Waveform: The MKBHD Podcast - Reels w/ Facebook CPO Chris Cox, Samsung Unpacked, & Our First-Year Recap of Waveform!

Episode Date: August 7, 2020

On this, the one-year anniversary of Waveform, we discuss all the devices launched at Samsung's Unpacked event, while simultaneously ranking the highs and lows of the livestream event. Then, we interview Facebook CPO Chris Cox about their new Reels feature, before wrapping the episode up with a recap of the first year of the Waveform Podcast and what the future has in store! Links: To check out the new Wild Wild Tech podcast, go to: https://bit.ly/WildWildTech https://twitter.com/wvfrm https://twitter.com/mkbhd https://twitter.com/andymanganelli https://www.instagram.com/wvfrmpodcast/ shop.mkbhd.com Music by KamrenB: https://spoti.fi/2WRJOFh Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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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. What's up everybody? Welcome back to another episode of the Waveform Podcast. We're your hosts. I'm Marques Brownlee. And I'm Andrew Manganielli. Fun fact, this is actually our roughly one year anniversary of the Waveform Podcast. Well, technically Sunday would be exactly a year from the first one, but close enough.

And that's pretty exciting. And we're going to dedicate actually a portion of this podcast to celebrating that one year, talking about what we've been through and what we have planned for the future for the next year and beyond. But I think we got to talk tech first. We got to do a recap. I think we can do that. Tesla Model Y to start. So that video, so that, that video kind of came from a weird set of circumstances. We actually shot about half of what people saw from that video in January, was it? I think it was like end of January, beginning of February. When we went out to San Francisco for that.

So real split shoot there. Then the second half, all of the rolling shots shot on a7S III were know the week that the video came out so it was a little bit i mean it wasn't planned that way so initially we'd shot the first half of that video before model y was actually out and so we had like a really early production model y but we weren't able to drive it so we were sort of in this warehouse shooting uh that was the part that was shot on red and we got some pretty good shots of the inside of the car but it turned out not to really work out as far as publishing it and and making a full video of it until we actually got more time with the car

yeah it's it's kind of funny because the whole time we were out there we kept talking about how it was like the most efficient shoot we've ever been a part of at least like outside of it yeah we kept saying like oh man we have like this car and even though we had to keep in the warehouse the warehouse had like a ton of room and really good light and we had a shot a bunch of cool things thought it all looked good we were getting so much done the second day we got there and it was just like our second day of shooting um we i felt like we checked everything on our list already so we're like now we just get fun more shots and we're like this is going so smoothly so smoothly and then covid hits so we like we jinxed it to another level of causing a global pandemic it feels like

which um we delayed the video but uh yeah it was a super fun shoot and but you know maybe we didn't get an exclusive out of it but being able to come here and shoot it with a super fun shoot. And but, you know, maybe we didn't get an exclusive out of it. But being able to come here and shoot it with a 7S and doing some fun shots was. Yeah, I found that more fun. To be honest, if we'd done that, like first version of the video we were planning without any of the driving of the car, it's kind of just more stuff that we'd seen from my first impressions video that I shot when it was rolled out on stage at that event. So I'm glad we did it a little bit

later and ended up putting that, that driving together. It's an autofocus video. So of course, it's not a review of the car or anything. And it was kind of interesting to actually see how many structural flaws that car had that Tesla loaned us, which was weird. It's just like, I don't know. I don't know enough about it, but there's just all these like little tiny things where it's like, if I'm paying this much for a car, I i don't know enough about it but there's just all these like little tiny things where it's like if i'm paying this much for a car i probably don't want to see them it's probably not going to affect anything but i had this like huge problem with the front trunk the like hood of the car was just ever so slightly under the lip of the bumper and it looked like it had an underbite and it's like you could only tell from a couple angles, but once you knew it was there, you just couldn't.

You can't unsee that. Yeah. So that was something that I think a lot of people latched onto, and that was an important part of the video talking about that. But yeah, this is a car that's going to improve over time, and that's worth noting too. So watch that video if you haven't already. Tesla Model Y Autofocus, probably their most important car. Then we got to i guess it's pixel 4a so this one was sort of lying in wait forever was it the last episode

where we were like we talked about two episodes and where is pixel 4a yeah yeah just a uh sort of a on the horizon phone for a while after google i o was canceled, and eventually, eventually it did come out. $350. And there's a couple interesting little facts surrounding the launch of this phone. It launched, well, all of this, it didn't actually launch, but it was revealed, and our embargo dropped, and all the videos came out the day before OnePlus Nord pre-orders go live. We thought that was kind of interesting. I did not notice that actually. Yeah. So that was something to note. And of course, a lot of the feature set of the phone sort of competes directly against Apple's iPhone SE in a lot of ways. And I almost made my video more of like a drawing parallels to the iPhone SE because this $350 phone, it nails all the basics.

It does really well what we expect Google to do well, which is the camera and the software experience, and the rest is just super simple. And it even had, like, the old fingerprint reader on the back, which is what Apple did with the old Touch ID sensor on the front. You know, not the best screen, kind of like Apple doesn't have the best screen. Great camera, because Apple also has a great camera.

Like, they had a lot of parallels in the software but uh pixel 4a is 50 less than iphone se so if you're after if you're after the best phone under 400 bucks this might not be it but if you're after the best phone for 350 bucks this is it i think that's where i'm at right now i think that's a pretty safe bet i think the the biggest difference, though, between the SE, and I always go back to this, is just that you're still getting that top-of-the-line processor in the SE. Future value. Yeah.

Yep. So there's pros and cons for sure. The Pixel 4a looks great, though. I actually really, really like the uniform plastic back on it i think it looks really sleek i like holding feels really nice uh yeah it makes me wonder more and more why we're doing so much glass on smartphones i think i would feel better knowing the front and back of my phone can't shatter just the front can interesting should that be the next rollback of the tech industry is we're realizing curved screens aren't actually all

that awesome so we go back to flat and now we slowly realize glass isn't really that great still is like it's nice it feels great i mean and we're still seeing some plastic ones with fingerprints which is something i really didn't think would happen but yeah i think i would prefer an option would be cool um and i almost wonder, yeah, I wonder if even if the option is like a price difference, even if it's at the same price, I think there's times I would pick plastic over the glass. Interesting. Well, speaking of plastic versus glass, we come up to Samsung Unpacked was this week. Yeah.

And well, we got a lot to talk about there, but let's just say, so we got all the unveils officially of the Galaxy Note 20, Galaxy Note 20 Ultra, the Z Fold 2, which didn't get the full unveil treatment. We got a date for more info, basically. They showed us the design and some new stuff, and then they said, September 1st, remember the day. That'll be all the rest of the stuff, which led us all to go go how much does it cost uh we don't know the price of that yet but the galaxy tab s7 and the galaxy buds live aka the beans and i think uh you know not too many surprises here we saw the the video

one live on the channel of the note 20 and note 20 The $1,000 plastic 1080p 60 hertz flat screen Note 20 with no expandable storage and a slightly smaller battery and screen. And the Note 20 Ultra, which is like the premium, super primo, clean like metal and glass. Empty your wallet. $1,300 phone.

