Waveform: The MKBHD Podcast - Talking Tech w/ Shark Tank's Kevin O'Leary, Portless iPhone Rumors, & Our Holiday Gift Guide

Episode Date: December 13, 2019

With Andrew back from his episode off, we take a look at some big projects from the past few weeks and share our thoughts on the portless 2020 iPhone rumors. Then, Marques sits down with Shark Tank star Kevin O'Leary to see how he utilizes tech and his views on the tech world as an entrepreneur. Lastly, we give you a few great gift ideas for this holiday season! Links: https://twitter.com/wvfrm https://twitter.com/mkbhd https://twitter.com/andymanganelli Andrew's Wedding: https://bit.ly/2RLKI4s Steve Soares Photography: https://bit.ly/34gOeXl Portless iPhone: https://bit.ly/34gqbrp Kevin O'Leary YouTube: https://bit.ly/35j794X Throwboy Pillows: shop.mkbhd.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Thumbtack presents the ins and outs of caring for your home. Out Indecision, overthinking, second guessing every choice you make. In Plans and guides that make it easy to get home projects done. Out Beige on beige on beige. In Knowing what to do, when to do it, and who to hire. Start caring for your home with confidence. Download Thumbtack today. All right, welcome back to another episode of the Waveform Podcast.

We're your hosts. I'm Marques Brownlee. And I'm Andrew Manganielli. So today we're going to start with a little recap of some of the bigger projects we did over the last few weeks and then talk about a certain little iPhone rumor that we've heard about. And then after that, I had a chance to sit down and catch up with Kevin O'Leary, better known as Mr. Wonderful from Shark Tank, my favorite shark, and have a quick chat with him. And then we're going to go wrap it up with Andrew and I giving you a few tech gift ideas for the upcoming holiday season. Although let's be real, you probably should

be pretty close to done with that. Either way, it's waveform. Let's get into it. All right, so why don't we go ahead and jump right in with our recap since the last episode. First of all, have you done anything special since the last episode? Maybe. Actually, this recap might help me just as much because I've missed half of these videos. Yeah, I got married. Yeah, that's pretty sweet. And you went to some crazy exotic place for a while.

We went to Belize. You definitely had it nicer than our snowy, sort of wintry mix here. So I'm jealous of that. I flew back into that. It was a hard a hard flight back into reality after all of that but uh but yeah yeah getting married it was it's it's awesome it's a fun time pretty stoked this ring is really strange um i play with it all like who needs a fidget spinner just get married just have a ring on your does it change the way you like use your phone or like hold electronics or

anything weird like that? I haven't done that so much yet. Typing was like a little strange at first. I feel like I use that finger a lot. Also every time I hold my water bottle now, it's probably terrible for the ring. I've scratched it a lot, but I'm getting married.

It was super fun. Belize was super fun nice um thank you for coming again uh yeah if anyone's really that interested uh i posted a few pictures on my instagram we had a crazy talented photographer i do have to say that that is steve steve was awesome i have to say if you're gonna spend some money somewhere spend it on the thing that's gonna help you remember the event that you spent a ton of money on. And you just want to because it goes by so fast. And yeah, our photographer Steve was amazing.

And the pictures came out incredible. That's just a memory you'll have forever. Yeah. Awesome. Yeah. OK, well, we had a couple a couple tech things happen since then, but I'll go over some stuff on the channel first. We had our favorite tech of the year rewind collab I call us a rewind collab because YouTube rewind came out which by the way maybe the most forgettable YouTube

rewind ever do you think that's what they're going for I think okay when I looked at YouTube rewind I thought that this was what happens when you avoid something instead of going for something so their entire thing was don't get hated don't get hated on don't do something that people hate if you do this they're gonna hate it if you don't do this they're gonna hate it so we got to do it this way so that people don't hate it but what they didn't do was try to make something amazing so really if you go back and watch it they're just counting down like the top you know most viewed creators most liked videos go through a couple genres tada

I mean, it's super forgettable, but it is it is rewind. Yeah, I would say last year's was hated this year's was Disliked which is a step forward who are there Casey retweeted some guy that made his own version of it and it was a couple Great. So there's a couple Creator made rewinds. And you sort of expect that around this time of year. One of them was, yeah, like literally like in the style of rewind where there's animations and shout outs to big moments during the year.

And another one was an entire musical that sort of Oh, I missed that one. Shouted out different moments and creators. So that was fun. There was actually a, I'll try to link it in the show notes. There was a a the musical gave me a shout out something about uh marquez gets interviews with elon and bill that was like the line in the musical which was really funny that's awesome i'll check i'll share that as well

yeah we had a tech rewind which was uh 20 of my favorite creators uh going through their favorite piece of tech they discovered in 2020 so everyone from sean Sean Evans to Philip DeFranco to Simone Gertz to whoever, a lot of people that are in tech and that are sort of around tech. When you're a creator, you're just sort of around tech. Yeah, yeah. And yeah, some of their favorite tech. And it's not as predictable as they thought. I think I reached out to a lot of people thinking,

we're going to get iPhone a lot. We're probably going to get AirPods a lot. And it was surprisingly, I don't think anyone picked airpods and uh we got a lot of random stuff we got the zen book in there we got the dji osmo mobile that's one i was surprised about when i was listening to uh phil's podcast with you on my flight back i was like he's like oh yeah and i was talking about blah blah blah this piece of tech and he said that and i was like oh he was like, oh yeah. And I was talking about blah, blah, blah, this piece of tech. And he said that. And I was like, oh, I totally forgot about that. Yeah. That's one specific thing where I can see

that that has like a personal, like he has kids. Yeah. And like walking around, trying to chase your kids with a video camera is really hard, even with a smartphone. But having it stabilized like that is definitely important. So you could tell that that's something that he used a lot this year.

