Waveform: The MKBHD Podcast - Our First FPV Drone Experience & What's the Deal with Clubhouse?

Episode Date: March 5, 2021

This week's episode is an absolute grab bag of topics so buckle up, folks. We're going to talk a little bit about NBA Top Shot and how to mint an NFT, our recollection of our first experience flying an FPV drone, and a substantial discussion about the pros and cons of Clubhouse and whether or not it will prevail or be stomped out by a competitor. Links: https://twitter.com/wvfrm https://twitter.com/mkbhd https://twitter.com/andymanganelli https://twitter.com/AdamLukas17 https://www.instagram.com/wvfrmpodcast/ shop.mkbhd.com Music by KamrenB: https://spoti.fi/2WRJOFh NBA TopShot Video: https://bit.ly/3qcs1o1 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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This holiday season, the Center for Addiction and Mental Health is counting on your support. CAMH is on a mission to make better mental health care for all a reality, and they've made incredible strides forward, breaking down stigma, improving access to care, and pioneering research breakthroughs. But now is the time to aim even higher. You can help create a world where no one is left behind. Donate at camh.ca slash donate now from December 23rd to the 31st,

and your gift will be tripled for three times the impact. I literally, when I sat down, my friend tagged me in a Slack message like, have you seen the new DJI drone? I was like, well, I have a story for you, man. Welcome back to another episode of the Waveform Podcast. We're your hosts. I'm Marques. And I'm Andrew.

And this episode is a literal grab bag of unrelated topics. We're all over the place. Today, we talk about NFTs, the NBA, a folding phone, DJI's incredible new FPV drone, Clubhouse versus Instagram, and the addicting nature of the Apple Watch and the competition at our store. Wish us luck with the segues. But first, we got to talk about NFTs. We had a little bit of chatting about NFTs in the last episode,

and they continue to blow up and be kind of the number one thing I've seen talked about on social media for the past at least week. For sure. I want to shout out. There's a really good video by a YouTuber I like. He's called Jimmy High Roller on YouTube, and he mostly does NBA videos. And I was waiting for his take on Top Shot just because it's the NBA world. And he did a video on the concept of Top Shot.

And it was sort of the antithesis of our conversation with Justin last week where there is almost no perceived value at all in what is going on with Top Shot. Just to briefly explain it, just to give you the 30,000 foot view, ready? With Top Shot, you can buy NBA moments as they happen. There can be a small or a large amount

of these limited edition moments. So a LeBron James dunk, for example, can be minted. There's a small amount of them. One of them's gone for a record $208,000 or something like that. But there's also a bunch of other smaller moments and plays, blocks, dunks,000 or something like that. But there's also a bunch of other smaller moments and plays, blocks, dunks, steals, things like that. And there'll be a thousand bucks, 1200 bucks, $2,000.

And it's just wild to watch because when you try to explain it to someone, you're like, so what are you buying? And you have to explain that you're buying an NBA moment, like a play. Buying a moment. Sounds impossible, right? How can you own a piece of time? And it's like, well, I could just watch the play on YouTube, which is kind of like what we

were saying with art before. I could just download the PNG and that's always been true about it. And he goes really into detail because basically the point is people are really enthusiastic about it specifically because they think they can make money from it. And there seems to be almost no intrinsic value of the actual thing you're buying. So I thought that was really good. That'll be one of the top links in the show notes, Jimmy High Roller's video, shout out to him. It makes great, great videos. I think the like main thing that I'm kind of confused about with NBA Top Shot is like, I can see regular NFTs because you're like supporting digital artists and people who didn't really have a median to be supported on before, but it's the NBA. They're making plenty of money. Like, I mean, this is

just more money, but it's also, I don't know. I feel like less, it feels less personal. This also isn't the players making money. They go out and play like they usually do. And it's just people paying each other for these moments, which is crazy. The NBA has got to be associated some way right or they're at least licensing they're officially like they're making some money okay so i think it's something called actually i signed up for top shop because people are making a lot of money off of us you know just something called dapper i think was the website so is that i guess they just licensed with nba and now they're creating all the different like little highlight packs

and stuff like that okay yeah but i like the video just because he goes way off the deep end of like, why is this Draymond green block worth any more than one cent? Like you can watch it on YouTube for free. You probably wouldn't even want to, the play is not that cool, but for some reason there's less of these minted. So there's an artificial scarcity of this minted moment. So this one's worth $2,000. Like it just, it falls apart pretty quickly. Do you think the other mint like aspects of NBA games that aren't physical plays, like didn't Shaquille O'Neal once dive

to like keep a ball in bounds and knock over and then like eat someone's nachos on the sideline? Fan interaction. Like I would buy that NFT. Interesting. Would you buy it to own it because it's cool or would you buy it to sell it? I feel like I would buy it as the like,

I'm cool, I'm cool. I'm going against the grain. Everyone's buying Steph Curry three pointers and I'm buying Shaq eating nachos and then probably sell it when it winds up being worth a ton of money. Yeah. It sort of all boils down to you're buying it to sell it eventually. But yeah, the art side of it I thought was cool because there was original art. It was just funny because yeah, I could just watch the highlight on YouTube. Speaking of NFTs, after last episode, I've, you know,

watched a lot of videos about it. I saw a lot of people talking about it again. And then I watched Sam Sheffer and mint one of his tweets. And I just thought everybody's minting something. I think I should give this a shot and see what the process is like and kind of quick dive into how easy or hard it is to do it. Research. Research. Yeah, we'll call it research. First of all, I spent way, way, way too long creating the piece that I wanted to mint.