So yeah, that video went live and I think the review will come out probably like mid-august something like that but that was yeah the reveal i think the the my main takeaway from both of those is i can't believe the s20 with how much lower spec wise it is on a lot of different things is a thousand dollars i that it is interesting i remember when we were talking about note 20 before 799 right i think i said 699 we saw those rumors and that would have made a lot of sense like again take the take the logo off of it imagine you know it could be lg it could be whoever so this phone comes out it is like i said it's it's a flat 1080p 60 hertz screen uh it's got a stylus it's got a

4300 milliamp hour battery it's pretty big and it's snapdragon 865 plus but 128 gigs of storage you know 8 or 12 gigs of ram like it's it's a high-end phone it's just not the highest end yeah and so you expect when you go plastic back and you start to like cut these little things out, no micro SD card slot, you know, a slightly bigger hole punch camera. You're like, oh, oh, they're trimming down the price. That's what they're doing here. And so I would have liked really to see the Note 20 be that like entry level note that sort of brings people in. Actually, I think Becca from The Verge had a really good line at the end of her video, which is, you know, the Galaxy Note used to be like what you would look to if you want the absolute maximum Samsung can give you. Now the word you look for isn't note. The word you look for is ultra. Yeah. Because it's the Galaxy S20 Ultra or Note 20 Ultra that

give you the highest end. But if you just want the regular Note 20, you're not going to get the highest end or the regular S20. So I think that's true about these. And so instead of getting a $700, $800 entry level Note to sort of bring people in, it's a thousand bucks at launch. Yeah. So here's a thought. First question is, would you consider the regular Note a flagship anymore because it has its higher end? No. Okay, so is this the first $1,000 non-flagship? We always talk about price range, and it got into this weird gray area of is S20?

S20 Plus. S20 Plus versus S20. It still feels weird because, and I guess that would go against my own reasoning, the Galaxy S20 line is still like kind of their flagship. But I feel like. I think my definition of flagship is a little more narrow. I think you only get one flagship. You only get one.

Because that's the flagship first ship that has the flag on it. The rest of them are all following. I hate to say that that's the first time i realized what the term flagship at least that's what my cow my definition would be so if you've got a whole fleet of battleships yeah the first one that sort of represents the best of what you got that's leading the way you put the flag right on the front that's your best you have to offer that's your flagship we're gonna get crucified by someone who knows military operations yeah maybe, maybe that's not real. That ship isn't in the front.

Maybe that's not real. You hide your best one behind the front one. But wait, okay. So now that we're that sidetracked, going back, comparing, I feel like it's harder to compare S20 Ultra and S20 Plus because that still generally had almost everything. Now we're going from like, because it still had a glass back, it still had, like everything was almost the same except for battery, screen size, and what, like an extra camera?

The periscope was gone. Again, the periscope was only on the Ultra again. But now you're going to like, you're changing the materials of the phone. You're giving it a way different screen like different uh refresh rate just everything is different these just feel like so much different phones yeah almost like they're not even in the same line the only reason they are is basically because it has a an s pen so you know what this should have been this should have been the note 20e this should have been exactly basically like they should have put the fingerprint reader on the power button they should have just gone all the way and just made it like the note 20e and i think

i'm assuming the reason they didn't do that is because they wanted to charge a thousand dollars for it and you can't put in something in the e line at a thousand dollars so it just seems like a weird phone i also think samsung knows the note still has some shine to the name where you don't necessarily want to diminish the Note brand. When you think Galaxy Note, you immediately think, oh, this is going to be the biggest, baddest phone with the stylus and everything. And when you have a cheapo version of it, like the S10e, not that it's cheapo, but immediately you're thinking that's more attainable, affordable, cheaper, plastic, cut down. Maybe they just don't want that

to happen to Note at all i mean i don't know that's great for selling the regular note 20 this year but then now the note 20 or the note line has a phone with a plastic back attending screen 60 hertz right next to its brother the same exact year that has yeah everything so i feel like it is it's just overpricing diminishing the the lineup yeah i don't know we'll see maybe it'll i think it's gonna pull a sam feel like it is it's just overpriced diminishing the the lineup yeah i don't know we'll see maybe it'll i think it's gonna pull a samsung like it always does and it'll be discounted pretty heavily pretty early but i do think the launch price yeah i hate talking about that and like launch price things because it just doesn't feel right if if that phone came

out at 7.99 as the note 20e i think we would all be singing its praises and it's not. And I think it's just weird. Here's what I want to talk about though. The event. The actual event. To bring it up, like after the Apple event, we were talking about how things are changing this year and events are going to have to be online and we wanted to compare events because we wanted to see how people were gonna to pull it off right yes so with that being said thoughts on the event that happened today when i when it first started i thought it was an actual live production and i say this because it was live didn't they uh i mean the the stream was live but like you know there were some weird there's some audio issues like it was muted it started

like six minutes late or something like they were fixing some stuff that sounds i was kind of thinking oh samsung's just uh fixing up the live stream real quick before they start their presentation they start the presentation it very clearly to me looks like it's shot again on a phone. You know, it's in this empty stage area where they can do a live looking event, but they had some people on what looked like a video call in the background, like applauding instead of in the audience. So that's, you know, starting off a little cringe, but okay, fine. They're doing that. Um, but slowly as the event goes on, I'm seeing more and more like cutaway shots with animations and tracking and all this stuff happening. And I'm like, oh, this is actually,

I believe this is prerecorded, which that to me was so confusing. So now it's Samsung's prerecorded event made to look like it's happening live, even though it's not. So it's in this style um i don't know it it was pretty bad it was pretty yeah it wasn't i don't think it was live i'm almost positive right in the beginning they said live from korea or something like that um but yeah i mean they they

probably recorded it from there and ended up yeah i don I don't think it was going on exactly live. And I think the biggest giveaway is like what you said is they would cut to a side shot of them either with an animation that obviously wasn't cut live or even just sometimes they would cut to the side shot and there's no way their hands could have moved from how they were to the side shot. It was a pre-recorded side shot. Yeah. So yeah, maybe it was kind of live and then they had pre-recorded cutaways that they tried to. But I don't think that would be so hard to do. Yeah, I don't know why they would do that. Even remotely nicely.

So I'm just going to assume that this was pre-recorded for all of my following statements. all of my following statements, which are, I don't think the style of making, trying to emulate the crowd in the audience type of presentation is probably the best way to do it. So we saw, I think the other two that I'll compare it to are OnePlus's like augmented reality type of presentation where, you know, Carl is on a floating stage that you can walk around with your phone and explore and see the thing floating. Like it's obviously not live, but you know, it's a sort of interactive thing and apples. So apples, uh, what was it? WWDC presentation where they essentially had this whole, and again, you're not under any impression that this is happening live, but you're watching this movie basically that apple's made presenting this stuff to you where they have

transitions and drone shots and you're more just like immersed in this movie happening i don't know how i didn't think of this before but it kind of reminds me of like uh like if you were going to jurassic park this would be the like introduction video on your way to the island of like explaining around Apple campus. Right. So, you know, very well produced and everything. And like informative. Yeah. Apples is clearly the best.

I think the problem with Samsung's on this is they tried to recreate what their live events are and what their live events do best is like the theaters and the venues that they pick have these gigantic screens and like beautiful imagery that just takes up everything. And like you're just blown away by it when you're there in person, but it doesn't come off on video for a like quote unquote live audience or whatever you want to say. It just doesn't feel the same and you stage cringe is a little like less bad when you've got like giant towering uh like

monitors or projections over the distractions yeah you have distractions but when you're just sitting at your computer you can't avoid stage acting is pretty rough and it's also way easier to tweet about it because everybody's sitting on their phones. With great internet. Exactly. Yeah, you know, there are some moments where they're presenting products and I guess maybe there is no non-cringe way

to do a product demo like that. Everything is gonna have cringe. We fully accept that. It's about how much you can minimalize it. But what I'll point to is Phil Esposito cut this out of the keynote very nicely where they did these augmented reality sort of reveals of each product,

the Tab S7 Plus and the Buds and the phone. And each one of those is a different presenter on stage reacting to the product floating next to them. Like, oh, wow, look at this. I'm going to play this for you. And I just wanted to show you all of them in succession wow there it is the galaxy note 20 and here it is yeah as seven oh wow that looks so beautiful don't you guys think are you guys seeing this it cuts to the really poor applause after what what is the point of doing that for those of you haven't seen it imagine just a giant white