So yeah, if you haven't seen that already, check it out. It's literally 20 people in a row saying what they liked this year. So it's pretty sweet. We also came out with a video testing T-Mobile's low band 5G, their 600 megahertz 5G network. This was an interesting, it was more of just like a fun shoot.

We sort of owed people an update to the 5g explain video anyway where we went through verizon and their millimeter wave technology which had all sorts of sweet pros you know 2000 down is awesome yeah but all sorts of interesting cons like if you walk around a corner it doesn't even exist anymore four steps away from your 2000 down you don't even get it. Exactly. So the T-Mobile strategy, which they were so kind to share with us beforehand, and we were some of the first people ever to test it.

And as you can see in this video, is they're rolling out low band 5G, which is blanket coverage using a spectrum that travels really well. So these towers you can drive miles away from and still get 5G. And sure enough, that's exactly what happened. We drove around, happened to be in a 2020 McLaren gt happened to have a lot of fun with that too um but yeah we did get 5g pretty much everywhere but you're looking at maybe like 60

to 150 down which a lot of people sent me replies afterwards saying, oh, I already get that now with 4G. Great. I typically don't. I usually get somewhere from like 10 to 30 on a good day, but that's where they're starting. And then they're working their way up to mid band and eventually doing millimeter wave in like more populous areas like cities and, you know, transit stations, things like that. Then you'll get there. A lot of people getting 2000 down. But yeah. Yeah. So that's that's what that video was. I don't think there's any really follow-ups or fact checks. I think the moral is if you really want us to do a video on something, just let us drive in a supercar for a little while. It's a pretty good strategy.

Not going to lie. Also two episodes of retro tech finally are now live. They're going live for free every Monday at around noon. The first episode was on the camcorders, the JVC GRC1, the one from Back to the Future. And the second one was on the 1984 Macintosh with iJustine and Bill Nye and others. It's just a good time. So those two episodes are up. Yeah. And to clear that up since i feel like you've made it very clear already but there's still we get in our subreddit posts all

the time and people on twitter it's not everything is going to be free right now if you have youtube premium you can watch all of them and not have to wait you can binge yeah but all of them will be out free yeah the main thing marquez said before he even jumped into this was, I will not do anything that's strictly behind a paywall. Yeah. Oh, this is something we talked about before we even started to shoot this. You know, when YouTube came to me, they're like, we should do an original. And I was like, I've seen the originals.

They're really cool. But the number one rule on the internet is don't charge for something that was previously free. And you're going to have a hard time. So I'm not going to do an original if people can't watch it for free um and like months later they changed their policy to do originals that you can watch for free so yeah you can watch them monday is the release days they'll all come out eventually if you're wondering and they're great i think the next one well i don't i'm not even gonna spoil it you'll see. The next ones are also really good. Okay. Mac Pro came out. Yeah.

And when I say came out, I mean it's on Apple's website now. You can buy it now and it'll ship in a couple weeks. And the Pro Display XDR also, which I think is hilarious, is right now if you look on Apple's site, if you try to buy a Pro Display XDR and a stand, you'll get the stand in about two weeks and then you'll get the monitor in like the middle of January. So you just kind of have a thousand dollar stand sitting around on your desk

waiting for the monitor. Uh, no, yeah, we, we saw it coming. It's out now. Uh, and I, I did sort of a two week first impressions video since I've been using it. So it's a second impressions video. Been using it for two weeks. And I've really, really enjoyed it. So the spec you would expect. See, here's the thing. They didn't tell me, right? They said, hey, Marques, we have the Mac Pro coming out. It's going to be in December sometime. Do you want to test it? Yes. Okay. So we get in touch. We arrange everything. They also said, we're going to send you two Pro Display XDRs. we arrange everything they also said we're going to send you two pro display xdrs do you want one to be matte and one to be glossy did they really ask that they asked that and i thought about that and that would have actually been interesting i think john did this um because you can actually look at them side by side see the difference between the glossy one and the matte one

but i was sitting in front of an imac display at the time and i was like look i already know what glossy looks like let's just get two matte ones in here. So there are two matte ones. I get it for comparison's sake, but for actually wanting to use it for an extended amount of time, it would drive me crazy if I had a matte and a glossy actually using them side by side together.

So they're both matte. And they sent the specs. So the spec, as you guys saw in the video, is a 28 core, which is maxed out the highest end CPU they offer, 2.5 gigahertz base clock. Xeon chip, 384 gigs of RAM, and that's, I think, six DIMMs taken, six DIMMs populated, six DIMMs open. So I could just double that up real quick and have 768 megabytes of RAM. But that's the beauty of a tower.

You have 760 gigabytes. Sorry, gigs. Did I say megs? Big difference. I said megs. Yeah, gigabytes. Jesus. And then you have all your Vega GPUs and all this other stuff.

You can watch the video if you want the full specs. Interestingly, the 8-terabyte model doesn't ship yet. It's not an option to select. So 4 terabytes is the max that you can actually order right now but i will not be ordering until i can get eight terabytes um there so we both found it kind of interesting uh reddit and this video and talking about this video were polarizing is that one way of putting it i i don't the comments are interesting well anytime you look at it so i was the point i was getting at was i didn't know what spec they were going

to send me they sent me that spec and i didn't know what price my spec was as i'm testing it so there's no way for me to evaluate price all i know is hey this starts at five thousand dollars or whatever um but they sent me a totally different spec from the base so when it comes out i can spec it out on their site and the computer I've been using costs $28,000. So now that I have that context, you know, my video's already out there, but now I'm starting to evaluate, is it worth it or not? But yeah, like you mentioned, so Reddit, anytime you get a $28,000 Apple computer, you're gonna have some people who feel a certain way, one way or the other i mean it's super

expensive the thing is is you have to base on is it worth it in the sense of time saved and like that's so i think the most interesting post on reddit was somebody doing the math of the time you saved over the five minute unedited clip that you put in the video, they took that times it by the number of videos you made in a year and came out to X amount of hours saved based on what that was. But even that isn't getting even close to the amount of time saved.