I'll just give you a hint. It has to do with Mac. I don't know when I'll officially show it. So explain the process of what is it like to mint something? Because I've never done it, but I keep hearing this is how you get this to be purchased eventually. And so I'm coming at this from a standpoint of never owning any crypto at all. So this is all completely brand new to me. So I had to create a wallet. I did it on something called Metamask. And then I had to buy Ethereum, which is pretty easy, but there's like a transaction fee. I guessed it was going to cost

about 50 bucks because Adam was telling me he was trying to do it. So I put in 50 bucks, which is really 55 bucks because of the $5 transaction fee. And then started, I went to a website called Rarible. It's pretty easy. That's pretty easy. Once you link your wallet, there's like a really quick step-by-step process. You upload the video, you name it, you then pick like quantity of it. So I just did a one of one because I wasn't sure if I did multiples, if it would cost more money and I'm not trying to sink that much money into research. Did it cost money to mint the thing? Yes.

So it costs money, it costs gas fee, which I believe, and maybe Adam can give us a nod if this is right, that it's basically just like you're paying for the power that the blockchain needs to use to create that token, something like that. Somebody's probably cringing at that description. But so then after that, Rarible, I guess, was having some sort of bug because I went to their Discord. It didn't work at first, even though I confirmed it through my wallet and it took the money away. And then it was just nothing was there. So I got a little worried. The next day, it finally wound up coming up. And now I just have it in my collection. My art piece, that's Mac. Probably tweet it or something eventually so everyone can see. It is one of one. It has its own blockchain address or

token. It is minted and is part of my collection. It has its own blockchain address or token. It is minted and is part of my collection. It's not for sale. I'll probably sell it eventually and lose money. But right now I want to believe that I won't lose money. So right now, so you've gone through the minting process. So now this piece of art exists as an NFT and you are the first and only owner, according to blockchain, the creator and the owner of it.

Yeah. So that's, what's interesting though, is you are not just the owner, at least through Rarible and I believe other ones, if I sell this at any point in the future, if someone else sells it, if the new owner sells it, you can enter in a commission fee to it. So I just put 10%. You can put whatever you want. I'm sure that probably makes it more or less valuable

if someone's buying it as an investment with a 40% royalty, it's probably not quite as valuable to them. But whoever sells this in the future, I get 10% of it, which will probably still never make me my like 60 bucks back. You get 10% of every single time it's sold. So if someone sells it now, you get 10% of that fee. And then if someone sells it to someone else, you as a creator get another 10% of that fee and continues down the line as it gets sold over and over again. So this is something that creators of art that gets traded a lot have benefited a lot from, which is really, really interesting. And just to be clear, it should be pretty obvious, but you get 100% of the first sale after you create it and then 10% of every sale after that.

Got it. So I think in the end, after a day of waiting and like 60 bucks in Ethereum, that's what it did to make one of one. Still not totally sure if you can mint, if it would have been like 50 bucks for every single one, if gas fees would have been for every single token created or if it's one token for a collection. I don't really know, but pretty easy to do. I think if I could do it that quickly, it's a, it's a pretty simple process. So I was going to say congrats on your first NFT, but it sounds like it was pretty easy. It was pretty easy. You should say congrats on losing 60 bucks. I mean, you, you did the research. We figured it out. What I've said to people is I'm keeping my eye on it. I haven't bought anything yet because it's still even though i understand it now it still does feel like a little bit of a stretch when i break it down to

just would you like to spend 1 500 on this piece of art when you see like oh i have one ethereum here i can spend it on this art and maybe sell it later a lot of people look at it as like an investment that they can make their money back from. But I don't know, something about that initial barrier. If you see it like that, it's less collection and more gambling, I feel like. And I'm not huge into gambling. Is there something that you can think of that would be personal enough where you would be like, I'm pretty hyped to own this piece of something? I got pretty close when Justin Maller, you know, did the Ghosts 2 art, which I had a personal connection to. I've loved that piece for a long time. Even maybe if there was some sort of Daft Punk related art, I think I might be tempted to own it.

But at the same time, because it's missing the physical thing, and this is something we talked about in the studio with Beeple where he's doing this sweet version where you not only get the ownership of the art, which is digital, but you also receive once you buy it, this kind of cool kit.

Maybe just when you buy it from the creator, but this cool kit that's like a physical thing attached to it. That's cool. I haven't been tempted by anything like that yet because I still look at Daft Punk art and go, well, I kind of want the thing in a frame on my wall. God, that makes me sound old, but I feel like that's the barrier for me right now. But yeah, I've been intrigued by all the different versions of creative NFTs. I think we were going to talk like Beeple is an artist who's been doing online art for how many consecutive days? 5,000? 5,050 or something like that. It's like 13 years. Yeah. That's an insane amount of original art and he's gotten silly talented in

Photoshop or whatever he uses to create this art. And he has a huge collection of it. And so now he's able to turn around and share pieces of that collection, sometimes the entire collection with people. And it's been this sort of a phenomenon that's caught fire lately in NFTs. So that's pretty cool. There's also some like merit to just the fact that a lot of these websites are really easy to look at the marketplace and you can discover artists, whether you're buying things or not. I mean, I wonder how many of these artists are gaining just like Twitter and Instagram followers, just because people are looking at what's selling for a ton of money being like, oh, that's really neat. And then finding them on Instagram while they're right click saving

the marketplace thing and quote unquote owning. I was going to guess there is probably more of the other way around of people who have a following already sending people off to buy their NFTs, where if you don't have a following already, it's pretty hard to start making art and selling it if no one knows who you are yet. Yeah, but I'm like, just there's a lot of really easy ways to discover things on these websites,

and it's not all necessarily based on just the most popular ones. There's a lot of like new art. So I wonder if people are getting discovered just as, I mean, I've spent hours at this point on like Nifty Gateway and Rarible and all those super rare, just looking at some of the different pieces

because they're really, really impressive. And I realized I haven't, I don't look at a lot of stuff like that. Here's a question then, because there's such a good discovery, is anything underpriced? Have you ever come across something? I don't know what a fair price is.

