Waveform: The MKBHD Podcast - Mac Pro Story Time, r/Place Recap, and an Interview with Jad Abumrad

Episode Date: April 8, 2022

Marques and Andrew jump right into the thick of it discussing Twitter working on the edit button. Then they get into the Mac Pro trade-in that Marques just completed before talking about the stressful weekend Andrew had with r/Place on Reddit. After that, David Imel talks with Jad Abumrad of Radiolab fame about the past, present, and future of podcasting. Sidenote: Starting this week we'll be having two trivia questions per episode so you can see if you know more random tech facts than we do! Links: Josh Wardle interview Mac Studio review Radiolab Elon Musk buys 9.2% of Twitter Twitters: https://twitter.com/wvfrm https://twitter.com/mkbhd https://twitter.com/andymanganelli https://twitter.com/adamlukas17 https://twitter.com/DurvidImel https://twitter.com/JadAbumrad Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/wvfrmpodcast/ Shop the merch: shop.mkbhd.com Join the Discord: https://discord.gg/mkbhd 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

Thumbtack presents the ins and outs of caring for your home. Out. Procrastination, putting it off, kicking the can down the road. In. Plans and guides that make it easy to get home projects done. Out. Carpet in the bathroom. Like, why? In. Knowing what to do, when to do it, and who to hire. Start caring for your home with confidence. Download Thumbtack today. Get groceries delivered across the GTA from Real Canadian Superstore with PC Express.

Shop online for super prices and super savings. Try it today and get up to $75 in PC Optimum Points. Visit superstore.ca to get started. All right, what's going on, people of the internet? Welcome back to another episode of the Waveform Podcast. We're your hosts. I'm Marques. And I'm Andrew.

And today, we've got a fun one, a couple of different stories, a sort of assortment, if you will. Yeah, a very broad assortment. It's a fun time for that. It's earlier in the year. Sometimes we get like heavy weeks, sometimes we get light weeks. This is one of those fun, lighter weeks. So Andrew's going to dive into the Reddit r slash place update for 2022 and how it went

down. We actually had a lot of fun with this in the Discord. It was so much fun, yeah. And also, we're going to talk a little bit about, well I finally did it and I swapped out the Mac Pro with, remember last time I said I had that Mac Studio on order? It's the new editing machine. The last

video was edited on the Mac Studio. But we also have a weird trade-in story and what's happening with the Mac Pro. So we'll talk about that and we're going to finish up with David interviewing Jad from Radiolab and what he's up to after his historic podcasting career. A little bit of an OG. Maybe the OG, probably.

Podcasts have a long history. We're not exactly veterans to this space, despite having a couple. So that'll be a fun one, too. But first, Twitter adding an edit button. Loyal soldiers of the Twitter edit war. This is crazy. We have won. This is crazy.

We have declared victory. How long have I been asking? I want to find the first time I ever mentioned the Twitter button because this has been a meme basically. I feel like since at least college I've been asking Twitter for an edit button. Dear Twitter, let us edit tweets. It is 2017 and we have a giant machine digging a tunnel under Los Angeles

to build an actual hyperloop, but we still can't edit tweets. We have the Large Hadron Collider, we found the God particle, we still can't edit tweets. And every time I bring it up, inevitably, of course I hear about the pros and the cons. Mm-hmm.

Because, you know, Twitter might not be the biggest social network ever, but it does have quite the user base. It's sort of like a public sphere, if you will. A lot of important people use it. And there's a lot of implications for what editing tweets might mean. And the bigger Twitter has gotten, the more vocal those downsides have been. But I maintain editing tweets would not like be the downfall of Twitter. It would not ruin Twitter.

I think it would be great. But I do want to address all of the conversation around the edit button. First, it was announced, well, the announcement was kind of weird itself actually. Yeah, the whole thing was interesting. And what's funny about it is because of how much of a meme you've turned this into and how you talk about it all the time, it almost felt and what's funny about it is because of how much of

a meme you've turned this into and how you talk about all the time it almost felt like you were part of it if you only look back at my twitter timeline it kind of looks like i was in on it i promise i was not in on this one no um i tweeted on april fool's day before the announcement from twitter tech company accidentally unveils product people actually want on april fool's day which is kind of a thing that happens all the time and it's not just twitter it happens a lot but it works perfectly because very shortly after that twitter did their april fool's joke a couple hours later in quotes saying they were adding an edit button we're working on an edit button straight up tweeted it tweeted it and everyone went thanks a lot twitter like we all know lots of people want it but in april fools they tweet very funny and then i think

like a day ago or something like that i tweeted i tweeted something with a typo in it but it was like 20 minutes later and it was like too late to take back all the conversations i'd had about the tweet so i just left it and then i tweeted you think i make typos on purpose to like continue to argue for the edit button, but I don't, I really don't. I just keep making typos, which brings up the number one thing I always hear, which is Marquez just proofread your tweet. Yeah. Yeah. Obviously that's I, I try if you're not, if you're a human, you make mistakes sometimes and you make typos. So it's not like I'm out here saying everyone should be perfect. If you've ever written a paper for school or something, you've most likely proofread it

and just because you've written it and you know what is being said on the paper, it's very easy to skip small typos. Especially when a word checker or spell checker is not picking it up because if you're spelling something that is a real word or it's not the word a real word it's not the word you wanted exactly it won't show up so it could just be wrong everybody's done it if

you pretend you didn't you're lying you've made a typo stop it a real life typo yeah and even so that that's my main argument by the way for twitter uh having an edit button just to finish the timeline a couple days later i guess this was yesterday for us as we record this but on tuesday this week twitter announces no seriously we're actually working on an edit button yeah and this is funny because this is like what a day after elon musk announced he bought nine percent of twitter and then asked if they wanted an edit button on twitter so take one step back here elon purchased a large number of shares for twitter i believe it's about nine percent he's the largest shareholder the largest shareholder then got invited to join the board of twitter a lot of

people were talking about that then posted a poll asking if there should be an edit button and everyone started going crazy and within 24 hours of that is when the twitter comms uh handle tweeted that they're working on it they all they said yes we've been working on an edit feature since last year no we didn't get the idea from a poll we're kicking off testing with twitter blue labs in the coming months to learn what works what doesn't and what's possible so yeah if for some reason you really think that el poll is what created this, it's not, it's, it's,

but the timing is like his announcement, probably his, his tweet probably forced their hand to just announce it so that people wouldn't think forced their hand or he bought all the shares was talking to people at Twitter. And that's also a good way to bring hype. Fair enough. Um,

either way, it's going to be a Twitter blue labs feature coming in a few months now i just want to refresh this again because i've said this before like i'm for adding a twitter edit button under a few specific circumstances the number one thing i keep seeing that is an obvious concern is what if i tweet something i I like cheese. A bunch of people like it, retweet it, whatever. And then an hour later, I go in and edit it and say something horrific that obviously you'd never want to be attached to.

Something like 24 FPS is better or something ridiculous like that, right? Good way to go on that. Yeah. I would never want to be associated with anyone saying that, but I already liked this tweet. So now it looks like I liked the tweet saying 24 fps or retweeted it like an endorsement that's horrible if you if you add an edit button that's what it's going to look like yeah my argument would be a

couple fold one you need to make it very obvious that it was an edited tweet so i don't know it's probably more than an asterisk it's probably some sort of a some print or something alongside the tweet a color something that shows that this is an edited tweet and that you should show the original tweet yeah so you can already edit an instagram caption a youtube description a facebook post all of these things have already existed news everyone's always been able to edit social media posts yeah other than tweets now these other mediums may often have other media attached to them like on instagram it's a caption but also a photo so if i like a photo and someone changes the caption does that imply that i liked the new caption no i like the

photo but since twitter is just text, there's a little extra concern. It's just the text we're associating with. And the best way to compare this right now is how Reddit does it, which is also purely text. A lot of people commenting and upvoting on it, although upvotes aren't displayed publicly,

but it adds an asterisk. I believe it adds a history as well. They also do it a little differently. I think if you edit within the first 60 seconds, you don't get an asterisk. I believe it adds a history as well. They also do it a little differently. I think if you edit within the first 60 seconds, you don't get an asterisk. But I do think on Twitter, it should potentially still do it anyways, just to be safe.