That would be only if I upload, only if I was making five minute unedited videos, I would save that many hours. And if you're only ever exporting one time for it, which like a lot of time, yeah, that is true. But when we do do sponsored stuff, even for the like 60 second ad spots we do, and this is a reason why we hate doing a lot of them is like back and forth. Yeah.

You make everything, you make a, the 60 second ad spot to exactly what they ask you to do. You send, you export to do you send you export it you send it to for approval they come back with can you say this one more thing in there bring it back in you have to export everything again it's happened four or five times to us before to the point where we many times i think we've ditched ad spots because we just wanted to push the video out and it was getting annoying so like yeah yeah it saves a ton of time is it overkill is one of those words like yeah it's probably overkill you could do all of this on the iMac pro you can do all of it on a MacBook Pro but eventually you're saving time

you're saving your own sanity at some points like when it's midnight and we're exporting something that's when you really feel it yeah we'd like to go home it's not just safe it's keeping marquez here it's keeping all four of us here sometimes and uh so yeah sorry little rant no i feel that i really you have to respect the scalability of this computer so there's a couple different ways to think about it one is a lot of people and i say people but really companies that are gonna be getting these you know this is miniature as far as expense in terms of like the production like when you look at like a Netflix show with a couple million dollar budget we're like oh we we didn't finish shooting we need a couple more days and maybe a few million dollars more to finish shooting this like the the couple Mac pros that they get for it it's not exactly you know killing them

but that doesn't necessarily mean it has It's not exactly, you know, killing them. But that doesn't necessarily mean it has to be expensive. So when you come down to this level where, you know, we're YouTubers, we make these pretty heavy projects, but they're not like movies with GFX. They're like, I have a Final Cut Pro workflow and I have 8K footage that needs to be transcoded. The fact that I still see that dramatic of a difference and that I will continue to see that difference over and over and over again for a hundred something videos every year is massively impressive um so like we were saying that clip where we tested the the render times was a five minute unedited just one single clip from a red camera drop that that on the timeline. The 16-inch MacBook Pro, high-end, exported that in 20 minutes.

Take that same five-minute unedited red clip, drop it on the timeline. Again, background rendering off, same exact thing. 18-core iMac Pro. So now this is the highest-end iMac Pro, the most powerful Mac you can buy before today. And that did it in about 10 minutes. So that's already a massive amount of time I'm saving. That's why I'm flying with an iMac Pro

when I have these big videos, because I'm not doing a five minute unedited clip. I'm doing a 12 minute clip with tons of things happening, color correction, LUTs, graphics, all this stuff. And so that 20 minute export becomes an hour and a half cut down to 40 minutes, right? Yeah. And that's super beneficial when we're in a hotel room exhausted from traveling and it's 1130 at night. Man, I can't tell you how much pain I've gone through with like an Apple event. I'm sitting and I have all the footage and it's edited and everyone's waiting for the video and I finally finish it. I hit export and I start to time it out as it goes from one to two to 3% and I can really just go to sleep and wake up the next morning and then

upload it, which is rough. So like it affects us for multiple reasons. Like one of them's potential view count on something like we go to an event, like an Apple event where the embargo is right after even something like C ces where those export times could potentially mean something getting out late or at ces we almost missed an appointment last year because we were exporting a video and trying to upload it before we went to it which wound up the video we almost missed was the self-driving taxi appointment yep it was a great video so just because of waiting for something like that we almost missed a whole nother video so like and that was the imac pro so i guess we were saying we should bring the mac pro oh man no yeah so so to

wrap that up the the mac pro with that same five minute unedited clip uh 28 chorus uh churned through that export in four minutes and 20 seconds so it was again cutting it in half from the iMac pro so again when you scale that up you can't forget to scale it up when you scale that up to what would have been a 40 45 minute export now you're looking at a 19 minute export and like finding mistakes and doing other things and redoing it all of that scales massively. So when you put it in the context of scale, the Mac Pro is a worthy investment for someone, even in my position, which is like a Final Cut Pro workflow. Can we also talk about how long it took the last Mac Pro to get a

reiteration? Your future proofing at this point, like the last Mac Pro was released in 13. Yep. The trash can. So what if we don't see another Mac Pro till 2025? Like that, that big upgrade now is going to be really beneficial in 2023. If there's still not a new Mac Pro out? Yeah, so this, so if someone's going to be getting a Mac Pro, which I am, there's a couple things that you know, you can definitely upgrade. And then there's a couple things you probably will want to just get now i will definitely be getting the 28 core like no doubt about it um i have no problems with because the mac pro doesn't necessarily feel like snappier and faster it's more about like those heavy workloads it's pushing it's like a you know

like a pickup truck instead of a sports car whatever whatever you want to look at it. It's like a cyber truck. Um, so you have, uh, you have your CPU and yes, you can upgrade it later, but I'm just going to get the high end one. The Ram is one of those things you don't have to do now. I might just get 384 gigs of Ram. That's hilarious that I said that sentence. Yeah. Like, like it's not a lot. Yeah. Like I might only get 384 gigs of Ram and later down the road when I can fill in the rest of those DIMMs, because half of them are empty, then I will end up with the 768. I don't even think I'll ever need a terabyte and a half of RAM. Yeah, we're not doing a lot of like multiple programs open and stuff like that, that requires quite as much RAM. Yeah, it's not really about this, the amount of

RAM at that point anymore for me. And there are some apps and some workflows that will take advantage of that. Um, mine is not one of them. Final cut pro is really looking at a CPU and GPU. Um, so I will also be right out the box getting, uh, the dual AMD Vega pro two GPUs. So that's something that you look at again, now that it's a tower and you can upgrade it, you couldn't do that with a trash can macro. Uh, you think of this having like a, maybe like an 8, 10 year plus life cycle. This is actually not the worst thing ever.