circular stage with your screen behind you and then it almost looks like the product is on the screen but it's definitely like a little more brought out and supposed to the first one literally is like somebody looking like they're about to get crushed by like a giant 20 yeah and just like oh wow it it doesn't add that yeah it's pretty rough my favorite was uh when they were they were demoing one of the the buds features and i think someone, she, she put the buds in and she immediately reacted to what was on the screen wide eyed, like, Oh wow, this is really loud and scary. And the girl next to her goes, don't worry. I can change the volume of both of us. And, and there's like, there's no way that you, you make that non cringy, no matter how good of an actor you are. So I think, I think the flaw isn't in the acting on the present presenters necessarily. It's just in the format. I don't really think

it works. How far away are we from, uh, tech events hiring, not just like tech coordinators and like, but like full blown theater directors to try and make things feel more natural? Well, that's interesting. So hard. That's a's a good question i so apple has an entire i think they actually bought a production company but they have an entire team specifically dedicated to the production and they rehearse and rehearse and go through the presentations and they happen to have pretty good presenters that actually work for the company on the products now because they're the gold standard a lot of companies you know are essentially emulating that and try to swing for the fences and miss in a lot of ways and so those misses are really glaring so

when you have people who don't speak as well on stage or who do work for the company and do are experts at the product but don't present it very well you know you see those those flaws a little more glaringly than if you weren't i think it's tough because being a stage actor is so tough as it is and they can't just throw anybody up there they want to bring the people in who are who are like product managers or like people working closely with the products and those people are probably never taking acting classes so maybe they maybe they just need some sort of like acting teacher or something to make it a little less cringy i don't like using cringy like i understand all this stuff is super hard i cringe at myself listening to myself sitting in a private room talking to a microphone that i know no one can see me at so like it's the

internet it takes a lot of courage to go up and do all that stuff but yeah sometimes it's it's pretty i'm still giving them props they did the presentation they had some good info some good energy way to way to break it all down guys it was about two hours and kill that q a at the end oh yeah that was unnecessarily for all the praise i just for all the praise i just hyped on that q a with like staged uh scripted answers was pretty unnecessary so cut that out the rest was fine uh we went way too long and into the weeds on that. But hey, that's the podcast. Yeah. But before we go into the next thing, we have let's just picture our COVID live event leaderboards. OK, so we have Apple at one. Definitely. Definitely.

We're putting OnePlus at two. OnePlus Nord AR launch was was two. And then Samsung unpacked. Yeah, three. Yeah. I mean, I'm sure there have been others that I haven't watched as intently as those three, but if those are the three, then that's definitely the order. Okay. Yeah. Cool. Okay. Let's take a quick break. And then we actually have a special interview. So as we know this week, Facebook Reels launched in the US and sort of globally. And I had a few minutes to sit down with Chris Cox, the chief product officer at Facebook. And we got to talk about Instagram Reels and what it is. Then we'll come back and react to it.

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Ambition is on the inside. So that thing you love keep doing it drive your ambition mitsubishi motors all right welcome back to waveform so this is a quick conversation with chris cox from facebook about instagram reels and what that is now if you haven't seen it it's on your phone probably already by now if you have the Instagram app. This chat was actually recorded on Tuesday, so a few days ago. So that's why when you hear a mention tomorrow in the chat, he's talking about Wednesday, which is when this launched worldwide. But all of this also has the backdrop of TikTok and its looming potential action in the US. And I think it's pretty interesting that I just ask about it and we

actually get to talk about all of that. So here's a chat with Chris. Enjoy. Awesome. So Chris, thanks for joining me to talk a little bit about something Instagram is releasing in the U.S. So this is new for us here, which is Reels. And I think there's a lot to talk about it, but why don't I have you in your words, talk about, first of all, what you've worked on and what is Reels? Yeah, so Reels is a short form. It's a new format for Instagram. It's short form video. It shows up on top of the Explore tab, and it's really about being a stage for folks who want to, whether it's music, whether it's dance,

whether it's roller skating in the park in Berlin. It's really about being a place that you can perform a short format video and reach new followers on Instagram. You know, Instagram is the place where we see so much culture being created, not just in the U.S., but abroad. created, not just in the US, but abroad. You know, whether it's celebrating a moment, whether it's organizing a movement in the US, you know, we're starting to see Instagram become more and more culturally relevant, and more and more of a place where that happens. So this is a short video format that completes the suite of what we're seeing people really want on Instagram. You know, stories is kind of your diary. IGTV is really about episodic content.

And Reels is really about being the stage. So we're going to be rolling that out starting tomorrow morning in 50 countries, in 50 countries, along with a catalog of 10 million songs for folks who want to perform a lip sync or who want to sync their content to music. As we mentioned, it's been testing in a few countries, Brazil, India, Germany. We started rolling this out in November, and we're seeing an amazing pickup in those countries, each with its own unique flavor. So tomorrow is the big rollout to the U.S. and a whole bunch of countries around the world. Awesome.

Okay, I have a bunch of questions about it. So you mentioned, I guess I'll start with, so you mentioned it's been in a few countries already as you've started to test it. What have you found that people go to Reels for specifically? Because I use Instagram and as a content creator, I'm thinking about, okay, I have Instagram, like the feed where I want to maybe post a short video now, or I might want to post that on IGTV where I have multiple episodes of I have a series I do where you're guessing a phone behind your back. That's an IGTV thing. Or maybe it's just on my story, maybe it's Reels.

How are people deciding what to put in Reels versus what they've put in other places? Yeah, so it's still evolving, but Reels is a place to be discovered because it really shows up on top of Explore. So if you're in a country with Reels, you see when you go to Explore, a really sort of large format video of somebody

you're probably not connected to, which is a way of finding new people. And the way that people use Explore is finding the best stuff across the community that they may not know about. And so I would say the most important thing for creators is this is a place they can be discovered if they make great content. And for users, it's a place to go see what's fun and what's going on that you may not, like I said, already know about. What's happening is both culturally relevant to the countries it's in. So in India, you're seeing a lot of Bollywood sort of like breaking what's coming in Bollywood or actors talking about what they're working on. Brazil, you're seeing a really cool amount of dance and music. In Germany, you're seeing Umi Janta, one of my favorites, just crushing it on like

vintage roller skates out in the middle of a park in Berlin. And I don't know, part of what's so neat for me is I wouldn't otherwise have discovered these folks, but this is giving me a place to go learn, not just in the US where I'm from, but also in all of these countries around the world where I do want to see what's coming out of these places, especially because so much of what we're going through in the world right now is a shared experience. Definitely. You know, pandemic. Yeah, go ahead.

Yeah, no, I was gonna say, I look at a lot of my Instagram Explorer page is a lot of like, not just the curated stuff that I'm into, but also a discovery of new things and going down rabbit holes, too. So I'm definitely feeling that. A smaller question about that. So it's in, Reels are in the Explorer page. IGTV videos, correct me if I'm wrong, no longer in the Explorer page, right? Right. They're in their own, they're in their own section. Right. And so basically on Explorer, I've already found, I mean, most of my Explorer actually right now is just people who've posted videos to Instagram. So in their feed. So does this show up, it shows up differently as a reel?

People will know when it's a reel versus when it's an IG video? Yeah, it has its own little icon. You'll see it's a reels icon. It's the short format. And we've seen a demand for this. I think it's 45% of all videos posted to feed in the past month on IG globally are around 15 seconds. And so there's something very, and that's not what you see in the episodic IGTV format.