I like that because I'll just say the other thing you should do is, you know, add a limited amount of characters you can change and a limited amount of time that you can edit. Yeah. So really what that narrows it down to for me is typos yeah which are going to happen within like five minutes someone says oh did you mean four not 40 oh my bad it's already like the thread has already this is in the middle of a thread like i can't go back and redo the rest of this i just want to edit this real quick i jump in there edit tweet, make it say 40 instead of four, like I meant to, and then everything's good.

You can see that it was edited. You can see what was edited and none of the engagement has to disappear. Yeah. Um, so that's really the main thing. Like if, as long as all of that is super clear, then I think that's a totally reasonable feature to add to Twitter. And that would save me a lot of the OCD of like having tweets out with typos that I wanted to leave. Because you have somebody quick enough telling you that something is wrong, but enough to where if you change that, the majority of the conversation is still going to be what the basis of the tweet was about. And that's, and that's what happens. But like, sometimes if you don't notice for five minutes or whatever, there are

a lot of tweets about that. You've kind of lost that, but you've also lost the traction because it just got wildly popular. You lost all that engagement kind of. Yeah, yeah. This is like a, it's a small user problem or a small group of users that have the problem. But when you have enough engagement very quickly, that's usually when people find a typo. So like if you make a typo in a tweet and an hour later, there's no engagement, but you found the typo, then yeah, you can delete the tweet and tweet it again because that doesn't change anything. But if you have a lot of engagement very quickly, usually that's how you find the typo. But then that's also

a lot of engagement very quickly and the conversation starting and the quote tweets and everything. It's funny because Twitter just acts did this weird thing where they changed the way twitter embeds work so a bunch of old articles that had embedded tweets now just have like blank boxes oh really and that's like you just removed the conversation from the context of what it's like it's basically like if i were to delete my tweet, everyone's quote tweet would now make no sense. So the bottom line is you preserve all the engagement by having that quick edit button for, I don't know, five, 10 characters to just fix a quick typo. Yeah. And it makes perfect sense for Twitter blue. We don't know if this is what's going to be how they finish it because they just said they're going to test on it right now but like you said it's a small user group that would really benefit from this so paying for it sounds it sounds

reasonable yeah people were trying to tell me that the end the undo tweet button was was good enough that i don't count that that was just like making sure you proofread but we just talked about how proofreading doesn't necessarily mean finding things correctly yeah it's also broken on android for months i'm Not that surprised. On my phone anyway. So, yeah. And we don't know how this is going to work yet. The most we saw was a quick GIF that they posted

where next to your tweet in the menu option, the three dots in the top right corner that you usually get at the bottom of that is just an edit tweet button on top of everything else. So we don't know what it entails, if there's a character limit entails if there's a character limit if there's a time limit what the um potential if there's a an edit history so we'll see what happens all those things i think they should do and i think they should be they're probably

considering all that stuff as they build it but yeah you know people using the beta feature will be the first ones to give them the feedback about that yeah and i think the the only other thing i can add on this besides you will be getting it day one um i'm sure there's a lot of people who think it might get abused despite what we said i'm sure the first week there will be a lot of really weird twitter interactions kind of you remember when they changed it from 140 to 280 yeah and everyone's timeline was just like spam just just memeing the new feature to see if they can pull the string all the way and yeah you want that viral tweet or whatever it'll probably happen for the first week

and then i think it'll go back to totally normal like reddit has this feature and it works really really well and i rarely see a time where it's being abused by anything so it it clearly can work so i'm ready for that twitter i'm sure you want to just hook me up with that alpha yeah can we can we unbox this on live for you guys can i be you want to just hook me up with that alpha. Yeah, can we unbox this live for you guys? Can I be the first one to edit a tweet? Would that be like full circle? That'd be pretty sick. It's probably happened already with some Twitter user.

If you buy 10% of Twitter stock. That's how much it costs me? You have to beat Elon, yeah. Fine. All right, I'll keep waiting. I'm in the beta. But no, we want to talk a little bit about the Mac Pro retirement situation retirement the Viking funeral it's kind of a weird feels worse yeah it's weird it's uh

so there's no there's no one right answer but there's a number of things you can do with a computer when you're done using it all right perfect example we made planters out of the old Mac Pro well i don't know why we still have those but yeah we do we do still have the old 2013 that's how long it's been 2013 yeah trash can mac pro nobody is gonna buy those we could have sold it for a thousand bucks to someone who might have used it but i think we had our good fun with it and they're gonna live in the studio the gpu was like literally damaged though on the one you had it was like showing green pixels as you used yeah it was it was kind of rough so that we we got our use out of those the mac pro uh only two years old 2019 and somebody

i think tweeted at me pretty recently a snippet from our video where i'm like and i'm really happy with it and i'm really looking forward to it lasting me hopefully a decade and getting better over time lots changed yeah landscapes different yeah it's a little that did not age well nope um so i got the the max studio with i max it out basically yeah i have the 128 gigs of memory i have the eight terabytes of storage which is necessary for my workflow i couldn't't, I couldn't, I could not use a four terabyte version. We regularly go over four terabytes of working media on our projects.

And I edit everything on one machine. So I maxed it out and, you know, set it up and started working with it. And I did the first full pass edit on the latest video, which was about YouTube comments. It actually had a failure in the export and it was maybe 30 in and it said export failed and then it showed me exactly the time

stamp at which it failed and i went into the timeline and it was from an old screen recording i was using from the previous mac so i just reshot the screen recording dropped that in there edited everything went smoothly. All my plugins work, everything's good. And so now I just have this Mac pro that we spent. I spent 40, I looked at $42,000 on that Mac pro, um, that I no longer need. So, so there's a couple, there's some things you can do with a computer like that. One, you can try to sell it and there's a couple there's some things you can do with a computer like that one you can try to sell it and there's a couple ways you can sell it craigslist facebook marketplace ebay two you can recycle it three you could throw it out i guess not ideal and uh apple also actually

has a trade-in program which we looked up and you can put in the specs and the serial number and it'll give you a trade-in value yeah now i'm guessing most people would not have guessed which one we picked but we we originally decided we're probably going to try to sell it out just throw it in the trash no we it's it's a perfectly working machine but it's also slightly worse in almost every way at everything we needed to do so it doesn't actually have a use it's like if you have a a perfect any other perfect product if you had a perfect camera and you had another perfectly useful slightly worse at everything but very capable camera that cost 10 times as much, you would never buy that camera. Even though it's a perfectly good working camera,

you would never buy it. So that's kind of the Mac Pro situation. So originally we were like, well, we can sell it, right? So we looked on eBay because this is what we've done with old computers and gear in the past, and there are a couple Mac Pros on eBay. Very few. I think i maybe found 10 i found one comparable sold for about 11 grand that was as sold um a lot of the other ones were far far far

smaller specs i mean some of them were like 32 or 64 gigs of ram yeah and just for context i basically maxed out the mac pro other than the ram which was still 768 768 gigs of ram so i didn't have the 1.5 terabytes but i had the 28 core i had the afterburner i had dual vega pro 2 duos that thing was very that was beefed up so yeah the closest thing we could find was someone listing it for 11 grand they did sold they did sold it for 11 okay they sold it for 11 um and doing something like that is like, it's nice that you can get, you know, $11,000 isn't anywhere near what we spent,

but you could get that money back and you have to ship it and you have to obviously erase it fully and send it to the person who hopefully can get it working again. If they have any problems, they're probably going to look back to you. There's a lot of other questions about dust

and like cleaning it out and making sure we're getting them something that they expect to be in like perfect condition, blah, blah, blah. And we did all that. And we did all that and we cleaned it out and it's in working order. And then we tried to list it

and eBay has, I don't know if you guys know about seller limits on eBay, but if you mysteriously pop up as a new user on eBay and suddenly start listing a bunch of stuff, you can get your account suspended for suspicious activity because it looks like you stole a bunch of stuff and started listing it to sell it. Yeah, we haven't had the best track record with eBay. Probably mostly our fault.