I've discovered some weird things that I didn't think people would ever create in my lifetime. I don't know why I'm surprised by that. And I don't think it's safe enough for work to even speak about it. It's the internet. But it's a hoot. It's fun.

That's fair. It's a good lunchtime. I'm imagining stumbling across something and being like, wow, only $350 for this art. Where it's like, I would never, I've never spent $350 on a piece of art in my life. So I feel like that would be pretty crazy. I don't think I've ever spent $350 on a piece of furniture in my life. So it's a pretty big swing for a lot of people.

Interesting. All right. Well, speaking of things that may or may not have any value, Huawei Mate X2 is out. That was a rough segue. I don't think that flowed quite as well. You know, I gave it my best shot. Huawei Mate X2 is officially out now. We are actively working on getting our hands on it. I literally just a month ago did my video on the Mate X and how I was speculating about how they'll probably have to stop doing this outside fold thing for a little bit. Let me know what your thoughts are below,

if you think we should still do the outside fold stuff or not. And sure enough, we are right. So they haven't harnessed the Cicada wing yet? They haven't quite mastered the Cicada wing, exactly. So the Mate X2 has an inside fold. It's very similar to what you'd see in the Galaxy Fold 2. So it's inward facing with a screen on the outside. So the screen on the inside is an 8-inch display,

2480 by 2200 resolution. Then it's got this pretty much full screen on the outside, which is 6.45 inches. That's a big phone by itself. That's a 2700 by 1160, pretty tall resolution.

It's slightly bigger than Fold 2. Exactly. And it's both OLED, both 90 hertz, which I think is sweet. It's going to have Harmony OS and it's going to come out pretty soon. And I think we might even have it tomorrow. I don't want to jinx it because, you know, shipping's not amazing right now. But that's a phone that is pretty flagship, high end specs, high end screens. translating, $2,785. And there's a half terabyte version for right around $3,000. So it's not like I'm going to go around recommending it to people, but I'm definitely trying to figure out like,

okay, what did Huawei learn? What did they do differently? I'm sure they tested versions of the Mate X2 with the outside fold. I'm sure they wanted to keep going with that. But the fact that they went with this makes me want to try it out and see what they did. I feel like we've just seen foldables in the news a lot lately and in headlines a lot, especially with Pixel Fold and iPhone Fold or Apple Fold. If you've seen those headlines, don't even click on the link because the entire article is just the headline. It basically just says like, it's going to be here. It's going to happen. And there's no other information. So I'm sure people want us to talk about it, but there's absolutely nothing to talk about.

Yeah, here's my two cents. It might happen. There it is. All right. Confirmed. Nailed it. Confirmed. We've got the podcast title,

Apple Fold, Pixel Fold Confirmed. Okay. The thing that I think I've wanted to talk about for a little bit here, because it's been sitting in the studio for almost, I'm going to say three months now, is DJI's new FPV drone. Okay. This thing, this thing has a lot of stories behind it already, but let me just explain what it is. So DJI just announced an FPV drone. An FPV drone, if you don't

know, FPV stands for first person view. And the world of DJI drones that they've worked on for years as camera tools and the world of first-person drones is surprisingly very different. Vastly different. So DJI drones like your Mavic, your Inspire, your Spark, all of these, the Phantom, are generally designed to be film tools. You see people shooting real estate videos flying around houses. You see people like Casey Neistat using them as, you know, cinema tools and vlogs? They are really great specifically for connecting to your phone, ease of use, shooting videos to micro SD cards with them. That's one half of it. FPV drones, if you've ever seen like on TV, tune into one of those like drone race shows or like competitions.

It's a totally different world where if you want to get into this yourself, you're like soldering, you're building your own. You have a motherboard and some propellers and some lights and you're connecting to a controller and you're probably breaking a lot of stuff, but making a lot of this stuff happen yourself. They are not camera tools. They have terrible cameras on them, super lightweight, super aerodynamic, but they go fast. They're sporty. Yeah. super lightweight super aerodynamic but they go fast they're sporty yeah i'm talking like 40 50 60 70 miles an hour hard turns hard corner radius it's really fun to watch if you've ever seen one of these on tv that's the world of fpv drones so dji comes along and they put in our studio

their first fpv drone which combines these worlds so it's about the size of a cantaloupe. It is very, that's fair. So it's got, it's got the quad copters on it. It still looks like a normal drone, but it has a pretty decent camera on it, a 4k camera. It's got a gimbal that can tilt up and down. So it's not an amazing like phantom or inspire level camera, but it's a much better camera than normal it records to an SD card it connects to your phone and flies like a normal DJI drone and it is so fun it is super sporty also oh that's oh yeah that's the last fun part is when you see these people flying these FPV drones they are