It's really about the clip, which is great for the way we use our phones and great for finding something to laugh at and share. So yeah, it's prominent at top of the Explore tab. We're really trying to lean into this feature to, you know, help the creator community that's going to that's going to continue to try it out and experiment with it. Make sure that they're getting, you know, distribution and that it's easy for people to find. And then once you follow a creator or anyone, you'll see it, you'll start to see it in your feed and then you'll also see it on their profile grid. a creator or anyone, you'll start to see it in your feed and then you'll also see it on their profile grid. Yeah. So speaking of the creator community, I know a lot of the features and even

the UI when I'm looking at Reels here on my phone looks a lot like TikTok and has a lot of the same features set as TikTok. And so when I think of creator community, I think of how can Instagram better support a creator community than TikTok? You know, one of the biggest reasons YouTube is so popular is they have monetization tools. They have an impressive, you know, suite of things specifically catered to content creators. Is there something Instagram Reels offers to creators that doesn't necessarily exist other places? Yeah, so there's a few things here. I mean, first, you know, I think TikTok has

built a great product. I mean, they have a great community. There's a really great set of recommendations. You know, as I'm using TikTok, I'm seeing great content. So respect to what they've done. You know, when we look at Instagram, it's got, you know, at the base layer, it's really about creating culture. It's about, you know, the creative, expressive power that Instagram has brought folks from the very beginning. For a creator, Instagram's a great place to be connected to your following. I mean, we've invested for years on helping personalities, creators, and just people and their friends get connected to the right people. And that's a lot of what we bring to the table

in addition to the cultural element. You also have the suite of creative tools. Spark AR is a way that, as you know, developers and community members can contribute ar effects to the camera yeah so you've probably seen like the gibberish stuff going around you've seen the q a format there's a lot of formats that kind of go viral and become their own cultural moment and that's something that will be a part of the way we distinguish ourselves with the short form video format is really the tools that we bring to help people be creative and celebrate

with their friends and also their community. There's also the chance to build a business. You know, we've focused a lot, not just on helping folks get connected if you're a creator, but also on helping you pay the bills, whether it's branded content. We're testing ads in IGTV, which have a rev share. We're focused on making sure that there's a sustainable business at the end of the day for the folks who are building communities and creating content on our platforms. And I hope that that's going to be a big part of how we're helping the creator side of the equation,

in addition to weaving it really nicely into the experience for the people, over a billion people who use our products. For sure. Is there potentially a monetization feature that can be built into Reels specifically, or just obviously testing ads on Instagram with IGTV can sort of wrap into the whole suite of things as you use Reels, you use other stuff too? Yeah, it's something we're exploring. We don't have the full story yet, but we're committed to experimenting with what works and working with creators to figure out how we can help them succeed. So not a totally full story there yet, except for a commitment from us

to work really hard on making that work. So I love that, first of all. Having the focus on creators, I think, is a big part of what other platforms have missed. But what do you see as potentially where Reels could go, what it could evolve into in the future? Because I know adapting and moving with the times is a big part of what keeps platforms not just relevant but successful. Instagram has a habit of adapting and moving and creating new things.

What do you think Reels could be in a year or two? Is it this massive thing that people have flocked to for for sharing their 15-second bits It's interesting I think You know part of what's so fun about what we do building the products is how much is white space How much of it is people You know taking what they see in the world. I mean we just had you know, I'm in the Bay Area I'm out here in San Francisco. We had a woman, Tiana Day, who's a 17-year-old youth activist, meet a friend, Mimi Zoila, on Instagram and organize in less than 48 hours a BLM march

across the Golden Gate Bridge, you know, one of the most iconic places in the world. And that just happened with her own sheer will and creative force and a connection she made and her access to a platform that let her reach people. And people want to participate in the moment that we're in right now. And that's not something that was by design, quote unquote. It was something that was really about her. And, you know, we celebrate that. And I think when we look at what Reels could be, it could be applied to education, maybe. I mean, you could have teachers, you know, starting to think about creating short

form videos on how to, how to, you know, do whatever it is that is their field of expertise. It could be history or whatever. We see some of that happening on Instagram anyway. And it's obviously important right now as kids in the U.S. are trying to go back to school and maybe can't go back to school or are going back to school in a limited way. So, I mean, my hope is that this is a way for people to, you know, meet the moment that we're in. And whether it's have a laugh or whether it's organize a movement, you know, this is going to be a tool for people to reach a broader audience than their followers based upon their talent, their dedication, you know, and their hard work. Yeah. We definitely got to get Bill Nye using Instagram. That's a hundred percent. I grew up with Bill Nye. Yeah. Same. I mean, who didn't? I mean,

he's in every classroom. Well, anybody who's under the age of 20 didn't. Man, I don't want to think about how old I am. Yeah, exactly. We won't share that right now. So now you've tested it in a few countries. Now it's launching broadly and including in the U.S. I guess why now?

Is there a reason why? Has it been accelerated forward at all? Or you always sort of had a couple months of testing in mind before you wanted to go more broad in case you found some things you want to change? Uh, why now? Yeah, like I said, we've been, we, we started launch, we started testing this feature in November. Uh, so it's been out there in the world for a bit.

You know, we want to make sure it's stable, that people like it, that it's easy for creators. to make sure it's stable, that people like it, that it's easy for creators. You know, part of why it's part of why we can do this is we have a ton of infrastructure across the Facebook apps at streaming video. We also have a ton of infrastructure on creative tools. We have a developer platform around creative tools. So a lot of the mechanics of what we would need to build

if we were doing this from scratch, we just kind of have because we are, you know, we've been working on this stuff for a long time. We've been working on live for several years across Facebook and Instagram. So we're able to sort of move quickly on this product. But like I said, in the countries we've launched it in, we're seeing first each country adopt its own unique flavor

of how culture shows up in a performative short-form video in that country. In Brazil, like I said, full of music and dance and that sort of life and you know when we see the demand that's happening just based on what people what creators are posting like I said so much short so much of the video being posted in short form we just want to unlock it and like I said we'll wait and see kind of what happens next. We'll see how people use it.

We'll see what they want. And then we'll just have a team who's dedicated to making the product work. Makes sense. All right. I got a couple. I got like a last. I have an idea for how to succinctly wrap it up. So I'm going to give you.

I'm going to float some video ideas I have at you. And then you can tell me which Instagram video feature makes the most sense to post it. So it could be, it could be a, it could be a story, right? It could be an in-feed video. It could be IGTV or it could be real. Okay. First I have a, let's say I have a 15-second review of a phone case. I don't need to put a whole YouTube video out. I just got a new case. It's quick.

I'm showing you the front, the back, what it's made of. Where does that go? Reels. Short form. Reels. Okay. Even if it's... It could be...

The thing about episodic stuff, I don't find it always has to be longer. I feel like I've done some episodic stuff that can be short on IGTV. I feel like it could live there too. I think you could be right, but I think what I'm trying to, at least my intuition is we have a new format here. Let's play with that. Let's try it out. Let's see what works. And on the platform side, we're going to be committed to understanding how that's happening and supporting the creators who are doing neat things and you're somebody who could put put things in a lot of places and get a you know get a get a great response and i think you know as long as it's short uh i think reels is a great place to to start trying out uh uh, your ideas. Okay. So how about I have a, like a five second video

and it's just, it's like a trick shot where like I throw a USB drive across the whole studio and it lands perfectly in the side of the laptop. One in a million shot. Well, if you hit it, you're going to want that on the rails too. Really? I would want that on the feed, right? That's the main feed. I got to share that. So your followers are going to see it in feed. Okay. Does it show up on the main feed is just going to be still regular Instagram videos

and they'll have to swipe over to the Reels tab? No, no. If I'm following, so Reels in explore will be a place i can find folks i'm not connected to once i connect to you i'll see it in my feed okay so you don't have to make a decision about feed versus reels for your followers okay it is the place you're going to go see everyone you're connected to whatever the format right right and reels is about sort of introducing you it's kind of like a stage that's introducing you to a broader group on top of Explore. And that's why I'm trying to encourage folks like you to try it out and then see if you get a broader audience in Explore and then your audience who's following you will continue to see it in feed. Got it.