I can't totally blame eBay because we've've done like we'll do a big clean out of phones and we'll try and sell them for a really good price because we want people to be able to get some some good stuff we always sell it as like totally used when it's almost brand new but reasonably so ebay sees you selling like 10 phones it's a reasonable policy like yeah and then they get mad we've had our accounts suspended a couple times yeah so we So we've gotten brought back. Imagine what that looks like to eBay. It looks terrible. An account pops up and suddenly lists 10 phones. The first time they asked for receipts

and I couldn't give them an answer for it because they're old review units and everything like that. So it stinks, but there's still a seller limit. And the only way you can break through that seller limit is if you're consistently selling. So they assume you as a store and that seller limit is five thousand five thousand um so at that point you there's even a button that says request a higher seller limit you click it and it says not able to or for us we haven't been active enough on ebay yeah so five thousand was the most we could get plus we'd have

to ship it plus we have to ensure the shipment Plus we'd have to make sure everything got there in good working order. And then I looked up Apple's trade-in program. Now Apple's trade-in program is a pretty big rip-off. Like for most of the stuff, you send it in, like you put in your serial number, you put in your specs,

and then the money you get back is just a gift card for Apple. So you get to spend that on more Apple stuff in the future. Luckily, luckily you know we buy enough computers that we'll probably eventually spend it but well obviously eventually apple money yeah so we uh we punched in the serial number and the the specs of the max that mac pro and the thing i spent 42 grand on two years ago, it shot me back a value of $4,700 something dollars, $4,700. Yeah. And that's a pretty big bummer, but it is minus all of the headache of selling it,

shipping it, insuring it, and all that. With all of that plus eBay's fees, it probably actually would have been more money than selling it on eBay for the max listed price. Mathematically, it did turn out to be more because if we got our five grand, if we just listed it at exactly our max, which was okay, one item, we can only sell one this month, but we're going to sell it for our max at $5,000. And it's going to take 500 bucks to ship it. And it's going to take 300 bucks to insure it in FedEx by shipping something that expensive. And I'm probably going to have to, what was the other thing FedEx by shipping something that expensive. And I'm probably

going to have to, what was the other thing? Oh, eBay takes a cut out of all of that. That would have been actually less than the money Apple was giving. So I said, okay, well, whatever Apple's going to do with it, whether it's recycle it or use those parts for repairing other people's Mac Pros, I don't know what they're going to do, but they're willing to take it off my hands and give me $4,700 of credit. I've gotten, at this point, I've gotten my value out of that Mac Pro. I understand in my heart I'm not going to get 50 grand out of that computer anymore. No one in their right mind would spend that much on it.

I'm fine with taking this L. It's a hard, tough pill to swallow because of how much you spent on it. In our situation situation with a couple of factors it does wind up being it hurts to say but it makes sense biggest fact we got two years out of it we saved endless amount of time using it like it's been worth it just for two years of editing probably 200 videos on that yeah we made content on it so we literally profited off of it and the second the mac studio got announced that thing's value just tanked plummeted it's just unless you're someone who needs to use intel for compatibility reasons on whatever software you've got it makes no sense that are the gpus yeah it

still has the gpu power advantage for certain apps that are looking for those GPUs. Like for our workflow, it doesn't make that much sense because we don't use all that GPU power. But like, yeah, for a Final Cut Studio like we are, the value plummeted. So, yeah. And if we were going to get somebody to pay all of that value that they really saw on it, it would still get swallowed up by eBay's fees. So this turned out to actually be the best thing for us to deal with it so i i went ahead and hit the accept button and basically what they do is they send you a fedex uh qr code we put it back in its original box i just pulled that thing into my car brought

it to fedex oh you brought it to fedex i brought it to fedex and i put it on the on the stand and they went oh a mac pro and then i said here's this qr code and they scanned it and they're like oh okay yeah it's free they shipped it packed it and it was out of my hands that day i thought you were going to bring it to the apple store because that was an option and i really really wanted to see what they said it was yeah it's that that i'm not sure you would have gotten the exact same dollar amount because i think there's still one last step of that needs to get to apple and they take it out the box and evaluate it and make sure it's still in good condition and all that stuff they can confirm they're ripping they can confirm exactly how much money they want to give you for it and i i bet if you went into the apple store they would

look at it and go oh the box is dented it's going to be minus the x dollars but whatever that we took care of it it's off our hands and that's what happened to the Mac Pro. So yeah, starting right now, here's the funny part. Starting right now, Mac Studio is editing everything right now. I fully expect to be back on the new Mac Pro when it comes out. And I think we will turn that Mac Studio that I've been using into another editor's machine or someone else's machine because it is that good at everything that we need it to do. for sure um but for that new mac pro when it does come out i think we're still going to use a little bit extra horses on the gpu stuff on the plugins on

the on the maxed out stuff so we'll see when that comes out i'm just speculating but yes as of right now that's what happened to our mac pro that's the story bro sad day sad don't what's it don't cry because it's over be happy smile because it happened or something like that yeah it was a good machine it was a great cheese grater it was a good machine we loved it we love it well i think that's a good place to take a quick break we'll take a quick pause yeah uh i'm gonna talk about place when we come back but before we do that adam came up with a fun little idea we're gonna start implementing into all of our episodes um basically he's gonna hit us with a trivia question before each ad break and then we're gonna take our time to think about

it and then we're gonna come back you and i are gonna guess so we'll have the whole episode to think about it we'll guess at the end and then adam will reveal the answers at the end so just a little little fun thing for everyone to be thinking about you know maybe you're on your commute to work and when we're getting boring talking about the place you can think about what the answer to the episode the question might be and yeah no googling allowed no googling i like that especially if you're driving no googling allowed if you're driving fair rule all right what are you're driving. Fair rule. All right. What are we looking at for week one of trivia? Okay, Carl Pei, the CEO of Nothing and co-founder of OnePlus,

grew up in which European country? That's a good one. We'll be right back. Oh, yeah, I'm not supposed to answer it. Yeah. taken care of with a sportsbook born in Vegas. That's a feeling you can only get with BetMGM. And no matter your team, your favorite player, or your style, there's something every NBA fan will love about BetMGM. Download the app today and discover why BetMGM is your basketball home for the season. Raise your game to the next level this year with BetMGM, a sportsbook worth a slam dunk an authorized gaming partner of the

nba bet mgm.com for terms and conditions must be 19 years of age or older to wager ontario only please play responsibly if you have any questions or concerns about your gambling or someone close to you please contact connex ontario at 1-866-531-2600 to speak to an advisor free of charge. BetMGM operates pursuant to an operating agreement with iGaming Ontario. With Uber Reserve, good things come to those who plan ahead. Family vacay? Reserve your ride as soon as you book your flights. To all the planners, now you can reserve your Uber ride up to 90 days in advance. See Uber app for details.

All right, welcome back. Let's talk about April Fool's Day 2022. We didn't have a whole lot of amazing April Fool's Day projects. Ours was amazing. What was our? Our short. Our short. That was a fun one.

Okay, if you haven't seen that, which was interesting. By the way, we keep trying this like vertical video format on different mediums because it was a short and we made it for shorts yeah but there are other mediums where that like kind of works for a while and even if you don't like keep watching it in the future it's fun for the day to see a video like that we put it on tiktok instagram reels and youtube shorts and twitter and twitter all good places for videos um and for like the third or fourth consecutive time we've done this, Instagram Reels has been the top performer. Like destroyed them, right? Yeah.