So I know a lot of people... Also, there's a tweet. I just replied. Who said that? SuperSaf said, Fun fact, 99.9% of people complaining about the price of the Mac Pro would have zero intention of actually ever buying one regardless of the price. And this is 100%

true. This is so true. Anyone complaining about the price of the Mac Pro, not that you don't have any justification, but is this really something that most people actually need to consider buying? Probably not. No, not at all. So, anyway, that's the Mac Pro. We do have a

Pro Display XDR video also coming up soon. And I don't know exactly the timing of it, but all this stuff is on the channel. And the full reviews I think will take a little bit longer just because this is one of those things you really get into the workflow of and you start to see where the limits are and you push it in different types of experiments. And here's what I'll say. Hit us up on Twitter with any questions you guys have about these two things, the display and the Mac.

Because my workflow is just one, which happens to be video editing and a very specific type of video editing. So if you have other workflows or things you have questions about or things I should test or even other benchmarks I should run, hit us up on Twitter, and that's where I'll be checking those out yeah yeah so that those reviews will be coming up soon um i just want to ask have you seen the rumors of the portless the portless iphone for 2021 i think when did we talk about this was it right when i got back uh yeah i saw the rumor we like yeah i think we were both walking out to the car after the day. And you were just like, oh, did you see?

By the way. The iPhone's going to be portless. And I was like, yeah. And I just shut my car door and drove away. Head down. Single tier rolls from eye. I think it's just like, who, was it Quinn that made a tweet? That was just like, Apple hates USB-C so much that they'd rather not put a port on than put USB-C on.

It's funny because they embrace USB-C in so many other parts of their business to the point of like maybe too much, right? They got rid of full-size USB on the MacBook Pro like years ago. Yeah, and even the MacBook Pro charging cable, the brick is USB-C. Yep.

It's not even like A into C. Yeah, so that was my favorite tweet is my own tweet where it was like hey apple you know you could you could probably update the port on the uh the iphone right and apple's sitting over there like don't make me do this we're like yeah this lightning's getting a little bit old maybe you want to update that and then they just go no port um i guess here's what i'll say about that it makes sense as much as it hurts to say that it makes sense when you look at the direction apple's been going yeah especially with the iphone in particular um they've been sort of on their way towards no buttons and no ports at all

they got rid of um well they still have all their buttons but they obviously got rid of the headphone jack yeah and they seem to be shrinking that speaker and uh they're on their way i think the the worst part of not having the lightning or usbc or anything at the bottom is actually charging yeah um because i didn't really plug in my iphone into my computer that much anyway and honestly i can't remember the last time i did but i do not always use wireless charging really i the only time i don't use wireless charging is in the car because i my mount that's one day i know you can get mounts that are wireless charging i probably should get one because it makes a lot of sense but uh that and the only other thing i can think of

is well it's still charging but like portable charging banks like you can get wireless versions of that but if i'm going to get a portable wireless charging thing because i'm going hiking like not ideal yeah yeah like throwing your phone in their backpack like connected to a charging bank is gonna stay fine wirelessly is not easy or it's fine with a wire sorry it's not great uh wirelessly and there's gonna easy. Or it's fine with a wire, sorry. It's not great wirelessly. And there's going to be a bunch of other reasons why this seems really impractical, and they're going to be memed.

But the reason Apple, I think, could get away with this, this is the way I see it, is just like AirPods Pro and AirPods, when they announced getting rid of the headphone jack, they said, here's our future of wireless audio solution airpods yeah what apple needs to do is when they do actually get rid of the charging port they need to be so far ahead on an incredible wireless charging accessory that it's undeniable that it makes sense to get rid of the charging port now how good is apple at wireless charging

accessories yeah how good is anyone well but also the company that just killed their yeah exactly they just killed what's it even called i forgot already air power air power they killed air power but they're totally going to get rid of the charging port and offer another wireless charger it seems really strange yeah, here's the question, which lower budget smartphone company hears Apple's gonna do this and beats them out to it? Beats them to getting rid of the port? It's crazy, I don't know.

Like I know getting rid of the headphone jack, like I could see, it didn't seem that crazy to me at the time. Like when they got rid of it, they're like, yeah, and we can fit a bigger haptic motor and the bigger battery. And I was like, okay, I guess you could do wireless headphones and,

and, you know, use that extra space. But getting rid of the only port on the phone left, I don't think any other manufacturer right now could rightfully justify it in 2019. Wireless charging is not good enough yet. That's the thing though. I don't think some of these phone companies

rightfully justify some of the decisions they make. I mean, like, and here's the thing is some of them to me, I almost feel like you see companies like who's done it, like Vivo's done the pop-up camera and the under finger point display sensor like those are things we heard companies were gonna do and then vivo comes out with it first right it's not the best but it's it's interesting for us to see where it might be going and and part of this in the back of my head makes me think it's like samsung sitting back there and thinking like let's see how they let's let them push this out first, see how they do with it. Does it do okay? Okay, we're ready. Yeah, it's funny.

I don't know. For as many things that as Apple is like a slow, like second mover on, it's, they would really have to be a first mover on some great wireless charging tech for this to actually be played off well. I also kind of think like it's possible that they've considered and maybe have plans to get rid of this charging port, but may scrap that plan if I think that's very likely.