All right, I have another super long live unboxing of a piece of tech. And I open it, and it's broken, and I can't believe it. But it took me 25 minutes to open it, and I was so excited. And now I have this moment on video. I mean, it's a live unboxing. You want to use live. And I mean, that's my gut. and i think you have a followership and part of the if you don't know what's about to happen that's the key thing right it's not a

script yeah that's true i think you want to use live for that and we're seeing across facebook and instagram we're seeing 800 million people a day participating in live, especially after COVID we're seeing live is so much more important. You know, I'm watching like DJ Jazzy Jeff, regular you've grew up with him too, right? I certainly did. You know, he's like, he's out there, you know, he understands where we're at and he's out there doing shows um you're seeing like the whole music community embrace that lives format i think for something like a live unboxing we're going to want to do it with you and and live will be your go-to it's a good answer all right

last one eight second video i'm lip-syncing to a Daft Punk song while holding a piece of tech. Probably reels. There you go. You know, so much of the inspiration here is the music. Yeah. And especially in that format, it's like our version of MTV. You know, we grew up with MTV, people our age.

You know, our version of that is everybody gets to do it and like we're all celebrating in some ways some of the same songs that are breaking at the same time you asked me a while ago what's unique i mean we have a huge catalog of music it's most music you can name it's over 10 million songs and so we're excited about broadening uh whatever your whatever your taste we're excited about broadening it out so that folks can be lip syncing to the music they love and not just a more limited catalog. Awesome. Well, I feel like I understand Reels a bit better and I'm looking forward to using it when it launches. So Chris, thank you for breaking it down for me and explaining

and I appreciate the time. Yeah. Thanks Marques. Appreciate it. Awesome. We're a few days past that now. Reels is officially launched. We were actually just kind of scrolling through it on Marques' phone to see what it looks like, and so what do you think so far? Well, it's public, so if you want to go open Instagram

and if you swipe over to stories and try to make a reel, you can see the creation UI, and if you want to go to, I'll give you an example. If you go to DudePerfect's Instagram and swipe over to stories and try to make a reel. You can see the creation UI. And if you want to go to, I'll give you an example. If you go to Dude Perfect's Instagram and swipe over twice, that's what it looks like on the profile and everything about it. And I mean, everything that I can think of looks exactly like TikTok. So, and we knew this, this is why we talked about this.

So the point is obviously TikTok is being very successful. So you are naturally gonna have competitors rise up to it. But also now all this like looming potential, maybe being banned in the US or losing a big chunk of its US market is gonna mean someone's gonna fill up, fill in where they left off. So I think it's super interesting

because it kind of reminds me of where we are now. Remember, I want to say remember Snapchat. Everyone remembers Snapchat. But like Instagram stories, this all started the exact same way. Oh, this is a blatant rip off of Snapchat. And then Snapchat did itself or did Instagram a huge favor and just completely ruined its own app. And then instagram stories are way better now but yep it's kind of the same they found facebook slash instagram saw a

competitor knew they could do it just as good have a great infrastructure have obviously enough money to throw into all of this and i was gonna say made a competitor i wonder how early facebook tried to buy tiktok because i almost i almost wanted i almost think it's guaranteed facebook thought about that that's kind of interesting though because tiktok bought musically which really started the whole thing like the basis of tiktok is basically musically which is now i think musically was way more used by very young people i know we all love to say tikt is only young people, but like it's not anymore. It's past that.

I love TikTok. I have not made one. I don't think I ever will admit. Yeah, I don't think I ever will make one. Quarantine helps a lot. Just let me say that. Yeah, there's not a lot of stuff to do during quarantine. And there are days where I will just sit on TikTok.

there's not a lot of stuff to do during quarantine and there are days where i will just sit on tiktok it is one of the best things about tiktok is the algorithm that gets to know you yeah pretty quickly and pretty well so my tiktok feed when i scroll through mine will look different from you when you scroll through yours mine at this point is a lot of dogs and a lot of uh sports videos but there's a lot of dogs on my tiktok and it's because they know i want i find it really funny and i'm sure you're similar is like i don't really follow anybody and i don't i only like content that i want to save and show like claire later so it doesn't know a lot about me because i'm not on it all the time so if i watch one video to completion whatever that video is about i'm not on it all the time so if i watch one video to completion whatever that video is about i'm gonna get 20 more videos that are just like that right because

even if you skip one it's like all right that one wasn't good and if you watch one to completion and maybe you watch it twice it loops again tiktok's like i know what you like yeah i know what you want so so to me there's like there's two big reasons as to why it's so easy to, you can say you hate TikTok, but if you open it, you are going to spend time on it. And to me, there's two reasons. Videos are so short, your attention span needed is basically nothing. It is so easy to just, if you're only seeing one good video out of 10, that's still only taking like a minute of your time to find something that

you found was funny because you can just swipe through things so easy and then the worst slash best idea ever is at least on android swiping to go back or pressing the back button on whatever you are doesn't exit the app it just brings up a new video and says are you sure you want to exit and then disappears that and all of a sudden you're watching a new video wow and that is just it literally means every time you try and exit the app you're getting sucked back in one more and it is one more a genius and yeah diabolical so so rule so so reals okay yeah so if you're ticked if you're Facebook or Instagram, right, and you see this coming up and you can't buy them for whatever legal or whatever reason, you can't buy them.

So you're gonna do the Instagram slash Facebook thing and try to just build as much of that into your app as you can. I think the best and worst things you can do, here's the best thing you can do, is support creators and make a bunch of awesome creator creative focus features. We mentioned briefly in our conversation with Chris

that IGTV is experimenting with ads now. I got that on my Instagram. I can add ads built in. That's one great place to start. Exploration, the Instagram Explorer page is a place a lot of people hang out and find new content and new people to follow. That's a great thing to do.

So that's the good stuff they can do. The bad thing I think is this will never be its own app. IGTV, I thought really interestingly at one point had its own app. And I think it's really important mentally for people that TikTok is its own app. It's a place that you go to just waste time and leave basically. And I think the fact that this is built into Instagram is its best and worst feature because now inside of Instagram, you have stories, you have the feed, you have videos in the feed, you have explore, you have IGTV, you have people tagging people, you have notifications, you have comments, and also reels are in there if you can find them and that i think mentally is different for people

no matter how good it is i think that's going to hold it back a little bit even if they do have those creator features and and things that can make it better than tiktok yeah that makes sense it has the benefit of being like just one step closer to the creator that you love because instagram we all know is like one of the biggest social media platforms out there right now and yeah every creator no matter what they're creating on has an Instagram and is using it to share with their audience so like being one step closer there's times you see TikTok and you're like I only ever see these people in 15 second clips I never get to see just kind of like and almost always produced clips or like very specific reasons for the TikTok whereas Instagram you got stories which is kind of like an almost always produced clips or like very specific reasons for the tiktok

whereas instagram you get stories which is kind of like a little behind the scenes you get pictures which could be thought out or could be very like uh on a whim kind of posts so like being a little closer to that is really neat instead of having to be like here's someone i like on tiktok let me go find their instagram right but like you said if I'm going on to tick tock I'm like almost preparing for it like I know I'm just going to spend the next hour sitting down not knowing what time it is anymore because you just lose all sense of time so let me ask you let me ask you something to to maybe compare it to streamers so let let's say TikTok is Twitch.

Yeah. And Instagram is YouTube. We're like, YouTube has been around forever. It's got established creator tools. And TikTok being Twitch, Twitch is like, they have their ninjas and their shrouds. They have their big names. What can YouTube do?