I mean, this one was closer. It was like 2.2 million versus 1.6. But like Instagram Reels is pretty. Instagram Reels is doing pretty awesome. Yeah. But yeah, yeah. As far as April Fool's projects, we didn't do a whole main channel video. We did see a couple good ones. I really linus's video he just did he kind of memed his

own sponsored reads to the point good but apparently got like full paid for all of them which i thought they were just joke reads but he just kept going and they were all real it was great for him yeah uh so there were some good ones we talked about dyson's non-april fool's day thing but probably our favorite april fool's day thing but probably our favorite april fool's day actual project was reddit reviving r slash place yes we talked to josh wardle a couple weeks ago who is sort of on the team responsible for the original version of this where they basically just have one place on the internet where anyone can place one pixel every five minutes correct yeah and it's this huge canvas and so inevitably communities

get together and they sort of like plan stuff and band together and will like they would crowdsource art they would make art you could say that together um which is a bit of a dangerous exercise because hey communities will decide whatever they want to do and put it wherever they want i mean josh specifically said that he was like our biggest worry in the original one in 2017 was inappropriate objects there's just gonna be phallic images everywhere and apparently that's how it started but then people sort of like adjusted and started making more wholesome stuff the first time right yeah yeah i think he did say there was some stuff that they were a little worried about it yeah but. But it happened again this year. They brought it back. We kind of all knew it was coming back, I believe, the day before. And they went on for four days and I followed it very intensely.

So this time we got involved a little bit. We got very involved. Because I had a stressful weekend, if I'm being honest. So I guess the funny part is, is that it was four days long. Yes. So if you drew something on the first day, there's a very low chance that it would still be there if you didn't come back for four days.

But on the other hand, if you waited too long, the whole thing would be so crowded with so many different communities looking for spots to build their own art that you would be out of space. So we had to find this like happy medium of like we do want something there do we just go for it on day one and we did right we went i can kind of give a little brief overview here i think i wanted to i split it into two things in my notes here um i kind of have what happened on our place in general and then what happened with our community

building things on our place so what's what did the overall our place look like? Okay, so it started off almost exactly how it did in 2017. One canvas, I believe, is 1,000 by 1,000 pixels. So one million pixels. It's not very much. And the biggest difference here, if you think about it, is in 2017, it popped up with zero instructions. No one knew what to do so the first

few hours was just pure chaos yeah this time around this thing goes live and communities are just already banding together we have discord servers there's uh subreddits people are creating new subreddits just for the subreddits beforehand to just find ways. We had streamers jumping on and bringing their audience in. There's all sorts of different things. And immediately this thing was filling up with different images. I think when I first logged in, there was a bunch of country flags. Yes. Huge flags, which that shouldn't shock me.

People are very attached to them. There's lots of huge communities to do that. People like representation too. I think there was a huge communities to do that. People like representation, too. I think there was a huge Ukraine blue and yellow across the entire thing, which was pretty wholesome. I think there was a Star Wars poster. There is a Star Wars poster in the canvas. There's a couple old memes from the first one,

which included, so in the first one, there was a Windows 98 taskbar at the bottom. This one, actually, I guess not off the start, but they was a windows 98 taskbar at the bottom this one eventually actually i guess not off the start but they made a windows xp taskbar there's something called the blue corner in the first one which was basically just a corner that was completely blue sure that started in this one as well sure in the top left corner there was the old school runescape disconnected message which is when you used to play the game anytime you had server issues it would pop up so they built that into the place that's a big community yeah and like you said lots and lots of flags so in this first day immediately we wanted to build something so i got

on our discord server i tweeted out that we wanted to do the waveform logo i think we mentioned it in the podcast last week um so we pick a spot. It was right next to a French flag. So it had a red border already that felt like a really easy thing to reference and draw. I remember when you guys were picking this and decided, and you can log in

and you can see every pixel, you hover over it and you can see the user. Oh, yeah. You can see the user that placed that pixel. Yeah. And you could zoom out a little bit

and you could see exactly the names of the coordinates of every single one. So you'd pick that place because it was a nice little spot that was unoccupied to me it was a space that was unoccupied and everyone wants to go for corners and sides at first because it's the easiest to coordinate from so we went to a french flag pixel which um very quickly adam found out was where the elden ring subreddit and discord community were starting to build which is massive i actually think somebody at the end of all this did a um a breakdown of which communities had the most pixels and elden ring was in the top 20 so we picked a rough opponent to start with it was funny because it wasn't there at all when we started

and then we started to build our logo there. I think I dropped like four pixels and I had like every five minutes, you're like, all right, I got a new pixel and I drop it in. And then I refreshed once and it was just like gone. Like all of it just got dominated in like two minutes. We had a very, very modest 15 by 15 pixel logo. That was, we were not trying to take a lot of space. I mean, the French flag that we were building next to take a lot of space i mean the the french flag that we were

building next to was probably like 100 pixels tall i mean like giant compared to 100 by 100 is you get oh yeah i don't know exactly what the dimensions were but it was taller they were taller than they were also but okay either way so um that was our first step just to like give a little hint of where our went we we got covered by elden ring we actually talked to someone from elden ring put it directly above theirs to use their border and then they decided to expand and just wipe this out again completely so that's a vibrant community when you overshoot because that was the thing when you when you do the math and you're like all right we want to make a 100 by 100 thing. Not too crazy. Just 100 by 100. Yeah.

That's 10,000 pixels you have to actively maintain. That is so many people that need to be online at once fighting for this spot. And to overshoot and be like, oh, we kind of dominated our spot. Like, why don't we just keep going? Yeah. That's pretty serious. So good job, Elden Ring subreddit. You definitely took those pixels.

We died. We died. So what, did we find a new spot so yeah we found a new spot um actually funny enough right over lttstore.com there happened to be some blank space up there that's where we nestled in created our logo had no trouble for a little while until a Croatian flag above us started taking over um we defended against them for a while, but it wasn't looking great. Then a Pokemon started getting built next to us,

I believe. Let me just, I want to get that. It's like a fever dream. It is. It's the most random thing. It is very, very interesting kind of what happens because there's this, like, what's really fun about it is you, like,

create friends and allies with these other communities, and they're generally communities you've never, I mean we know ltd stored none of them attacked us we never attacked them it's fun being next to each other as far as i know it's good linus it's good it's good thanks linus um let's see the pokemon next to us was called swablu how does that have a community so okay it's literally just that funnily enough somebody from that community listened to our podcast last week recognized that it was us trying to build it came into our discord server and created a truce and we actually wound up sharing a few pixels in between them and wound up defending and they had already built an alliance with croatia

so we all worked into the croatian. So we actually became allies with Croatia, Swablu, and I believe it's an anime called Nerve. The sentence is unbelievable. So that was our kind of like little place. And what's funny about this is, I'm going to call this, we have a spot on the old world because after we finished that on Saturday,

they decided to double the size of the canvas and add another thousand by thousand pixels to the right. And then later on that day, they actually doubled that again. So now it's four times the original canvas. So we're on the original thousand by thousand. Yes, our logo's on the original thousand by thousand. This is kind of like the old world,

which is really fun. But after they doubled that and quadrupled it is when a lot of the like pure chaos started happening and just throughout the weekend was super fun to watch. There's communities all over the place. There was a bunch of French streamers and a bunch of Spanish streamers banding together to build new flags and stuff like that.

There's a lot of just, one streamer I like was like, they would attack different places they didn't like. There was also a group of like kind of trolls called the Dark Void, which would in random places throughout the map, they would pick a community, attack it in this. They would just turn the whole thing black and this like black dissolving void and then like some sort of demonic face would start coming out of it. And then all of a sudden it would disappear back to what it originally was. It was wild. They made some really, really cool art all over the place.

Like you said, Star Wars. A couple of my favorite were like, a lot of the flags are really cool. So originally the French flag, the Irish flag got built underneath it. And at their border where they crossed, France drew a wine bottle. So Ireland responded with a Guinness pint underneath it and at their border where they crossed um france drew a wine bottle so ireland responded with a guinness pint underneath it and they both started adding references to

their countries like stemming from the middle of them wow a lot of the nordic countries did stuff like that too um they all kind of like any of these countries are carl pay's country is that all you're thinking about for the rest of it's bouncing around in there in my skull right now yeah um so there's a lot of fighting there's a lot of taking over on saturday our discord without even being prompted actually wound up finding a space in the second canvas and creating a pixel art of mac and the waveform logo which held true for a really long time, actually, until sometime on Sunday got completely taken over by what felt like some bot accounts because one of my biggest complaints here

is there's obviously a lot of botting happening because some things you can be consistent with and have large communities work together, but some are just too obvious. And there was a lot of, when you would click that name under the pixel, it would have an account made that day. And I saw that

probably 50% of the time I would click a pixel, which is one of my bigger gripes about the whole thing. So we lost Mac and Waveform. We lost Mac and Waveform, but just like without attempting to gatekeep Reddit and our plays place i'm fine with

people using alt accounts because that feels like it's part of reddit but doing same day accounts in this just felt like such an easy way to game the whole thing and like a little too it's less wholesome it's way less you're supposed to just use your own normal account um actually just real quick i have in the doc if if you click, I have the 2017 version, and we can put this up on the screen, the 2017 version and the 2021 version, and you can just kind of see the difference in scale between them. 2017's got a big flag right in the middle.