flying while watching the feed of the camera and that's really the only utility of the cameras they can go through obstacles they can go, over things, around things because they're watching the actual camera feed. And so DJI has included and built this pair of goggles, which connects in really low latency to the drone. You strap it on like a VR headset and suddenly you are the drone. You're flying around looking at the feed from the drone, not just on your phone screen, but as your field of view. And so now it's this crazy level of immersion where this drone has a max speed of 86 miles an hour. And when I tell you it feels like you're going 86 miles an hour, you really do. It's kind of awesome to be flying over the tops of buildings and around obstacles and turning around really sharply faster than I think I could even pull off

some inspire moves, which is like the craziest drone we've used. To compare the top speed of the Mavic's 44 miles an hour. So it's like double the Mavic. It is so fast. Imagine a car passing you on the highway. That's how fast this drone goes. It's crazy. So these two worlds combined, we've had it in our studio here for a little bit, but it's been super cold. And there's also been some delays obviously dji is going through a lot it's finally out the world can finally see it and we've finally taken it outside for the first time yeah we wanted to do a little first impressions on the podcast so we decided to take it out well it's like two hours ago and it's 50 degrees out and we finally got a chance uh do you want do you want to give you flew it first yeah okay so i flew

it first i got the goggles on. We've already done some stuff inside the studio because it's so cold outside. We're going in slow motion in the normal mode. It's got obstacle avoidance on. So I'm going like around some chairs and under a desk once in a while. And it's like, it's pretty fun,

but I'm trying to go 90 miles an hour, right? So we get outside and immediately you're soaring over the water. You're soaring over buildings. I'm like trying not to get too close to the birds, but I'm also trying to get pretty close to the birds. Like it's a lot of fun, right? I think this is the most fun I've ever had with a drone. It is, to be fair, pretty expensive. I think we're talking $1,300. So I said as we were packing up, like, yo, if I could get any one DJI drone and like not use any others for the rest of my life, I would get this one. It is just so much more fun to fly. But yeah, that was my experience is like

you get the goggles on, you immediately feel like you're flying 86 miles an hour, buzzing over the top of like obstacles. You obviously want to be very safe about it because anytime you fly a drone, you have a lot of power in your hands. You have a flying object. You don't want to fly towards people or groups of things. But in this safe area in the back where we have it was a ton of fun yeah we were pretty like clean location to be able to fly it's a little bit over the water so there's not really like much you can crash into um and we did have like one little issue which is why this is a first impressions and not like a full-blown review but we we haven't been able to unlock the like range i guess of it and it was like only

doing its really fast sport mode it's like a very small like a 300 yard bubble yeah yeah so that was kind of a bummer but even in that 300 yard bubble like it was it's zipping wild it was so fast and even just sitting there watching it fly back and forth is pretty crazy it sounds very different from some of the other bigger drones that have bigger propellers. Yeah. If you're familiar with drone sounds, like if you imagine a helicopter, it's got the big propeller, it's got this deep sound. And then when you imagine a typical drone, like maybe a Phantom or a Mavic, you imagine

this like buzz. And the smaller the drone, the smaller the propeller is, the higher pitched the buzz. So it had this really unique like buzz sound where you'd like turn around really fast and it would it would like rev the motors really high and pull off that move i don't know it was it was just like it's something that's going so fast you can actually just hear the doppler effect every single like every five seconds as it's zipping back and forth between you and uh yeah it was crazy and then uh Speaking of sounds. Yeah, so I wanted to give it a shot.

I was next in line, I guess. And I think the best way to describe how I flew it is, luckily, David made a little sound recording because he knew we were going to throw this on the podcast. And I'll just let it speak for itself. This isn't the most comfortable phone for the guy I stand by that also oh yeah does aircraft not bound to phone number

that's definitely why so don't do anything illegal then wait don't do anything legal illegal I mean it's not tied to anything who cares it's not left is up.

Down is right. Yeah. We're very impressed already. Yeah. To be honest. Okay. Okay. Whoa!

Whoa! Oh! How do I do it? F***. Where's obstacle avoidance? Obstacle avoidance is disabled in sport mode. I was in a panic. I didn't know what was going on at that point.

In my field, if you can't tell, I crashed, by the way. I think that was pretty obvious. I think that sound clip just really paints a beautiful picture. That was beautiful. But I was whipping it around. I tried to like make a really tight turn and I don't know. It just dipped hard. I'd be so curious what you saw.

So you have the goggles on, right? So here's what I saw. We were standing. We had these kind of like low plants near the curb. And you did one of those hard turns where you hear the propellers really spin up and you turned around. And when the drone goes fast, and you've probably seen this with a lot of drones in the past, they lean forward like a helicopter

where they have to push air backwards. So they're leaning forward and really cranking to go quickly. So in sport mode, this thing's leaning and you had this thing on such a lean that it started to like scrape the plants at the curb. You were like eight inches off the ground. And it took a tumble somewhere in there, came out the other side and it was just hauling vertically for about 40 yards at a foot off the ground until it scraped the ground and crashed. That's what I saw. So what I was trying to do was since we were in this bubble of the

fastest speed you could go is I was trying to go as fast as possible turn before the bubble and keep it in full speed mode so I could just rip down the straight line again I guess in that turn I wasn't controlling it very well and it took a dip I don't know how high I was the first like on the first straight away and then into the turn. Okay, then I was severely overestimating where I was in the airspace. But so in my eyes, I saw the turn. I saw I decreased elevation a little bit. Then I just saw a plant. And then I saw the feed just kind of scrambled. And then I just noticed everything was upside down

while it was still moving. So I could only assume I had crashed. I was kind of, I didn't know what to do. I kind of just, I didn't drop the controller, but I just let go of all the controls, hoping, but apparently it just kept sliding. Yeah, it was flying. So yeah, that's what happened. I don't know what, I have no excuses.