So I guess the question is, what can TikTok do to bring the charlie d'amelio's the addison ray's the i'm trying to think of another tiktoker it's really hard uh to bring those big names to instagram and reels and by the way some of these people are already really big on instagram because they know that they have to have other places and they do that smartly and they have instagram presences but how do they bring the creators on tiktok i think the hardest thing about that and it speaks really true also to twitch and youtube is when you build when your audience is built on that original platform bringing them to another platform is so hard um i think youtube's biggest problem with live streaming isn't that they're

uh they don't have like a good platform to do it on it's like youtube knows videos they know how to do all of that but twitch created this this uh like a platform where their audience was very set and it was very different from youtube comments and live live stream audience is so much different and it's so ingrained in twitch it's been really hard to kind of move them over somewhere else yeah and like you said when you have different different types of content on something like when you go to watch people on twitch you are there to watch people on twitch you are there to watch something live you're not there to watch something it's just a single purpose thing yeah you are there and you are in the mindset of watching live whereas if youtube now you're

either live or video or now community posts and all these different things right yeah so okay so is this one of those things where no matter how good they build their product the fact that it isn't a dedicated one place will always hold it back like if instagram built in just like a scroller for you you could just endlessly scroll through reels do they not have that i haven't found that yet like i have the explorer page if they want to compete with tiktok it needs a i a zero attention span carousel. Yeah, exactly. Yeah.

I think if they haven't already built that, they've probably built that. I think they need a new tab. I think they need a Reels tab on the bottom and you go into Reels and like TikTok, it just, I kind of was wondering if that's what he meant by the Discover page. I was wondering if there was like, okay, almost like a Reels discover page. Maybe that's what they could do. He did say Reels pop up in your regular feed if you're following that creator, which is great. That's really cool.

They should have a discover tab. So you go into the discover page, and then at the top, there's a tab that says Reels, and then you can just scroll through potential Reels that you might like in that carousel fashion right that's what they need to do i don't know if there's some sort of uh like trademark or like infringement that might happen because tiktok may have done something similar to that but that is that's pretty big yeah that might be the the magic touches you need to just make it but like you mentioned before, Instagram, Facebook might have a huge advantage because if TikTok winds up getting banned or anything in the United States, then that is the very, very obvious answer to go to next.

So that sort of looms over everything is there is a sort of vague possibility that TikTok is gone from the US, which is currently its biggest market now that it's banned in India. And I think if it also gets banned in the US, you will see a landscape shift to fill in that gap. And Instagram Reels is positioning it to be at the front of that race. That's just a great business move. There's no doubt about the strategy behind that. It's just like, where will creators go? That's the question the question yeah but it's probably not happy that facebook is going to take that away oh but just a super quick on tiktok getting banned here just that we don't want to get into the politics of it so whether you agree with it or not or whatever just at first i thought

there's no way they can do that but then i completely forgot about like huawei's whole situation here like yeah we basically banned huawei from the united states and and the way you do that is you go after and what you put them on the entity list and you ban u.s companies from doing business with exactly so if tiktok isn't on google play store app store it's basically banned and it was actually surprising how much easier it was to imagine that than I thought. So who knows? There is also some talk about

the way this could potentially not happen is if someone buys the US portion of TikTok or just TikTok in general, so it's not going back to ByteDance, which is the Chinese-run company. There's two big rumors about that. Yeah, wasn't the first one Apple? And then they said no. in general so it's not going back to uh bite dance which is the chinese run company there's two big rumors about that yeah wasn't the first one apple and the first no yeah the first one is microsoft okay and then the second one is apple and within like three hours of that story coming

out someone asked apple and apple is immediately like no that's not what we're doing so microsoft his has been actively in touch with the u.S. government about the details of that potential ban and having to sell off that arm of ByteDance, which is TikTok. Maybe that's why they got rid of Mixer, throw all their money into TikTok. Hey, that might be a thing too. If I was looking to make money, I would ditch Mixer and buy TikTok. Maybe we got to have a round two interview with Satya and figure out what those conversations are behind the scenes. But are we due for another break? We've

gone for a while. We had that interview. I think let's take a quick break, come back and talk about the Twitter hack, the whole one year podcast thing. We got a little way to go. Be right back. Support for the show today comes from NetSuite. Anuite 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 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

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The guide is free to you at netsuite.com slash waveform. netsuite.com slash waveform. All right, welcome back. Time to waveform all right welcome back time to celebrate a little bit time to kick back take it easy a little for the last little part of the podcast here we mentioned at the top this is roughly our one year podcast anniversary uh the the total amount of time we've been podcasting we've seen a lot happen in those in those months we've seen itunes charts we've seen crazy guests we've seen fun numbers we can we can just talk through all that but i feel like we should we should go back to just the genesis of like how

we started the podcast in the first place which i think we've talked about like super briefly before but uh yeah but like even this is our first year but we've talked about like super briefly before, but, uh, but like even this is our first year, but we've been talking about this probably since I basically started working here. Like we always talked about a podcast cause it's just what everyone was doing and you always look to open up your forms of content, but we never had like a solid reason, but I think we fell into this, uh, rhythm of like every morning we would both get in at nine o'clock and i don't think we ever started shooting till after 10 because the beginning of

it was usually like checking your emails checking twitter and just talking about did you see this thing did you see this tweet you see this story none of these things make it into videos yeah and some of those conversations would go on for 20 plus minutes about like a single thing and like we would argue about things we would make bets about things and this and that just like super candid conversations we knew no one would ever hear yeah so yeah that's that's kind of the basic idea for the podcast now it's audio only a lot of people were asking like well why don't you do it on YouTube? Why don't you do a video version? And to me, it was just like easier to focus on just the best possible audio listener experience. I started listening to more podcasts the more we started doing them.

And I really appreciated how good an audio podcast could be. So that's been really fun. But as of late, we've also sort of tied in a little video element to it. And we'll start, we'll talk about that more later but you know having a combo youtube video and podcast that can launch at the same time which i thought has been actually really fun so all that's been evolving but generally i feel like in the year that we've started i mean correct me if i'm wrong audience on twitter but i feel like we've sort of we've gotten into a sort of step, a rhythm, where we have a real decent quality, we have a decent format, and now we can actually start to explore what can go well inside of that format, which is

fun guests and fun topics. Yeah, I think quality-wise, we've taken leaps and bounds. I want to, like, I'm going to pause for a a second and i'm just going to play a quick uh snippet from our first episode which we have no i was just a total mistake in terms of noise gates and like levels and sure amplifiers and everything and uh just take a listen real quick let's hear it there's a lot of people who have these specialty needs who are really nerdy or into you know creativity or just need a headphone jack for certain applications now hopefully marquez and i can talk again and you'll realize how much better it's become and maybe if this rate of improvement continues it'll sound even

better in another i mean like if we're talking about things that are coming up we're in the podcast room right now we actually just got foam on the ceiling so it might even just minutely sound better than the last episode one more wall yeah one more we have one more wall i believe shipping date for our new acoustics for the wall behind marquez right now is the 15th so hopefully by end of august we should have like almost full acoustic paneling in this studio um the biggest thing that's going to get better is the trucks behind me currently right now are apparently moving out in a few months yeah you might hear a truck backing up every once in a while and even though we have double pane glass you'll it still picks it up there's still trucks yeah so there's still things even quality wise

just audio we're uh still have some things coming in the future uh huge shout out to everyone there are a lot of people who know a lot about audio out there and you guys have really helped us on twitter reaching out helping with a couple different things i've had programs sent to me i've had microphones sent to me i've had mixers sent to me you know it's kind of funny about that in video i've been doing video for so long that like in what is this year 11 of doing videos i constantly find all sorts of things to improve or to do better with videos and then i see someone like give a suggestion about video and i'll like i'll read it and i'll just kind of shake my head like that that wouldn't actually work like there's no way but when i i've

only been podcasting for a couple weeks or months literally any audio tip i feel like we can learn shake my head like that that wouldn't actually work like there's no way but when i i've only been podcasting for a couple weeks or months literally any audio tip i feel like we can learn a lot from yeah so i'm i'm like a sponge right now with like literally anything people tell me about you know just podcasting world in general so that's been actually really exciting to see not to say that i don't listen to feedback on the videos but it's a lot harder to get constructive feedback on the production process for me versus a lot harder to get constructive feedback on the production process for me versus a podcast. So that's what I'm happy about. Yeah. We're, we're always open to feedback. I know there's a lot of people out there who are like

microphone reviewers and stuff like that, who know all this. And once we're, once we're comfortable bringing people into the studio, I would love to have somebody in here to really like critique our setup and help us make it better. Yes. This is a big part of why we have a podcast studio. We've been talking about acoustic foam and the foam in the ceiling and all that stuff. At the end of the day, that's all pretty minor. But having an actual place where we can bring in guests and have people talk to us in person instead of over a video call, which has been what we've been doing. That's going to be the best, most fun part. Actually, some of our first guests when Justine and Jenna were here, they were in-person guests.