Yeah, isn't good enough yet. So we'll see if the if the rumors for the 2020 iPhone are what we've seen, they can easily keep the charging port and still have enough other big changes to it that will still make the phone like one of the first phones you can or like you know a huge design change like back to the 10 pretty much so they might as well just drop usbc in it just one one year of iphone with usbc is that one is that worse than than just totally skipping it giving you one year of it's funny for the normal person yes because they're like oh no i need a new charger even though it comes in the box, I'd be like, Oh darn,

all of my accessories don't work. Car charger. Yeah. Car charger, all that other accessories. But also, uh, I would be totally fine with that.

I think it'd be a huge tease. It would be pretty funny. Okay. So let's take a quick short break and hear from our sponsors. And then next up, we're going to have our chat with Kevin O'Leary. We'll be right back. With Uber Reserve, good things come to those who plan ahead.

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Mitsubishi Motors. All right, we're back. So we got the chance to talk to Mr. Kevin O'Leary, my personal favorite shark from Shark Tank. If you've watched Shark Tank, you've seen this incredible entrepreneurship-based show. I was doing a short video with him actually on his YouTube channel, which will be linked in the show notes.

And I decided to, while I was there, I said, hey, you mind if we bring our own microphones and we set up a little bit of a podcast and just chat for a bit? And he was totally down and he spent plenty of time. So that's what we did. Just a quick programming note before we start. You'll hear, of course, the conditions for the podcast are not totally ideal. We're not in a podcast studio. We just sort of brought the setup elsewhere. So the audio quality will sound a bit different, but that's okay. Also, I'm gonna go ahead and put a quick language warning for the following interview conversation. So if you're

listening with a young audience, you may want to cover their ears around 25 minutes or so, but that's not a huge deal. Either way, let's jump right into it. Okay. Welcome back to waveform. I'm joined by Mr. Kevin O'Leary. So I'll say Mr. Wonderful from shark tank, entrepreneur, billionaire, media head, tech head, guitar collector, pen collector, watch collector. I'm missing anything. No, those are some of the passions I have. Okay. Nice diversity there. I appreciate it. Thanks for joining me on the show. So I feel like we just have to start just jumping into just investment stuff. First thing that comes to mind, I just got LASIK two days ago. Already for me, best money I've ever spent. What's the best money you ever spent? The best money I ever spent was on myself, educating myself.

A lot of people really debate about whether education has value. What I learned from it, having gone through the process, that was expensive, particularly when I didn't have any money. But it wasn't about what they taught me in any of those classes. I even did an MBA, which I don't remember any of the lessons at all. But I've met so many different people going through that journey that to me that was the best investment I ever made. It let me, you know life's serendipitous, you don't know what's going to work.

Let me explore a lot of different options until one path took me into an opportunity. I'm an entrepreneur so I keep telling people it's not about the pursuit of money and the greed of money. That's not what it's about. It's the passion of something you love. And most of the guys I talk to that wake up really wealthy one day, they never saw it coming. And I didn't either. We sold our company for $4.2 billion.

And I was working that day, and I kept working after we sold it, too. And I just remember saying to myself and the other nine guys that were with me that, you know, we had built this together. I said, we're really rich. How'd that happen? Happened sort of quickly. And it didn't change much. It really didn't. And it just happened that way. And that's what I've learned now. I tell people, you know, it's not really, if your goal is just to be filthy rich, that's a bad investment. If your goal is to be free. That's a good pursuit

So we were just chatting on your YouTube channel, which if anyone hasn't seen it yet It'll be in the show notes definitely go check it out and one of the things we mentioned was You know the relationships you build in college are some of the best things you get out of it And and you said you went to business school after you got your undergrad degree. Is that right? Yeah, I got my undergrad in environmental studies. And my pursuit was I wanted to be a photographer

and a film producer after that. And my dad said, you're going to starve to death. You're just not that good. And if you've got the basis of business, maybe you could pursue one of those things. And I argued with him for a while, but he was right and I went back and did it and remarkably you know I had I got success in consumer software educational software advancing math and reading scores for children ended up

being a very very big business and after the exit of that I went back and bought myself a bunch of production equipment and an editing table okay film to go back to what I really wanted to try and now more as a hobby. So I became a photographer for a while. My work is sold for charity, which is great. It's sort of, I got to show my dad that, look, I made it. Yeah, check out this film. Yeah, that was sort of part of the motivation.

And I pursue a lot of different things in the arts that I really enjoy. But I'm primarily now an investor helping young Kevin O'Leary's. I see myself in my 52 companies that I invested in. Guys like you. And I'm sort of saying, look, I think this is a good idea. I know it's a really hard path. Let me buy a piece of it and let's take the journey together. Right. I love that.

And I'll also say, don't tell the other sharks. But I'll also say that you're the person on Shark Tank that I've learned the most together. Right. I love that. And I'll also say, don't tell the other sharks, but I'll also say that you're the person on Shark Tank that I've learned the most from. And I went to business school too. So I learned a lot from all these various professors about different, very specific topics. But as far as like day-to-day, like how to invest, how to give good advice as an investor, I feel like that's, I really do appreciate that. I've tried to be honest on Shark Tank for this last 11 years and not pander to people's emotions. We often get people that can't take the truth. We've had all kinds of crazy stuff happen on that set

where they just break down crying, realizing it's the end of a journey for them in many ways. But it's not the end of your life. It's just the end of that deal. And you have to realize failure is part of the entrepreneurial journey. But what really makes me angry, and I tell Barbara this and Laurie all the time who's sat on either side of me, when you tell somebody, look, you keep going. I think it's wonderful that you're trying, but I'm not going to invest in you.

That's disingenuous. The reason you're not going to invest, it's a really sh**ty deal and it's going to go to zero. Why not tell them that? Tell them that, yeah. And they say, well, I don't want to hurt their feelings. Screw their feelings. Tell them the truth because that's what they really need.