It's got a Mona Lisa. I see the Linux Penguin. We're actually really close to the Linux Penguin on the new one. Of course, the Linux Penguin is on both. Alright, 2021. Oh wow, that took a while to load. That was huge. The 2021 one is gigantic. I mean, I think I mentioned some

of my favorites. The flags are all really good. It's less clear who has the largest piece of art right now. So if you look France has like the bottom left corner which is crazy. That whole thing is France. That's not even what I'm talking about. The one I'm talking about is closer to the left hand's top quarter portion. And it has an Eiffel Tower and the moon and a wine glass.

And one thing they did that was really cool is they basically knew time lapses would be created of this. So the wine bottle, they had the liquid go slowly down. And then they built it back up and the glass would change on the side and they were like some people were literally animating something this is this brings me to this was my favorite part of like i saw like the chaos and like you guys talking to the discord for a couple days and then the slack over the weekend my favorite thing that came out of this was at the end of it since it was a four-day event of people placing these pixels over and over again is the time lapse that they made of how this thing exploded into existence and then like ebbed and flowed and things appeared and disappeared over time and that was sick watch

that if you get a chance that's where you can see the dark void that i was talking about it just kind of shows up all over the place. Another thing I loved Among Us, while they didn't end with a lot of things, they probably played one of the biggest roles in this whole weekend because constantly giant Among Us characters would just show up in the middle of nowhere. At one point, the entire left hand corner was just small, like four by four pixels of Among Us characters characters and then rather than expanding that they decided to go into other art pieces and take the colors and go one off of all the colors and make among us characters that were hidden inside of the images around it to the point

where i think someone created an ai that scanned for all of them and found like over 2,000 of them littered around the entire canvas, just like small Among Us characters all over the place. It was really, really cool. I'll get back into, because I couldn't handle Mac getting destroyed. So Monday- There's so many other dogs on here, I'm seeing.

There are a lot of dogs, yeah. But on Monday, our Discord had been fighting all day Sunday and we unfortunately lost that battle. But on Monday, I decided we had to finish this. It was ending on Monday afternoon, so I hopped on our Discord. I fired up my stream,

which I haven't done in like three years, and our Discord community just went off the rails trying to make this happen. We shrunk Mac a little bit. We finally, I think after five tries of fighting people and losing, found a spot that we could defend. It also helped Sam Sheffer came in and saw my stream and then brought his whole audience in,

and we kind of all battled together, and it probably took like four hours, but we finally got Mac on the canvas, accurately defended him, and he's there it seems like streamers would have the most would have the best audience to do something like this because they're all engaged they're all plugged in and they're all here in the same place together at the same time they would literally just like pick somewhere and say attack and then you would watch it on screen just turn black and then something else pop up um but yeah this to me this is like one of the coolest online social experiment kind of things we've ever

witnessed it was way different this year because everyone knew what to do so there's far more creativity i mean there's like full-blown renaissance paintings in here yeah there's a lot of crazy stuff i found a waldo where's waldo did you really there's one near the i don't want to i'm not even gonna say where it is but i found waldo find it yeah it's right here lots of sports teams lots of flags lots of video game references and anime references um yeah there's a lot of things someone created an atlas where you could go in and now the mkbhd logo and mac are officially recorded in the atlas for this final one. And then it all ended where towards the last couple hours, you could only place white pixels. So essentially they made it so everyone would just place white pixels

until the whole canvas turned back white. And then it was lost into the void. Not before people got screenshots and time lapses of everything. So we'll definitely put some stuff in the show notes for people to check out time lapses but as a small I mean like we're a big channel but we're still kind of like small community in comparison

to like entire countries right or Elden Ring yeah but it was really really fun to have our discord and our reddit and other people's discords like band together this is all a really cool experience and like to me this is what discord feels like it's about like our community just all came together no one thought about anything they just like wondered where

pixels had to go place pixels and defended it for four days straight days essentially um i have to give one shout out to someone in our discord named bangle game who literally like 20 times over the weekend he built a spreadsheet with each pixel and then each what color it should be and a hyperlink to the pixel on the page and he constantly updated it every time we had to move pixels. That's crazy. That's the conductor at the front of the train. Everybody all aboard, this is what we're doing. He was our mastermind behind it all. Tim obviously created the logos.

Adam was fighting the whole time. He was the one scoping out. He was the one who found Elden Ring was about to destroy us. He was our lookout tower, I guess. It was super, super fun. Huge shout out to our discord to twitter to twitch to everybody who helped us um and also shout out to linus who's let's just say his place thing didn't come out exactly how they were

it was close expecting it it looks like it got close i liked it yeah close um but yeah that was super fun that's the place i i do have to, I hope they don't do this every year. It's different when it's every few years. It feels more special. Yeah. No, this was good. I'm glad they did it. Super fun, yeah.

Sick. All right. I'll tell you another quick break. We'll come back. Dave is going to talk to Jad from Radiolab, and then we'll get on with our trivia answers. Do we have another question here? We're going to add one?

Yeah, we'll do one each ad break. All right. Let's add a trivia question. Yeah. Let's brainstorm a bit. Okay. So the headphones you guys are wearing right now are the Audio Technica ATH-M50Xs. Yep.

What year were they released in? I'm phoning a friend. Okay. Marcus is the friend. I have an idea. All right, that's a good one. That's a good one. BRB.

Cool. This is an ad from BetterHelp. This holiday season, do something for a special person in your life. You. Give yourself the gift of better mental health. BetterHelp Online Therapy connects you with a qualified therapist via phone, video, or live chat. It's convenient and affordable and can be done from the comfort of your own home. Having someone to talk to is truly a gift, especially during the holidays. Visit BetterHelp.com to learn more and save 10% off your first month. That's BetterHelp,

H-E-L-P.com. Support for the show today comes from NetSuite. Anxious about where the economy is headed? You're not alone. If you ask nine experts, you're likely to get 10 different answers. So unless you're a fortune teller and it's perfectly okay that you're not, nobody can say for certain. So that makes it tricky to future-proof your business in times like these. That's why over 38,000 businesses are already setting their future plans with NetSuite by Oracle. This top-rated cloud ERP brings accounting, financial management, inventory, HR, and more onto one unified platform, letting you streamline operations and cut down on costs. With NetSuite's real-time insights and forecasting tools, you're not just managing your business, you're anticipating its next move. You can close the books in days, not weeks, and keep your focus forward on what's coming next. Plus,

NetSuite has compiled insights about how AI and machine learning may affect your business and how to best seize this new opportunity. So you can download the CFO's Guide to AI and Machine Learning at netsuite.com slash waveform. The guide is free to you at netsuite.com slash waveform, netsuite.com slash waveform netsuite.com slash waveform all right welcome back so as we mentioned from the beginning this last bit here for this week we have a guest and it's jad from radio lab david actually got to speak to him and and went over sort of his origins and the beginnings of like podcasting as a whole it's a really in-depth and and really interesting we've done this podcast thing for two and a half years. Is that right? Two years? We're at 110 episodes. Is that including

audio and video or just audio? Audio and video. So we have a little longer. No, no, sorry. Audio only. Yeah. Audio only. So we have a good amount. That seems like a long time actually, but this is a man who's been in the thick of it for way longer than we have. Far longer. So we'll let David talk to him, and then we'll come back at the end and go over our trivia question answers. Yeah. Take it away, David. All right. Well, I guess, do you want to just start off with your name and what you've done for your whole life and what you're into?