Austin was an in-person guest at CES. Was Quinn in person? No. Quinn was in person. Oh, he was. It was our first interview ever. He was here. Okay.

So then it went to some mobile. Saradici came in. Oh, Saradici was in the old studio too. Then we had Mr. Mobile on via phone call. We had Craig Federighi as a guest. We had Carl Pei as a guest. Kevin O'Leary was actually an in-person guest when we traveled to him. Yeah, it was in like a hotel room with not a great audio setup.

I think those were on labs also. Barely qualified as a podcast but it was a fun conversation either way and mark german is also a virtual guest so i think when we get back to in-person guests the the format can be a lot more loose and fun we don't have to plan on latency and sync issues and all that fun stuff so the production gets a lot easier when we have this space for it. So that's really the point of that. Stats. Everyone loves numbers. I love numbers.

And like YouTube, you get to see the numbers all the time. So as the audience, if any of you guys are interested, we pulled a couple stats out. So you've got these numbers. Why don't you read them? Because I haven't seen these yet.

Yeah, so let's go the first one. This is the 31st episode, so all the stats I'm gonna talk about are the first 30 episodes, first year. We just crossed over 10 million total downloads. So talk about a number to hit like when you're talking about stats. That's a good number.

Just reaching 10 million, that sounds, that feels good. That makes me feel really accomplished. Beautiful. It's hard to compare it to youtube videos because that is obviously the the bulk of what this channel is about and um podcasts in general don't see numbers like that i don't think unless you're like joe rogan maybe yeah um but i think our around our average amount of downloads listens is uh 200 to 300 000 which is per episode is pretty crazy and i hate

looking at because then i realized that many people are listening to my voice and it never gets old man i'm just warning you now because i know you you've been i'm just going to shout out andrew editing the podcast for the past couple months like editing your own voice hearing your own voice and headphones never gets easy i think think I, I think especially when we were remote, I would send Mark as a clip almost every podcast and be like, what this sounds wrong. What's wrong with it? And then you'd be like,

I don't hear it. And I'm like, okay, I'm just losing my mind about how good this audio needs to be. It's real. And yeah. So anyways, 10 million downloads is awesome.

Most popular episode was the first one, of course, which also makes me cringe because it's easily the worst audio, I think. But second best was Craig Federighi. That episode was just that's funny. That reminds me like some of my first YouTube videos, like when YouTube surfaces them again and they get like three million views in the last like two years. And I'm like, come on, YouTube, like, thanks. But also, come on. Yeah, so Craig Federighi won that. That makes sense because the video launched with it.

That was one of my favorite episodes. I'm also gonna say another one of my favorite was the one with Mr. Mobile. Just talking with YouTubers in general tends to be a lot of fun, so I feel like that'll be a theme. I think that's one of my favorites, and I think our audience loved that one as well.

Does it? Yeah. I also have to shout out, I think one of the favorites and i think our audience loved that one as well i think yeah um i also have to shout out i think one of the most interesting ones and maybe it's just because we've had a bunch of youtubers but they're people we've interacted with like all the time and we know youtubing well mark german was awesome because i know zero absolutely nothing about like how people get leaks and how you develop a story based on that so that was like one of the most interesting like interviews we've had and just like a world i know nothing about but something i'm super interested about because you see leakers on you see them on twitter all the

time but you have no no knowledge of how all this is coming to fruition so he just had a really uh cool background to listen to. All right. A couple more stats here. How our audience is listening. 23% from Apple Podcasts, 20% from Spotify, 18% from what's called Apple Core Media, which basically seems like almost anything on an Apple device that's not through Apple Podcasts itself. So like maybe Safari, maybe, I don't even know.

I'm not well enough versed. But then apparently it doesn't include Apple Watch because coming in next is 10% on Apple Watch. Followed by 7% on Pocket Casts. And then everything else was like only a couple of percent. Oh, that's super deceiving. Wait, okay. So 23% Apple Podcasts and then 18 apple core media and then 10 apple watch yeah so a lot of you guys are listening on ios devices is what i'm gathering

pretty pretty wild okay got it got it got it and then let's go just one more fun stat we have top countries listening in um we have usa at one uk and india are tied at two, then brings in Canada, Germany. Are they actually tied? 8%. Wow. I didn't have the exact numbers. UK was over India. So I'm assuming there's a very slight bump.

Tenth of a percent? Possibly something like that. Yeah. Okay. And then Canada, Germany, Australia, Netherlands, Sweden, France, Malaysia is the list that I have in that order. That's always fun. Wow. Yeah, it's just weird thinking.

I guess you've thought about this a million times, but this is all very new to me, which is why this episode in itself is pretty special for me. But just knowing that there's people all over the world listening to your voices it's kind of strange it's a fun time it's a lot a lot of good conversations to be had and i'm really excited for the for the next year just like yeah once you get into a rhythm so this is something i find a lot of people ask about when starting a new creative insert project here whether it's a

youtube channel whatever it is it's a podcast in our case. It's like once you get into the rhythm where you just do the process over and over, you get better at it very, very quickly. And then once you get that first learning curve over with, then you can start experimenting and start adding things. Maybe for us, that's adding the video layer that we've been talking about for so long. Maybe for others, that's bringing more guests into the studio. Maybe that's having more variety of conversations. Maybe that's upping the frequency of episodes and making them just as good. Maybe that's hiring someone

and having an even better production value to the podcast overall. All this stuff is on the table for us. And I think all of that's just the most exciting part of like doing that first year, just actually doing it. If we ever hear us giving the advice of like, hey first year just actually doing it so if we ever hear us giving the advice of like hey just go do it that's actually real advice it really is how it

works as much as we it seems like this channel knows what they're doing production wise which they do we do whatever um that's in youtube podcasting was just so new to us we definitely had some advantages of just being ready to invest into good quality stuff, but that didn't mean we knew how to use it. And like we heard before, episode one showed that pretty well. Bake it till you make it. Yeah, we've really been testing a lot. Bake it till you make it.

I hate saying fake it till you make it because you don't actually have to pretend you know what you're talking about. You can just work on stuff. But bake it till you make it implies work is being done. And then once you're done, you've baked it. I'm done. Okay, never mind. That was a pretty bad analogy.

I just thought I'd toss that out there. But yeah. We'll start it. Bake it till you make it. Maybe that's the new intro we're looking for because it's been one year of trying to think of a new intro and we still don't have one. Bake it. I might pass on that one.

I don't know. All right. Let's go into some questions you guys have. Oh, yeah. I have a feeling there's going to be a lot of stuff about things we're looking at in the future. So let's just let's hit up your questions. So I asked on Twitter what you guys want to, at WVFRM said this week's episode marks one year since the podcast officially kicked off.

So we've got a lot to talk about. Ask us anything about Waveform for the one year Q&A. Let's see what you guys asked. I mean, I have one here that I think is going to be one of the most asked questions. Okay. Will you consider releasing the podcast in video?