I just smashed it. Here's the fun part. So this drone is covered in like hard plastic. Basically, the entire thing's made of hard plastic. It's got this shell over the top where most of the computers are, hard plastic, rubber at the bottom. We pick this thing up.

It's like pretty much completely intact. I swear, I promise to you, it crashed at 40 miles an hour. It crashed into cement and slid for 30 yards at a high speed. And we pick it up and it looks like we could just keep going, just fly it again.

Some nicks on the plastic, of course, and lots of scratches. But I think, I mean, with any drone, you get a ton of propellers because you know that's the first thing you buzz when you hit something. I think with four new propellers, that thing flies exactly the way it did before. I think it'll be totally fine. It doesn't look great anymore, but there's a lot of new propellers. And I feel the worst because Adam and David were waiting to fly it

and I just destroyed it right off the bat. We're taking that thing out again. It was a lot of fun for the 45 seconds I got to fly it in the air. So we'll do a lot more with this drone. I feel like we have, this is a dope tech video waiting to happen because we've got some other stuff coming to the studio.

And anytime you get nice weather, you can go outside with a drone. Honestly, the footage from it was much better than I was expecting because I didn't review it, but I waited till embargo and I saw a bunch of other reviews. And again, in FPV world, there's not much in the world of great cameras, but in DJI world, I mean, it's a smartphone size sensor. You can get pretty decent video quality out of these things. So I'm excited to shoot a video with the drone. And I think that's going to be fun. And it's just so much more fun to fly than any of the not so sporty drones. Yeah.

Oh, it's a hundred. It's a thousand times better, more fun to fly. I was actually, you're talking about the cameras. When we picked it up, the gimbal on the drone upside down crashed on the thing was still like leveling itself up out as we picked it up. So like- Totally fine. Yeah, it survived pretty rough crash.

I think it represents a level of accessibility. I know it's still expensive at 1300 bucks, but the accessibility of an FPV drone experience like that before with the goggles and the low latency camera and the sporty propeller setup and all that stuff was not financial as much as it's just like skill level and technical know-how. So the fact that you can go out and, and buy the DJI easy FPV drone experience and get into it is super cool to me.

I like that. You were flying it within two minutes of taking it out and everything. Like it was just turn it on, turn the controller on, turn the goggles on, and it was ready to go. Yeah, super cool. So, you know, if you're itching to fly a drone at a very high rate of speed, might I recommend this one? Dope Tech video coming soon, but we'll take a quick break. We'll come back. We got a lot of Clubhouse to talk about.

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down on costs with net suite's real-time insights and forecasting tools you're not just managing Thank you. 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. All right, welcome back. Story time. Okay, so Instagram, pretty well-known social network we all know and love, right?

A little bit, yeah. Pretty popular. A lot of us use it. I use it. Andrew uses it. David uses it. Adam uses it. We're all on Instagram, right?

Okay. So the head of Instagram announces on Twitter, conveniently, that they are working on a pretty highly anticipated new feature. Now, anytime you hear that, your mind immediately goes to the number one most anticipated thing. Oh, iPad app. And then you go, wait, well, maybe not. Maybe that's too good to be true. But for some reason, when he tweeted that this time, we all well, maybe not. Maybe that's too good to be true. But for some

reason, when he tweeted that this time, we all thought, you know what, maybe this is it. Maybe they're finally going to do an iPad app and this is what he's hyping. He tweeted as this like tweet underneath his original one, like, by the way, this is one that a lot of people have been requesting for a long time. And it's like, all right, finally, we're getting it. Finally, finally. So it's got a certain date and time attached to it. We wait for the date long time. And it's like, all right, finally, we're getting iPad. Finally, finally. So it's got a certain date and time attached to it. We wait for the date and time. And eventually they launched their big new feature, which is you can now do live with four people instead of two.

So that's the feature. That's it. There's still no Instagram iPad app. Adam, if you're listening, we still want one. But the concept of a live with four people had a a bunch of different reactions and yeah and comparisons from each of us in the studio so I kind of wanted to relive that I wish we were just like recording our conversations in the studio all the time but one day we're all just going to be live to the minute we walk into the studio so you

compared it to clubhouse which I thought was really interesting because I've been on Clubhouse for a couple of weeks now. It's an audio only social network. And the phenomenon is like, if you haven't heard of it, you can sort of enter rooms and there will be people on stage talking. Again, this is all audio. And so people can invite people from the audience up on stage. Anyone speaking can unmute their mic and speak. And then you can leave, go to a

different room where other people are speaking. You can join, you can listen in. And it's this sort of audio only experience that is catching a lot of traction and actually sort of creating its own copycats like Twitter spaces, right? Yeah, we'll get into that also. Yeah. So tell me how you see Instagram, these two new people you can add to live streams, how that sort of compares. I guess to me, and this is as someone who has not used Clubhouse yet, Yeah. So tell me how you see Instagram, these two new people you can add to live streams, how that sort of compares. I guess to me, and this is as someone who has not used Clubhouse yet, it just felt like, it kind of felt like that. It reminded me of like, I've been to Comic-Con before and there's panels up there and you just have the cast of a TV show or a movie that you