Yeah. My name is Jad abumrad i created a show called radio lab and a couple of related podcasts and radio shows and uh that has been the last two decades but i recently um announced i'm moving on from that and uh it's funny i think i think when i announced you reached out to me right or did i reach out to you i tweeted that you had an incredibly long and great career yes and then you reached out to me and i saw your byline and i was like oh oh can i yeah okay i was like oh shit you work it with you work out out here at mk mkbhd i don't even know what you call the actual umbrella thing uh yeah that's basically what we call it okay yeah but i I was, I've been a, a massive consumer of your tech videos.

Uh, and I've seen this space maybe 55 times in the, in those videos. So when you reach out, I was like, oh my God, can I come over and see the space? So I'm, this is basically me forcing my way in. Well, when you DM'd me back and followed me, I had the same reaction. So we'll just call it mutual mutual positivity cool cool cool so you've been you've been like building podcasts for 20 plus years yeah since um before they were podcasts before well or as as most people as as i like to call podcasts radio right exactly yeah it's amazing to be like people who

are in podcasting now are just like they feel like they're inventing something and uh and they are i mean everybody is everybody's inventing themselves every day but like i when i first started radio lab which was first a radio show and it was i was airing early documentaries from from like the golden age of radio and so i was listening to a lot of stuff and when you start to listen like orson welles in 1930 you realize nothing that we are doing is original right it's all been done yeah and i find that quite liberating but uh i'm curious about that though when you say do you mean that everything you've made has been a mixture of other things that you listen to yeah i mean yeah isn't that isn't everybody yeah um derivative

yeah i mean it's funny we all get credited for doing things that we might not i don't know that we deserve all the credit we get i say we meaning all people who make stuff yeah but specifically radio lab gets credited as like doing something new to podcasting. And maybe we did, but it was just generational. Like that stuff existed before us, like way before us. And so, yeah, I don't feel like I invented anything. I feel like I just recombined stuff in a new way, but not even in a new way. Isn't that what inventing is in a way?

Yeah. Everything else is built of everything else before it. Yeah, totally. But we forget. Yeah. Right? We forget. Seriously, you should listen to like The Shadow, radio dramas from the 1930s.

Not only are they amazing and like terrifying, like in a horror movie kind of way, they're really scary. You just realize like, oh, we're all just like, we're just like riding the coattails of like, I mean, radio was invented in 1920. By 1938,

they'd done everything. They literally fixed, they'd done everything. And so, we're just kind of mixing the same stew. Yeah. Is what I feel like.

Yeah. But in a different conglomerate way. Yeah, with new digital. I mean, I think that with podcasts in particular,

because, like you said, Radiolab was like a thing before podcasting was really a thing, right? So,

what was that transition into, I mean, I know you still call it radio versus podcasts, but like, what was that transition like from

airing on the radio and like hoping people would hear it transitioning into people actively deciding to download podcasts and just become fans of a show they could listen to at any time? serendipitously just being in the car and it happens to be on to like people subscribing and actively consuming it that made all the difference for us like it a radio lab never really made sense on the radio you know because it's so highly produced there's so many layers it's so musical and it's fast right it moves very quickly um it when you're driving and you're trying to to figure out whether you should take a left turn or a right turn or when you're in your kitchen doing the dishes and the kids are screaming, it can be a hard show to listen to because you're having to divide your brain in a way that is difficult with a show like Radiolab. It's not a divided brain kind of experience. with a show like Radio Lab.

It's not a divided brain kind of experience. And so it was, I don't want to say languishing on the radio, but it had like a small band of followers, but very, very kind of way off in the margins. And then podcasting came along. 2006, like OG podcasting, right? Yeah. You still have to sync your iPod to the computer.

Yeah, exactly. People forget that podcasting is kind you still have to sync your ipod to the computer yeah exactly uh people forget the podcast is kind of old right actually yeah um and uh when that came along and you could suddenly stop and start and you were telling the story and you were deep in someone's ear canal right um suddenly the show made sense you know like oh we were making for this medium we didn't realize it but we were making for the medium that just appeared and uh and then we just got lucky we made a thing and then ira glass at this american life promoted it and then suddenly like our audience went like from like here to boink over here and then suddenly the rest was history um i don't know it was weird i mean we were we were there right at the beginning when podcasting became like that first wave of big

shows yeah uh we we just i don't know it's it's weird like we're a product of the historical window that we were in which was between um public radio i mean not even public radio like all that existed was this american life and a few other shows and then news. Right. Yeah. Yeah. So we were coming out of that like space and then suddenly podcasting happened and we got grandfathered in, in a way. And then suddenly we were a massive podcast.

But it's funny. It's funny to look back on it, like how much luck played into it. It's funny to look back on how much luck played into it. If I were to start Radiolab now, I don't think it would have the same trajectory because podcasting is an established thing. Did it feel like it popped off instantaneously or was it like a slow growth that just eventually got big? It was that, slow. It's like inverse power law.

We were in the long pre-tail for a long time and then finally i'd say around 2008 or 9 uh somewhere in that zone i have a theory and i would like you to i would like to see if you agree with it oh please um the mobile internet and the ability to sort of download anything at any time wirelessly, I think sort of allowed people to just listen to whatever they wanted at any time. And it's funny because you mentioned earlier, like podcasting is actually kind of old. But the ability, but podcasts in general have only really seen mass popularity in the last decade or even less.

And to me, it feels like it's mostly just people having the ability to listen to whatever they want, whatever they want, without having to plug their iPod into a computer and sync something. And just reducing layers of friction and complexity in that system. Yeah, I would agree with that. And I would actually double down a little bit and say, when Apple baked in the podcast app to the phone, that was a huge moment, right? Suddenly it was this thing that was on your phone and then anybody could like one day flip through

and be like, huh, what is that? Let me click that. And like that was a massive moment. And that happened like one or two like we were around a few other podcasts were around and gaining popularity that happened uh i think the rise of the wireless mobile internet was happening and then serial happened yeah right and so all of those things kind of came together at once and then suddenly uh it became like a meme at that point like it became it became uh you know spoofed on saturday night live and like people were

writing articles about it and it became like an idea that was talked about in the culture um but it had been around for a while but maybe things were playing catch up the technologies were maturing and uh and also like there were shows that you know there were there was uh this american life there was us there were other shows that had back catalogs that people could dive into yeah at that point so um yeah we just happened it's it's funny to just be standing in the street in the middle of the street when all the cars show up yeah yeah yeah Yeah, yeah. You feel excited about that, but you also feel like, I don't know that I necessarily did this.

It's just like 14 things came together that I had no control over. Yeah, yeah. So like we obviously create a lot of YouTube videos here and we recently, about a year ago, switched to doing YouTube podcasts as well. And I remember when I was, I used to like watch YouTube live shows on the time,

but they weren't really podcasts and there were podcasts that weren't really live shows. And I feel like that's a sort of recent convergence. And I know that even Radiolab started putting, they made a YouTube channel and started putting stuff on there. How is that? How do you see like the future of video and storytelling in a podcast format? Because it's kind of weird, right? Because like video and audio are very different mediums. And we did episodes back when we were only an audio show that I felt like it was a lot easier to sort of create that world in your head and tell the story with sound effects

and all these things. Suddenly, if we're sitting here with cameras. Which we are. Which we are. It's a little different. You can't really force someone into that world as much because they're also in the real world sitting here with us. Yeah, yeah. I mean, it is a weird experience to have.

I mean, these three very beautiful looking cameras you have pointed at us. And each of them has their little monitors showing different images of us. That's a totally different experience than like making, making a podcast in an airless booth and then putting it out and knowing that you're just going to be into people's minds and not into their eyeballs. Right.

But that said, you know, I mean, I, I feel like if the conversation is good, it does. I mean, you just kind of want to be where people are at, right? And having a conversation – I mean would we do an episode of Radiolab the way we're doing this now?

No. But when you're talking to somebody, what do I do when I'm like – when Terry Gross is talking to somebody? I'm like, oh, that's fascinating. I go and look at what – I look them up on the internet and then within 10 seconds, I know when I'm like, when Terry Gross is talking to somebody, I'm like, oh, that's fascinating. I go and look at what, I look them up on the internet and then within 10 seconds, I know what they look like. You know what I mean?