There have been moments where Marques and Andrew detail products you're holding in your hands and it would be cool to see them during the podcast in video um there have been moments where marquez and andrew detail products you're holding in your hands and it would be cool to see them during the podcast so right i think this hits on two things that are really important here okay first off is the video portion which is we get asked every single week will there be a video portion? And it's definitely something that will happen eventually. We do not have a date for that though. And we don't have a goal either necessarily. That's like the surface line, the surface duo.

It's something we're working towards, but I don't have a date yet. But we are definitely working towards that and making progress. It's stuff we talk about a lot. I think coming into a podcast have a date yet but we are definitely working towards that and making progress there it's it's stuff we talk about a lot um i think coming into a podcast and having no experience with it we were ready to just kick it off and work on it as we went but video is something that this channel has been doing for a very long time and i think does very well So we are way more strict when it comes to video and we don't

want to just produce anything. Um, so we're, we've been brainstorming a lot of different ideas on how to bring that into a video format, but then I think this next, or do you have anything else to add about the video aspect of it? No, I mean, yeah, I think that's basically it. And also when you consider video, when you actually think about what is a video podcast, that's like a multiple angle shoot where you cut between the angles. So that's a new level of editing that needs to be done and just generally more hands that are necessary. So I think that's a, that's an addition to staff and that's an addition to the production workflow. So all of that has to get sorted, which takes some time, but I think that's, yeah, that's something we're working towards.

Yeah. And I think the next part of this question, whereas he says sometimes you have products in hand and I would like to see that. I think that kind of helps go along with that. Our main goal here is an audio podcast. Video is going to be great and we're excited for that. But we've always wanted to do this as an audio podcast because that's what I think of when I think of audio podcast. Video is going to be great and we're excited for that, but we've always wanted to do this as an audio podcast

because that's what I think of when I think of a podcast. And most importantly, we want some sort of content that people can consume in their cars because that's when we listen to it the most and a safe way to indulge in that content. So I think one thing we can work on better

is explaining things in a visual way when you only have audio. We've been trying really hard, but it's tough. We're used to pointing a camera at things. So it's a lot different. So that's one thing we have to work on. And I just, with everyone worried or wondering about the video podcast,

audio is our main goal and will be our number one priority through the whole thing. We don't want anyone to be in a car listening to a podcast and thinking they have to turn on the video version and do something unsafe to get the full reach of it. The audio should be the full reach. That being said, I also love podcast clips channels on YouTube. Yes. And I think it would be awesome to have a podcast channel. So I think that's, it's a, it's like a dual goal. I mean, right now in quarantine, video podcasts are amazing because I'm barely in my car.

Kick back and find the topics you like. Yeah. So yeah, that, that's that. I think that covers that question pretty well. Yeah. Okay. I have a good one here. Okay. So through all of your microphone testing, what have you found to be most important? that's that i think that covers that question pretty well yeah okay i have a good one here okay

so through all of your microphone testing what have you found to be most important a good microphone a good recording environment or both also what's your number one mic that you guys have used thank you carson okay uh i will say that a good microphone is nothing without a good recording environment we could take this setup we could take this mic out into the open studio in like an echoey place and it would sound pretty bad um kind of like i've i've shot videos with great microphones in horrible places and they sound horrible so uh it's it's both is the short answer but i think if you could only focus on one focus on the recording environment and the mic is the easiest cheap upgrade later um yeah if i had the choice to pick uh like a blue yeti in a nice like echo-less like quiet space so a good uh like

studio space environment i would pick that over the best microphone with the best amp and the best mixer and everything in a space where almost like our old studio where people are talking outside the window all the time and there's echo on everything. Like if you could have the best of the best equipment and if the room you're in is not great, it's going to be bad. It's kind of like having a great camera and trash lighting. You can't really make a great camera look amazing in trash lighting but you can make an okay camera look pretty good with amazing lighting so uh i'm happy what mic am

i using the electro voice re27 let me look it up so the mic i'm using right now it's called the electro voice re27 uh andrews on shore sm7. We have other Shure SM7Bs, kind of the industry standard that we just start with as a default figure. You can't really go wrong with that. I happen to think my voice sounds better with a certain type of microphone. So I'm giving the ElectroVoice a shot,

but yeah, that's where we're at. Yeah, I think I actually, I wouldn't mind trying the the electro voice but right now uh i don't think sharing something so close to people's mouths yeah that's probably so i'll probably try another point and see uh see how my voice sounds on that also when we were recording um remotely i tried like three different microphones, all USB microphones. I think it was the Samsung G-Track Pro, just a Blue Yeti, and the Rode Podcaster, I think, because the Procaster is their XLR one. All of them sounded pretty good.

The biggest thing was I live on a house that's extremely close to a main road and constantly hearing background noise and max footsteps in the background. So like- The pitter patter again yeah like i would take if i had the shore back at home and the blue yeti in this studio right now i would take the blue yeti in this studio i think it would wind up sounding better all right i have one here from keith he says by the way good name keith uh what's something you want to accomplish what's something you want to accomplish with year two and i've i've historically been pretty bad at setting goals like i you would think someone is like a great goal setter because they seem to you know achieve things but uh i've i've not really been very good at long-term goals i I've had people ask me, where do you see yourself in 10 years? No idea.

Where do you see yourself in two years? Absolutely no idea. So I'm hoping that this podcast at the end of year two has expanded its variety of guests, has had great episodes with YouTubers, with tech people, with creative people. We've talked about like all kinds of studio conversation we've started our video version and we've had a great time with it

that's that's basically it i think yeah i think that's a good idea i i have a personal one and i have a a podcast as a whole goal i guess my my personal goal, and I've had this tweeted at me and mentioned a couple times. Um, it's hard to change though. Uh, I have a, a way of speaking where I trail off at the end of sentences and that's something I don't know if it's me moving away from the microphone or just a way I speak, but I, I just don't know how to think about that in my head while I'm talking to stop doing it. So I don't know exactly. And I hear it.

I totally understand it. When you go like edit, yeah. Yeah, when I edit it, it does sound different. I'm trying to focus on keeping the mic closer to my mouth more. I'm wondering, I mean, it could just be how I talk, which I don't know how I'll ever change that because I'm 30 now and I don't think you really change much you haven't done for 30 years. But we'll see i'm trying

but uh i think one thing i would like to as a goal for the podcast is i would love to write a couple episodes that are uh less about exactly what is going on that week in tech and more about a specific story that i like dove deep into or we dove deep into the the kind of deep dive stories and i'll always talk about long distances being one of them but they have a whole a whole bunch of them but just kind of timeless stories that make really really interesting like completely engulfed episodes of just like you want it's i want to create some episodes where you're driving in the car and you get in your driveway and there's 15 minutes left and you don't leave your car because you can't wait to hear like what the end of it is and i think as

a writer and just storyteller i'm so far away from that. So that's something I personally want to set for myself. Or I write a lot of these or at least really outline them. It's more of outlines at this point. I would like to be able to write something where you and I can spend a long time diving deep into and telling a story that people don't know the end to by the end of the episode. I think that would be really cool. I like that. Yeah, I like that. That sounds really good. Maybe that's a good place to end it. This sort of maybe high bar, evergreen storytelling content that makes not just a podcast, but really anything more compelling content. I think that's, I think that's a great goal to have for it. That's a great goal to and that's a good way you're right that's a good way to end it

because now this is the last thing i will hear when i edit this episode and listen to it four more times so it'll really just there you go it's gonna sink in yeah there it is well listen guys thanks for listening uh to waveform for the first year it's been a lot of fun and we're looking forward to the next year we got a lot more on the plate you guys there's a lot i saw some other questions about do you guys have any other big plans and other guests planned there is always plans for waveform so definitely stay tuned for that and hopefully we'll we'll catch you guys in the download section catch you guys soon waveform is brought to you in part with studio 71 and our intro outro music was created by cameron barlow in part with Studio 71 and our intro outro music was created by Cameron Barlow.