Sometimes getting your feelings heard is actually the most effective way at getting a point across, especially when it's such an important thing to hear at such an important stage in their business when they're really evaluating it and seeing if it's good or not. Yeah, I don't care about their feelings. I care about their money. And I think I'm doing them a great service helping them realize that this path is not the path to success. And that's a constant tension we have in Shark Tank.

And I get a lot of hate mail for being the nasty, mean shark. No way. I'm the nice shark because I tell the truth and everybody else is, to me, being disingenuous. Being too nice. So as a shark, I have to ask you about something in tech, which is like the platforms like Kickstarter, where when you get Kickstarters, where companies are sort of emerging as a startup and they have this great product idea and they've presented it as if it's already a product, but it doesn't necessarily exist yet. How do you feel about people investing in those and trying to get in early on a product that doesn't exist yet? What do you think about platforms like that?

So you may be surprised with this answer, but I'm not a big fan of those platforms, and I'll tell you why. If you look at, there is a bunch of people that professionally play that game now. They produce very slick videos. They basically buy those production services to raise a whole bunch of money on ideas that may not have any merit at all That that to me is scamming and I see lots and lots of it and everybody's always telling me how they you know Did 200 that their budget was twenty five thousand two hundred thousand on a Kickstarter or another platform?

Indiegogo or whatever and To me that's not a product test at all. What I care about is getting a hundred users of your product or your service or your tech. And looking at the reviews of what they say, that they're actually using it. Everything else is bullsh**. And that's what I tell them. So I'm not impressed with you, you know, you spent ten grand to go raise fifty with some slick guy that knows how to play the platform. You know exactly what I'm them. So I'm not impressed with you. You spent 10 grand to go raise 50 with some slick guy that knows how to play the platform. And you know exactly what I'm talking

about. Well, I see this all the time, specifically in Indiegogo and Kickstarter, where they'll come into the tank and say, look, we just raised this much money on this platform, and now it's worth this much. But I'm with you. You need the actual product. And then the reviews, which I have a soft spot for, are super important to actually evaluating if your idea is good enough or not. I get that. Yeah.

I'll tell you what I do a lot of now. Because on Shark Tank you get a lot of consumer goods and services, even in tech. There's people trying to advance things, but mostly to consumer services. And their biggest problem these companies have is customer acquisition costs. And I can help them immensely there. I mean, I'm not an inexpensive investor. But if Mr. Wonderful is investing in your company, you're going to get on a lot of television programs. That's what's going to happen.

But the one that I really like to work with is let's say you get a product. I'll give you an example. There's one called Blueland, which learned how to crystallize detergent. So you could take a small crystal tablet and get a glass bottle and drop it in. And then you had detergent. So you could take a small crystal tablet and get a glass bottle and drop it in and then you had detergent or you had a hand soap or you

had a surface cleaner. So you're cutting back on the 50 billion bottles of plastic that are coming out, which is stupid. So that's a hot deal. A lot of big VCs put money into it. And I said, look, guys, I'll invest in your company. But what I want to do with it is I hear your vision, but it isn't tested yet. Let's go put, come with guys, I'll invest in your company. But what I want to do with it is I hear your vision, but it isn't tested yet. Let's go put, come with me. We'll do a show on QVC together. We'll sell it to 6 million people. We'll get a couple of hundred thousand dollars worth of orders and we'll listen. And they'll tell us what they like or don't like. And that's exactly what we did. And lo and behold, we learned a lot yeah our assumptions were wrong

okay and now we know exactly what to do but to me it's use the platforms like a QVC which nobody even thinks about that's six point two million people ready to buy stuff every minute yeah so yeah you know I have a show there and I bring a lot of my products and I learn I say say, whatever you thought you knew, watch this. Yeah. And you get a lot of feedback from that. Big time. Okay.

What do you think about tech companies on Shark Tank? Because there's a lot of different genres of companies, various products. A lot of new companies now are tech-related in some way just because tech is in everything. Do you look at tech companies differently? Do you look specifically for more protectable IP or things like that when you look at a tech company? It's a great question you're asking because we are now getting, particularly in the season that you haven't even finished watching yet, a tremendous amount of tech. And there's two reasons that's occurred. The first reason is that the big VC companies that have invested even sometimes around four of these tech companies have realized that Shark Tank has a massive global platform.

And so if you're trying to launch new tech and you want it shown in 34 countries and you want 10 million eyeballs to see it and you want to acquire some customers for free, there's only one place to do it and that's on Shark Tank. So that's step one. So they come on and they say, look, our shareholders now understand why there's value here and we're willing to do a deal with you. Our last round was 15 million pre-money and we want you to put in a million bucks. That's when it gets really interesting because I say, I don't give a shit what the last round was. There's only one Mr. Wonderful.

If you're going to get a deal from me, this is the value I bring to the table. And this is what I'm willing to pay. And they say, oh, my goodness, we'd be diluting our shareholders. I said, hey, what do you want to do? And that's where the tension starts. And I've closed many of those deals and brought a lot of value to them. But tech is now about 30% of the deals that we're getting pitched. And you'll understand this better than anybody else. It's hard to explain tech sometimes.

They basically need you to pitch their product. Because some of them really suck at it. It's tough. A lot of the most knowledgeable people at these tech companies about the product want to also be the one that goes on stage at the event or that gets on stage at Shark Tank and explains it. But one of the most important things I've found with tech

is having someone who can articulate it in a way that a normal person will understand the value of it. Have you found that to be something common, like very frequently people get on stage? More than common. It is both a blessing and a curse, actually. Because the tech nerd guy can really be bad television. And so bad that that episode never airs.