So it isn't that much of a stretch. What are we actually talking about? We're talking about having a conversation. And we're talking about telling a story. There's age old things that we just wrap new words around. So I don't know. I guess it was more

like the convergence of the audio and video mediums in that storytelling format. Do you see that as being like, because we have movies and we have YouTube videos and they're sort of the same thing but it's different from a podcast

where you create an entire world in someone's head and bring them through sound effects. And do you think that there is a place for emerging of those two things? We're able to like use the sound effects and. Yeah. Create those universes. Oh, like emerging of like a podcast on YouTube, but that's using sound in the way radio. Yeah, I guess.

Yeah. I mean, maybe. I mean, it really depends on, it depends on what you're doing to people's eyes, right? If it's a literal representation of two people talking, then it would be strange to watch us and then suddenly hear sound effects commingling with us. That's a weird thing.

There are all kinds of, like, essayists on, I yeah that's a weird thing there are all kinds of like essays on i mean you do essays there are all kinds of essays on youtube who are creating uh narrative experiences which feel like podcasts yeah right yeah which are using sound and artful ways um but those are more like movies right so it's like i don't know there's so much it's it's weird right yeah we sort of define things in categories but no the categories aren't don't make sense as much anymore um yeah i don't know there's like i feel like there's there's just the thing that happens in the first 10 seconds of anything which is if it's if it's a podcast it's if it's a video where you just you establish the rules for the experience and whatever you do

in those 10 seconds can can permit anything I feel like whether it's crazy sounds or or completely naturalistic

two people sitting in a room talking yeah yeah so you you grew up doing music engineering right and you moved into podcasting from that

yeah music I mean music engineering would be composition moved into podcasting from that yeah music i mean music engineering would be composition i was right yeah okay i mean one of my favorite things so i i went to music school before i fell through the side door into into podcasting and uh i went to like one of those music schools that taught you music in a way that's completely useless, but fascinating. I learned about music concret and all these things that no one cares about anymore. But I remember coming out of music school, and I had taken a whole course on Stockhausen and the way that he used sounds from the real world as music. And the first few radio labs that I made,

I was like, what would Stockhausen do? Like, how would, how would he tell this story? So you hear a lot of strange noises and, and sounds. And,

and it was really just like me trying to be a composer, but in a different way. And then as I learned the journalism and I learned how to tell a story and how to interview and all those like more journalistic things. The music just became a way to like augment all that, you know. At first it was very much like I want to be a composer and then I realized, oh no, I'm actually what I think I am as a journalist who speaks music, you know. And when you say speak, can you expand on that a little bit?

It's like creating the musical version of a conversation or a story in a way. Like the language that I speak into the story is a musical language. But what I'm trying to do is basic journalism on the front end of it. Does that make sense? Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And you said that now that you're retired, you're going to be doing more music stuff. What kind of music stuff is that going to be? What does that look like?

I don't know if I'm – see, retired is a funny word. I'm like, not that old. But it was time for a new chapter. And I am actually – I have a couple of music commissions I'm working through. I have a ton of music I'm writing that probably no one will ever hear, but that I'm really enjoying. And, you know, like, I mean, do you want to hear it?

I mean, I can tell you about the music, but it's like, I almost am embarrassed to talk about it because it's just, it's like one of those little like things you do that you almost feel like why would anyone listen to this but i i'm i'm writing a ton of music that's um meant to be listened to when you're asleep oh so i'm doing like i'm doing these like hour-long pieces that are timed to rem cycles that use some of the um the brainwave frequencies that people have when they sleep as musical content. And I'm sort of creating like, like nocturnes around that basically.

So quite literally no one will ever listen to it when they're conscious. And so, you know, I'm doing that, which is just like a fun project. And does that like help people sleep or is it sort of just based around the ideas of it's more based around the ideas. I'm not sure if it'll help people sleep or is it sort of just based around the ideas of it's more based around the ideas i'm not sure

if it'll help people sleep or not um and then i'm developing a few like long-term projects that might be podcasts i'm not sure um helping a friend with a documentary so i'm just kind of like playing around right now yeah um very much in the same spirit as why i'm here like i was just kind of reaching out to people I really respect and admire and seeing how they work. Yeah. I feel like I'm in a, I'm in a learning mode.

Yeah. Yeah. No, that's awesome. Yeah. That's awesome. Does it feel weird to like have been doing something every week for 20 years and then flip into a new mode like that?

Uh, it feels strange. It feels like, um, riding a bike a little bit um but it's feeling less and less strange and it's just so cool to see that just the the breadth of people making cool things right now um it sounds like such a like trite old man thing to say no but but it's a i mean it really is amazing like to be here for example and to see see how you guys make make uh videos and content um the thing about the weekly deadline is that you get locked into not just that work but that life right uh in that you're spending all

your waking hours making the next podcast and then you're also listening to like two or three podcasts ahead and editing those oh yeah and so the the entire project closes in around you and you're not able to like watch tv anymore or read books or do any of the things that you know you need to do to feed your creative energy creative energy yeah um i probably lived like 10 years in that space where it's just like you feel like, you feel like an eight, yeah, you feel like an 18 wheelers chasing you down the street. Yeah. Um, every minute of the day.

And so it's been really nice to break out of that. I mean, even though I love the work and I love the people I was doing it with, I love them so much. They're so incredible. It feels nice to break out of that rhythm and to just sit down and read something and not feel like it has to be goal-driven. Yeah, yeah, right. I'm just going to read it because I want to. And I'm still getting comfortable with that.

It's a thing. You have to train yourself to actually think that that's okay again. So I'm in that process. How long did it take you to like build a general episode from like start to finish because you said you were like working on multiple things multiple episodes at the same time two to three

I mean it depends there's some that are fast and fast is probably never faster than four months and there's some that take two years you know of just like slow incremental work. So you're not working on it all the time. Yeah.

You've got like 12 things happening. Right. But. That's reassuring because when we do long form episodes, sometimes they take like three or four months. Yeah. That's fast for me. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That's super fast. I mean, just finding the story can sometimes take that long. Mm hmm. You know? Yeah.

I mean, just finding the story can sometimes take that long, you know? I mean, like I think of one episode we did, which was sort of a profile of this guy who hunts big game. He like deliberately hunts. Oh, yeah. Yeah. This is called the Rhino Hunter. Yeah. And like he hunts endangered species and he would argue he's doing it to help them.

And so it's a really weird, ethical, complicated thing. Just getting that guy's trust and getting him to allow us to trail him, that took years. Really? So you expressed to me when you got here that you're weirdly into technology, right? Deep. What is your favorite category of technology? My favorite category would be Andrew Wang, okay? So you know Andrew. Yeah. It's Andrew Huang, and today I am using my face to control a synthesizer setup.

So like watching someone like that, some crazy talented dude, make music with a balloon. Or talk about his particular modular synthesis patch that he made that makes a cool bubbly sound or listen to various people give tutorials in Ableton right so it's a lot of like music related software tutorials a lot of gear stuff and and then i watch you guys all the time like and i've and that has been my gateway into like video like that whole category of youtube where people talk about lenses and cameras yeah i don't know about any of that but i watch it all yeah i don't know

something about it i'm just like it's like um it's like comforting to me. Yeah. You know? Yeah. I will never in my life buy a Samsung phone. But I watch all the videos talking about the strengths and weaknesses of the Samsung phones. I don't know. I just find it fascinating. Yeah. Yeah. But mostly it's audio tech is what I really nerd out on.

Yeah. I'm sure Adam could relate to that. tech is what i just saying is why is what i really nerd out on yeah i'm sure adam could relate to that if you guys ever need the like deep audio nerdy take on whatever just like call me okay because i i've done and done all right perfect yeah i love that stuff i uh i watch way too much of it yeah is that you know yeah i feel like we have the same youtube algorithm probably probably you probably have the same suggestion i go really deep Probably. You probably have the same suggestions. I go really deep though. I mean, I just like, how do you use FM synthesis to make a bass drum

and that kind of stuff? Like I'll watch stuff like that for days. Just like how to program stuff in various like phase plant and those kinds of synths. Like I'm listening to, I have no idea what I'm hearing right now. There's so much, there's such a wealth of stuff out there.