really like. And they're just, they're all talking together and talking about different things that have happened on the show or whatever. And then the audience kind of gets to interact later. So this felt a little bit like multiple people. It used to just be two before now it's four. First of all, that's just not, why would you ever even like tease that as this big announcement when you're just like adding two more people to it? That was just baffling. But I guess my assumptions of Clubhouse felt like this was just a video version of that that's more accessible because everyone has Instagram and it's not invite only and it's not iPhone only. And you do get video. And now I also was kind of thinking Clubhouse is very new and very small. It has a small team. Do they want to push to

video eventually or are they strictly audio only? I know people enjoy that, but then that's when you brought up the aspect of that you really enjoyed the no video part and that it never struck me as something that somebody would really want. So I think Clubhouse is both winning and losing because of how small it is. They don't have a huge team, like you said. So a Clubhouse room, for example, is limited to, it was previously 6,000 total people. Now it's 8,000, but that's literally because their servers aren't really built out enough to handle more than that. So they've got all sorts of limitations and that's part of the reason why they haven't added any new

features. There is no messaging feature in Clubhouse. You can share links to Clubhouse rooms outside of Clubhouse, but the whole app is still iPhone only and invite only. So it's small intentionally. But the other thing is it's winning because it's so limited because this whole audio only experience where you don't have to put on a video face, you don't have to entertain visually in any way. It's just a conversation. There is no chat. There is no text. There's no reactions. It's just people speaking on stage, just like a Comic-Con panel, just like a CES panel or something like that. I think that made it sort of unique and stand out for what it is. And I think the second they start trying to do more and adding those things like

reactions via text or video, then it's not really Clubhouse anymore. It's just building onto what's already existed. So I think they have copycat versions like Twitter spaces because their uniqueness in this audio only forum, which is actually also kind of perfect in 2021 where everyone's at home and doesn't want to put makeup and a face on. That's like a really interesting. So like for the people who are generally like pretty popular and getting and like having these really big clubhouse rooms, I can see that being a huge benefit because you can. And like they said, people will talk and listen to this while they're driving or riding an exercise bike or out on a walk or something like that. You don't need

to be in a studio space with a nice backdrop and look nice for it. It's super simple. I do wonder if the audience aspects like some people would prefer having video. It's super simple. I do wonder if the audience aspects, like some people would prefer having video because it's more personal. I think audio only benefits people who already have a following more so, but I bet it would be harder to grow an audience. I mean, there are always podcasters who never really show their face and they also do it, but I would argue it's harder to do that versus a YouTuber or someone on Instagram where you really get to know that person and see who they are. For example, I've been doing this podcast for two years

and I showed up in a video a couple days ago and there are a ton of comments that are like, it's really weird seeing what he looks like with that voice that I've been listening to for so long. So it becomes more personal when you see someone. I do agree that I really like the raising your hand aspect better than just like an insane chat log of live chat. I still don't know how like Twitch streamers deal with stuff like that. It's

absolutely crazy to me. But like if there's four very popular people on an Instagram live room, whatever you're calling it, I like reading that chat is going to be impossible and not really going to help anything. Yeah. Clubhouse to me. So on discovery, I, I have ended up following a completely different subset of people on clubhouse because of the way it works than I do on any other social network. Every other social network, I guess, basically is just me following people either based on what their reputation is or what they've already posted. So on clubhouse, once you're in a room, for example, and you hear like that, there's just a conversation going on. Some expert might jump in and weigh in on a topic

or something like that. This happens all the time. There's a question. Someone goes, hey, bring up this person from the audience. I've heard them speak about this before. And, you know, there's this whole NFTs conversation. And then you can follow that person and get notified when that person goes in and talks in other rooms. And so it becomes this way of like following someone's expertise around, not based on what they've done in the past, but based on what they're doing right now. I found that interesting. So I started off following a bunch of the same names I already know, people I already I'm contacted with, people I know from Twitter and YouTube, things like that. A lot of them

aren't really active in Clubhouse that much. As I started using Clubhouse a little more, I started popping up in rooms and hearing really interesting conversations and following people that I never followed on any other social network, but I did hear because their input to conversations was really thoughtful and engaging. And I wanted to hear more of that type of stuff. So it's a different model. And I wonder, I don't know if that's more or less effective at like surfacing new faces, but it was definitely different for me. So I find that interesting. Surfacing more new voices.

New voices, exactly. Is there a like verified account? Can you get your accounts verified? Nope. And it's super easy to just randomly change your profile. Yeah, like how easy would it be for someone to just throw your profile picture on with the name Marquez and then say something out loud

and it's very obvious. I mean, unless it's David whose voice sounds exactly the same. There are rooms where people will literally go, hey, if you change your profile picture to a picture of you and me, then I'll invite you up on stage to speak. And then people will start changing their profile pictures

and you'll see a room where everyone's profile picture is like them with that person. It's really fascinating because you can just refresh the room and everyone's profile pictures will be different and they can just keep changing them over and over. Wait, like these people have like real photos with them or are they like Photoshop?