So you have to think through, you've got to find that person in your organization that can stand up in front of those sharks and deliver a perfect performance that captures the producers to say, wow, that was energy. Because if a guy comes out, we had an amazing technology that hasn't aired yet that I'm putting in, in fact three of us are investing and we're putting a sizable chunk of cash into and I really love it. And I'd love to tell you about it but then I'd have to kill you. But you'd like it too.

It solves a big, big, big, big problem that even Apple couldn't figure out. And so these are two dudes that just took it from a different direction and that's what often happens with a new technology but they Struggled to explain it and it was such a great deal that we kept giving them another chance and another chance and another chance you saw Something in there that yeah, but finally said switch places. Let's hear from the guy who's not saying anything. Maybe he's better Maybe he's maybe he can tell the story and lo and behold Breaks it down. Yeah, okay. That's it. And so that you just never know television is that wicked master. You just don't know

Yeah, we mentioned we shot that YouTube video for your channel Where you said you you've worked with Steve Jobs before or you works for Steve Jobs? Well, I was his largest provider of Educational software, okay all of all There's 110,000 schools in America. They all had Macs at the time. Yes, I was his largest. So, yes. Yeah.

I worked for him. What was that like? I had an interview recently where I talked about the 1984 Macintosh. And so we had people who worked with Steve specifically on that project. I'm one of them. On the 84 Mac? Well, we were providing software back then. For that Mac, OK.

That's the early iteration. What do you remember about that company under Steve and working with Steve at that time? Well, it was the Woz and Steve because sometimes you'd propose something that the technology couldn't do and Woz would know that. Steve, everything was possible. That's how he thought, which is a great thing about him. I would say back in those days in the mid 80s, the one thing that people don't remember about him is

he cared about the art of the product. For example, I remember having this long dialogue with him about fonts on the screen. Just the presentation of the text, which no one cared about. Think about DOS in the early days and all the terminals. And he just would go on for hours about, no, we have to have variable fonts. We have to be able to script the look of the screen. And this is not anything anybody could do at that time.

TrueType was the first iteration that didn't exist. And I used to say to him, This is not anything anybody could do at that time. TrueType was the first iteration that didn't exist. And I used to say to him, Steve, I'm not going to spend millions of dollars on this idea you have to change just the fonts on the software. You have to understand what people are willing to do and what they're not. And we were always battling about that.

He'd have a vision, and then I had the reality of having to develop it. It ended up in a meeting, and I'll never forget this, and you probably appreciate this. Mac was declining in schools. They were losing share. Steve had lost his mojo. And he was in a tough place.

And my board said to me, the budget for Mac development this year is $24 million. And there's no reason to do that. Let's skip a whole year, no upgrades, because they're losing share. So Heidi Rosen was working with Steve, sort of the right hand person in software. And I called Heidi. She's still around. She's an investor in the Valley. And

I said, you got to get a meeting with Steve. I got to talk to him. And I told her the problem. So we flew out there. I brought my head of sales, my head of development. And I said, Steve, you got to throw in 12 million bucks, half the budget, or I'm just not doing it. And he went out of his mind mind. It was just he went crazy and just started yelling insults at my team and abusing me and And I said Steve were your partner like what are you doing? And why are you abusing my people like you can abuse me? But you know And Heidi was this ghostly white and I've heard I've talked to other people about this

when he got passionate about something Heidi was this ghostly white. And I've heard, I've talked to other people about this. When he got passionate about something, he just kind of lost control a little bit. And it didn't end there. I finally said, I got to leave. I can't let you keep throwing these barbs at my people. This is nuts. And I walked downstairs,

and it was in one of those buildings in Apple's headquarters where you couldn't open the whole window. You could only unscrew the little thing, and a little flap would open. And he saw me getting in my Hertz rental, direct SFO airport, and he sticks his head through and he's yelling at me, screaming at me from, like he can't even get his head through and he's still going.

I said, Steve, you're crazy. Like that's crazy. I'm 50 yards away from you now, you gotta stop. Yeah, wow. I called Heidi on the way the airport I said Heidi. What do we do? She said How about 10 million I? said okay, all right, that was the end of that yeah, but that

That's the the genius of him and the insanity of him in that one hour And I always tell that story it would always make me nervous to go in a room with that guy He was so crazy. But look what he created. But the passion of it is obvious. Yeah. Yeah. There's many stories like that, and I just have one of them.

But you can't run a company that way anymore, I don't think. Right. That would be wild. Well, I think we saw what happened at Uber, right? Well, there's a lot of companies that have had big shakeups. I actually want to ask you about just like tech, the tech landscape in general. Do you have any favorites?

I know you've invested in some versus just like the products and you used to be in film. So of course you're into the camera world as well. What kind of tech is your favorite in late 2019? I like technology that advances entertainment. I've always felt that people that bridge the creative side with technology do some amazing things. And so, you know, in music there's been some really fantastic advancement in technology

and how you can create music and edit music. Over the last decade it's completely changed the ability for an artist to just sit and record tracks in their kitchen that become yeah you know huge hits that we couldn't do before and that's very investable technology because it's it's sustained by by the art of it I like anything that merges art with with with you know human passion there's a lot of tech that doesn't do that but if you're to ask me do I invest in technology, yeah, show me something that helps create better photography or helps make life easier

as an artist. I like to invest in stuff like that. Alright, we talked about watches briefly but I want to bring it back up because I've got an Apple watch on here. In my opinion the best smartwatch on the planet. But you have a very different watch on that you feel very differently about. Could you explain why someone who currently has an Apple Watch should look into a collector's watch? Or why watch collecting is even interesting in the first place to you?

I think you'll understand my answer, particularly for you. I understand as a major tech dude that you are that you would have an Apple watch on, like the other 50 million robots that are walking around. And that's the problem. That watch says nothing about you other than that you're interested in tech and you like the utility of having a piece of consumer electronics. But from an investment point of view, we'll just start there. That lost 25% of its value the minute you walked out of the store.