Yeah. People who do that. That's what's amazing to me. I was like, man, these people can make a living on YouTube. Yeah. Maybe not a living, but something. I mean, probably, you know, it's like it's kind of insane. Like I I dropped out of college and ended up doing a job that is not even really related to what I went to college for, you know?

And so, and I learned most of the skills on YouTube. It's just wild. Yeah. And I feel like a lot of the world is kind of moving towards that, you know, where they can just learn anything. Like audio engineering or like any of that stuff. Like you're even still watching stuff. Yeah. I want to learn to play the bass.

And I was like, I was just doing a search the other day and I was like, oh, dang, that could like, I don't have to go get a teacher. It's all right. Yeah, I know. You know, you could buy a book, but you could just watch YouTube videos. Just watch it for like 24 hours, at least, you know, play something. Yeah. Do you have a prediction for like the future of what the next media category is?

Like the big next next media category is? The next big media category. We have podcasts and video and movies. Do you think there's going to be a whole new way that we experience things? I'm not going to blow anyone's mind by saying

this, but I think my prediction, or this is more my hope is like i think vr is amazing but kind of stupid and plays to the worst of humanity but i do think ar is fascinating you know and i do feel like um i hope podcasting discovers ar um because it's such a natural marriage. What does that look like? Like listening to a podcast while you have an augmented experience in front of you? Yeah, or there's so many ways in which, like we say stories are these vehicles for empathy, right? are these vehicles for empathy, right? There's so many ways in which all that you want in a story is to force someone to walk in someone else's shoes, right?

And it's amazing to think that you can create not just stories and narratives, but actually environments and spaces that people can walk in. Or you could tell a story about history. Like, I don't know. Have you ever walked down Wall Street in Manhattan and all of these tie-wearing bros are walking around

but you're thinking, man, Alexander Hamilton walked down the street. Then you take a right on whatever street it is and there's a corner off of Wall Street where there's a big chunk that's been taken out of the concrete. And if you just do a little search, you realize that in 1920-something, there was a bombing by anarchists.

And they just blew up the building. There's a big chunk missing from the building. But no one knows. It would be interesting to tell stories about these places and to see those ghosts of the past walk with us, you know, and to see the people who did those things, who walked these streets suddenly appear before us. But not appear in a VR sense where you're removed from your reality, but they appear and stand next to you in your world. Yeah. Right? Yeah.

That's super interesting to me. Yeah. interesting to me yeah i've always thought that that's probably where vr air is gonna go because like forcing someone to put a headset on like every level of friction that you have when getting into an environment the less likely someone is to use that that method or environment yeah i mean it doesn't feel long before warby parker just has ar implants in all their glasses yeah you know that just feels like three ten five years away yeah yeah so my big prediction would be that storytelling will find its way into that universe very quickly and i mean like just like workaday storytellers will start to i mean the big companies are already doing big

exhibits and yeah but like you and i will be doing stories for that for for that yeah i hope yeah yeah you said um like when you're just walking down the street and you see a chunk and you look And I will be doing stories for that. Yeah. I hope. Yeah, yeah. You said like when you're just walking down the street and you see a chunk and you look it up. Is that like how you find stories? Like how do you usually go about finding the best stories? What is your method for that? You read a lot. I mean my best method probably is I get overwhelmed with like reading stuff online. And I lose my bearings as to what's interesting. But, uh, I have a lot of people that I, over the years, I just like, I have breakfast with them,

you know, and, uh, people that you really like the way they think and you're just interested to know what they're reading. So I would have this habit of just like every week having two or three breakfasts with various people I know and, um, just kind of ask them what, what they're paying attention to. Um, and most of my ideas start with those breakfasts, you know, like, Oh, that so-and-so has just read a galley of X and Y book and thinks this is interesting. Let me call them and call that person and then just follow the leads a little bit and see where that goes. That's kind of the path I take. Someone like Latif who works with me at Radiolab and who sort of is the successor host, one of the two successor hosts, he gets so many of his ideas.

They begin as tiny Twitter threads and then he'll follow them so he uses social media in that way but i find i just get spun around by all that stuff i just i need to talk to somebody yeah so just having conversations with people yeah yeah well um you have any burning questions yeah so one last question How fast can you type the alphabet? Should we do this? Wait, is that a thing? Okay, yeah. So on Waveform, we generally have this race that people have to do whenever we have them on. I'm a pretty fast typer, but I've never typed the alphabet. It's harder than you think.

I would imagine. We have a leaderboard and I'm like second to last or something. Okay. Alright. I can just start at any point? Yes. Whenever you're ready. Alright, here I go. Where did I get to? 6.342.

6.342. Okay, that's really good. Is 6.342 okay that's really good is that good I'm gonna look up the overall score now you get three tries and we won't count the first one because you just hit A count it if it's my best

6.342 alright here we go reset all right six point three two one okay better slightly better where do i rank where does he rank i'm looking it up wait where is it you have one more run so i'm gonna get six point three two one is the current one i'm gonna break I'm gonna break the 4 second barrier oh shoot okay I'm just gonna throw caution to the wind

5.176 ooh 5.176 you are right after Josh Wardle the guy who created Wardle the guy who made wordle and my god you

beat me by 0.1 seconds so you are number four wow shoot really what's the top time top time is quinn of snazzy labs he's a youtuber he got 4.432 all right all right cool and an interview yeah well thank you and it was like a lot of ping ponging but no it was great it was really great it was really cool alright thank you David

and Jad for the time we also need to do our trivia answers now we've had some time to stew on it for those of you driving

you did not google the answers and for those of us hosting we also did not google the answers we didn't so remind us the first question Adam I do not think didn't. So remind us the first question, Adam.

I do not think I know the first one. So the first question, Carl Pei, the CEO of Nothing and co-founder of OnePlus, grew up in which European country? Okay. I'm guessing. Mm-hmm. I feel like I should know this, but I don't. So I'm going to guess Sweden.

Oh. I was going to go with the UK, which is that a country? Because I'm an idiot. United Kingdom. Britain. It's Sweden. Oh, it is. I knew it.

Okay, it's like this small thing in the back of my head where I was like, I've known this. I don't know if it's real, but I do know this. Right now, nothing's based in the UK. Nothing is, yeah. Nothing is, sorry. Something, but nothing. I'm confused Right now, nothing's based in the UK. Nothing is, yeah. Nothing is, sorry. Something, but nothing. I'm confused already.

The nothing thing? I hate this name so much. Yeah, nothing. Okay. The other one, though, I have to do some mental math because it's been a minute. So the next question, the headphones that you're wearing right now

are the Audio-Technica ATH-M50Xs. What year were they released in? Now, you specified M50Xx so there was the m50 and m50s but m50x came out a little bit later so i reviewed the m50s and i compared them to a bunch of other headphones are these different than the red colorware ones that were here? Red color wear? Remember we had... We had a red M50X. They were just red? They made red ones. That was an M50X? That was an X, yeah. Okay, so

I started in 2017 and that was the first pair of headphones I used when I started. So they were here in 2017. So it's before that. That's about as much information as I can give towards this question going

20 20 14 I was going to say 15 2014 2 for 2 not only are you 2 for 2 you got to watch me say the UK is a country so I hope Adam edits that part out

please don't make me look like I'm in the video on like i i did the comparison with the m50x versus the beats pro in college which was 2014 and 2015 when i was in that apartment so it was one of those two years yeah so yeah i feel pretty good about that good job all right are we keeping are we tallying who how many we get right now if i knew that i would have tried harder let's go all right well that's a good place to end it thanks for sticking with us this week uh we'll and are we tallying how many we get right now? Oh no. If I knew that I would have tried harder. Let's go. All right. Well that's a good place to end it. Thanks for sticking with us this week. We'll be back next week

with more Waveform. Yeah. Catch you guys later. Peace. Waveform is produced by Adam Molina. We are partnered with Vox Media and our intro outro music was created by Vayne Silk. Take care.