I'm very confused. This is in the weeds maybe. I was in a room where people were like, oh, if you have a picture with you and Gary Vee, I'll invite you up on stage to speak. Wait, was it Gary Vee asking that? I don't thinkary was asking that i really liked gary v it was just this meta moment where it was like oh if you also have a picture of you and gary v that's not fake then you can come up and speak and we'll all talk about how we met gary vee and then that happened everyone started changing their profile pictures and live

in the moment elon's twitter elon's on Clubhouse and his profile picture is just a picture of Tesla short shorts on a random mannequin. Like there is no verified system. It's super casual in that way. But again, is that small for the sake of being small or is that small because they should probably do verifications and they're just not big enough to yet? Yeah, I don't know. It's all strange. I don't see it being for me. I don't think doing live stuff is my cup of tea. I've tried some streams before't see it being for me. I don't think doing live stuff is my cup of tea. I've tried some streams before with very small audiences and have panicked completely in those. I take comfort in the podcast because I know Adam can edit out all my filler words and make me sound like a reasonably intelligent person. And on live, I do not have that. So

I don't know. I also don't, I have an Android, so I can't even really get on live. I do not have that. So I don't know. I also don't, I have an Android, so I can't even really get on it. Um, right. I think, I think clubhouse is interesting for, uh, the listening part for me. I think I happen to get looped into rooms and talking a lot because I'm in a lot of rooms about YouTube and then they'll go, Hey, Marquez is here and invite me on stage. But if I can just, a lot of people just listen like in the place of where they would normally listen to podcasts. So on a commute, you just open up Clubhouse. And if there's an interesting room, you'll just listen to that instead of the podcast you were going to listen to.

Or when you're cooking dinner, you might just put on a Clubhouse. You're not trying to like go speak and raise your hand. Some people are doing that all the time. But I think that's the most common use of Clubhouse. And I feel like it's been really fun for that use case. It does seem like a good feature to enable, which would be very, for a very small group of people like you, would be like an offline mode. So you can go in and not get invited on stage because maybe you're driving and you don't feel like talking or you just want to do that. But like, that's never going to get added because there's no reason to put that much effort into something

that's only going to affect 1% of the people on Clubhouse. So here's my feature list, official feature list suggestions for Clubhouse in order of importance for me. Okay. Number one, bigger servers so rooms can have more people. Because at this point you have someone like Mark Zuckerberg or Elon Musk or Bill Gates in a Clubhouse and it fills up in one second. And if you're not there, then you're kind of stuck in this like overflow room type thing where someone's recording it on their phone and streaming it from another phone. And then you're listening to a clubhouse in a different clubhouse room. That's what I was going to say. Are there like Twitch channels that like make it into the really

good clubhouse rooms and then just- Stream it. Yeah, stream it and rake in the ad revenue on Twitch or something. True. That is a thing. Five head player. Speaking of ad revenue, number two, well, number two, verification system, just for a couple people who probably need that. Number three, monetization for creators. This is a conversation that comes up with every social network, so I don't expect it

to happen in the blink of an eye, but there are so many interesting ideas about how to monetize a live speaking engagement. It's already a thing in real life. People have appearance fees. People may also charge for admission to rooms. That's something they got to think about a lot. Again, it's a small team. There's no way they build all my suggestions, but I think that should be on forefront for creators, making sure people want to use Clubhouse. And then let me toss in sort of a messaging feature. Just because if you're in a room, you see someone else who you know is in the room and you want to talk to that one other person

about what's happening in the room, you can do that. Because right now I'm just texting people I know who are in the room. And you can do that if you know the person, but like if you're not on stage, but you do want to talk to each other about the current conversation,

that would be kind of cool. And it wouldn't really ruin the room for other people if it's your own private chat. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So those are my suggestions. I'm going to do a featured dream list for someone who's never used Clubhouse before. Perfect.

Okay, number one, available on iOS and Android. True. Number two, I like video. Number three, chat. Number four, limited to four videos. And number five, connected to one of the biggest social media platforms out there. I see what you did there.

I see what you built there. I don't know. I don't think Clubhouse ever adds video. I don't think so either. I don't think it should. Okay. Yeah. All right.

Well, now that we've given all of our free suggestions to Clubhouse, I'll take 10%, like kind of like Mark Cuban style. We also on a completely, I am not good at segues. No, no. I wrote the segue here. One more quick thing on the topic of things Andrew hasn't used before. I literally wrote it for you.

And now I have to call you out. Dang, well played. On the topic of things Andrew hasn't used before. Thank you. The Apple Watch. So we decided to do a fitness challenge on the Apple Watch with everyone at the studio. It's been a lot of fun. I mean, this is day three, so I'm saying it's a lot of fun. I might be dead tired in like five or six days. I'm sore. I'm sore.

But the way the Apple Watch works is you're closing your rings every day. You're trying to close your stand hours, 12 hours of standing. You're trying to exercise every day, close those rings. Everyone knows if you have an Apple Watch, it's addicting to close your rings every day. Anytime you gamify fitness, everyone gets fit, right? So they have this mechanism built in to compete against each other. So if you compete against someone who also has an Apple Watch, it will share the data between the watches and whoever basically gets the most activity points during a seven-day stretch will win at the end of that week. Now, there's a lot of nuance to this, which is why what we're doing here is a little bit extra. But first of all, competitions are limited to 600 points per day, and points are measured in this sort of convoluted way where it's taking your move ring, your exercise ring, and your stand ring, and combining the way you fill those rings to total points. And 600 points is pretty hard,

but that's as high as you can go in a day. If you both get the same number of points, let's say you both get 600 every day, which is pretty hard, you would tie, which is pretty funny. But the other limitation is you can't do multi-person competitions. Yeah, we right now have, what,

like six different competitions going on between every, it's like a bunch of 1v1s right now. if I'm giving future suggestions for free on this podcast here, one, Apple, let us do no holes barred max points, unlimited competitions. I want to go over 600 points and I want to go way over. I want to, if I run a marathon or play an ultimate tournament, I want that to count as more than someone who filled their ring twice that day, right? Let's go, let's have the crazy version for people who want to turn it off. Just bury it in the settings. We'll find it. Then two, multiple person competitions would be so cool. Just for like a group of three or four people who are like in a, in a fun group. They all go to yoga. They all do something at the same time every week,

but they want to compete. Or you're on a team. Exactly. So that's a, that's my full list of feature suggestions for Apple. And everyone who's listening to this podcast, of course, can, can take those for free, but yeah, that's what we're doing now. I'm winning. You're winning, but to be fair, Brandon, I think is- I'm not winning at all. Brandon's tied, right? Or what is Brandon at? He has-

David's winning. David's winning? David's winning. David walked like seven. Here's the thing. You get a notification when people fill their rings and complete workouts. So David, who went and picked up some car today, walked for some reason like seven miles. I don't know if you walked to pick up the car or whatever was happening. There's some weird metrics too, because like David's couple mile walk that took

like four hours was the same as Adam's like seven mile run he did at five o'clock in the morning. It's still a mystery what exactly counts as a point, but when you get that notification at some crazy early morning hour of like Adam completed a five mile run, you're like, oh, it's on. It's on. My eyes are opening for the first time and Adam's like done with his six mile run in the morning.

Yeah, so this is how we're getting fit for March. This is how it's happening. We're going to be super, we're going to do this a bunch of weeks in a row. I don't know if I told you. So we're going to have like four straight weeks of 600 points just because pride's on the line. You know, you don't have to if you don't want to,

but we're doing it. This is also my first time ever using an Apple Watch as somebody who I feel like has ripped it apart a bunch of times with zero knowledge of it. So I have like a couple really quick key notes I've learned from it. Let's hear it. Free suggestion time.

Not even, no, praise time. I think eating my words time. The digital crown feedback is like absurdly good. I really thought it was real until David said, oh, it's so good. And then I was like, oh wait, it's not on right now, but now it's, oh my God, that's okay. So. Apple tactics are incredible. Absolutely amazing. Like you already said, challenges are like such a good way to get some, uh, just gamify like challenges and gamifying things. It's just really great motivation. Um, there have been times where I, so in the couple of days you've done it, I was working out and then someone finished and was like, I'm adding 20 more minutes to this workout.

I need to close my rings and the, just the closing rings in general, as confusing as they are with how you can like double or triple close rings for extra points, but only to a point. And it's based on whatever you set the goal as. That's a mess. But it is fun to say like, hey, you closed your rings today. It's like, oh, I wasn't that lazy. Solo loop band is amazing. I am so jealous.

There aren't like versions for this for garmin watches i tried to order some like aliexpress version took three months to get here and then was the wrong size so oh please just like oems make a solo loop band this is so much nicer than having like a metal prong like jabbing into your arm and then but last last part of praise, just make it a circle and make it not so tall. I want it to look like a watch. And it's just like... So you have a 46 millimeter and they also make a smaller 44, 42.

This is 44. So they have a large and a small. You have the larger screen size watch. They also have a smaller version. I have a pretty small... I have a little boy wrist. I also have a small wrist and I have the big watch

and I guess I just got used to it. But if you did want to go with the small one, I do love this. Like the screen itself is great. It's very easy to use and everything. I just don't like that. It's a square and it feels like it sits really high up on my wrist. So I've already stopped wearing it for sleep tracking because I didn't think the sleep tracking was anything I was that interested in. And if I put my arm under the pillow it gets stuck a lot so I guess I just won't ever wear it to sleep I'll be climbing with it this weekend and I want to see how it holds up then I think that'll be interesting and probably destroy it a little bit but yeah other than that it's it's a fun experience it's a good it's a good nice little ecosystem wall a lot of people who use the Apple

watch uh look at the other smartwatches they would have to use if they left the iPhone and just don't find any equivalent and stay with the iPhone because of the watch. The closing the rings

are addicting. The fitness competitions are addicting. Fitness Plus is pretty new and it's pretty decent but it's growing so there's a lot of plugs there.

Solo band. But the watch, the solo loop band. I'm like really high on solo band. It's good. It's good. For me, honestly, I But the watch, the solo loop band. I'm like really high on solo band. It's good. It's good. For me, honestly, I wear the watch to sleep,

not because the sleep tracking is that good, and it's not even that comfortable, but because, I said this in the video, because the Taptic Engine tapping me on the wrist to wake me up is immeasurably better than an alarm sound. It is so much better than waking up to sound. So I literally just get something tapping me on the wrist in the morning i wake up i see you could hire someone no it's so much better than that it's cheap no i the the watch waking me up is like incredible i i literally wear

it to sleep just for that so yeah we'll keep an eye on that you said you're climbing this weekend so i gotta find a weekend activity to close some rings as well no pressure or anything but pressure i i have putting a lot of pressure. I have to win. Putting a lot of pressure on. I have to. Like, I actually have to. This is either going to be a really fun challenge or turn this into an extremely toxic work environment.

If you want me to be tired at work, close your rings because it forces me to close mine. I'm telling you. We've also turned our morning pool games into like a workout frenzy where every shot you miss, you have to do pushups and it's been brutal. We got out of hand. We've gotten really bad at pooling. We got out of of hand so that's how our first three days are going but you know we'll

update you guys next week on the podcast see how everybody's arms and legs are doing either way that's been pretty much it kind of all over the place with this one nfts digital art you know apple watches and folding phones and we could talk about clubhouse forever but that's been a fun one thanks for listening and we'll catch you guys next week see you soon waveform is produced by adam melina we are partnered with studio 71 and our intro outro music is created by cameron parlow