When I broke the seal, it lost even more. Okay, so that is a problem. It also doesn't tell me who you are. It doesn't speak to your interests or what you covet or what you like about style or art. A watch says so much about the person that wears it, the kind of face it has, the design of it,

the different, if you're an AP guy, that says something about, to me, what you like in music, for example. Or if you're a Patek Philippe guy, you're high style, I get that. If you're Rolex, you'd be playing Ultimate Frisbee in a Rolex because it can sustain the G-forces. It can do that.

That would tell me something about who you are, but that watch tells me nothing. That's just, you're just a robot walking down the street. And I wouldn't be caught dead with that thing on because that, when you walk in a room, you're just, to me, 20% off retail. You have to build your value back. Explain to me why you got that. And so that's what you told me. You said, I like the fact that I can check the phone that's coming in and all that. I have, I use lots of Apple products. I edit on Apple products. I've got dozens of Apple devices throughout my offices But I'm not wearing that watch there ain't no way that's ever gonna happen to me. That is that is like that is a big No, no It's taking away from all the things you as a guy can do. You don't get to wear jewelry much.

Maybe a ring. Maybe some cufflinks you have a suit on. And then there's your watch, which says everything about you. So you should think about that. All right. I'm going to have to get your watch recommendation for sure. You should have a piece that says something about you. I think you should be a Rolex kind of star because you're working out so much.

I think you should be a Rolex guy to start because you're working out so much. You know, a Daytona, a steel-faced, you know, a steel white-faced Daytona right now or black-faced are the two hottest sort of sports watches. Okay. One is a little more stylish. I prefer white-faced. You might like black-faced because you're always in black. Black, for sure. You know, that's the thing.

Okay. And believe me, I can help you get one. All right. I'll reach out for sure. Last thing, I saw on one of your recent Ask Mr. Wonderful videos, or I think it was like sort of a daily tour you did where you had an iPad Pro, two Surface devices, and two phones all with you at the same time. I do. I do.

So what are you doing with each thing? Are they interchangeable? What's the setup there? So I have many, many different investments. One of them is in financial services, a company called O'Shares, which does ETFs, has about $725 million invested in it. It's a big one. And in the world of financial services, there's a huge issue around compliance. And so all the servers have to be compliant to the the SEC

which is the regulator and so when I do work on you know my financial services companies I use two surfaces that are encrypted and secure with you know the Windows operating system that is tied into a network of completely compliant, completely encrypted, completely secure. And anywhere in the world when I set those up, nobody can with it. And those are my business machines. And then my son's going to FaceTime me, and he's going to do it on an Apple device, and everybody's texting me.

So that's my other world. So when I set up in a hotel, I've got the two super secure server-based systems that I'm monitoring all these investments on. And over here is my entertainment section. So the maid walks in and says, what is this? There's four screens up here. And I'm playing like a harmony on them. Okay.

And I've been able to drag, you know, people say to me, gee, that luggage weighs a lot. I said, yeah, it's got like a moving office. But I need all that stuff because that's how I roll. Word. I feel that. And smartphone of choice? So you'll appreciate this. You would definitely get this.

You'll appreciate this. You would definitely get this. There are certain attributes of the Samsung 10 that I really, really like. Is it the Note 10 or the S10? The S10. The S10, okay. That I really, really, really like. And I really like.

And I can't get them on the 11. So you're talking ultra-wide camera. Yes. You're talking possibly headphone jack, depending on what you use. You're talking OLED screen, unless you got the newest phone. And you're probably talking like much bigger, more exotic looking screen with no notch. Correct. Okay. You got it. You must be in this space. I've had a hand in this, yeah, for a little bit. So I can't give that up. So I now walk around the world with, and the other thing I found in every city, and you probably know this better than I,

you need to have both AT&T and Verizon as you crisscross America. Interesting. You're in the hills in LA. I'm not gonna on either network. I'm just telling you one doesn't work there. And in the streets of Manhattan, the other one doesn't work. And so I need to have both phones.

Why these guys can't solve this problem i don't know maybe 5g will do it but these networks suck when you go to different cities and i mean suck they drop calls they just completely crap out it i can't say enough bad stuff but i'm not putting brand to brand i'm just telling you one brand works in the west one works in the east and you get to chicago it's a whole different kettle of fish. It's where you are. And I think I can't say enough bad stuff. They've got to fix this.

And I travel every day. Sometimes to three cities. I was in three cities yesterday. Jeez. OK. So you got one SIM card in your Samsung Galaxy S10. And the other is the iPhone? Yeah.

OK. I also have SIM cards in the tablets I've got, you know. It's the same setup here for me? Yeah. It's for slightly different reasons, mainly because I have to keep a... You have to, right? I have to keep a toe in both pools. Which one are you doing most of your texting on?

My main SIM card, like the one that my friends have, is an Android phone, and that's because if I put this SIM card in an iPhone, the iMessage, it'll swallow that up, and I won't be able to take it out. And a lot of people have had the same problem, where if you take a SIM card from an iPhone, and move it back to an Android phone, iMessage continues to pull. What's going on with that? So iMessage is their system that they've built

where you can combine SMS. Why is it staying, why is it actually attached to the card? It shouldn't, but it is essentially a glitch. Which is freaking me out. I've got to be honest with you. This has happened to me. I don't like it. Yeah, it's the reason why I refuse to combine them.

And they should be able to fix it. You're the guy that should be able to get that answered. Maybe that's something I need to ask. Apple, why can't I guarantee that my texts will not go to this iPhone when I take the SIM card out? That's something I should look into. Let me ask you another question maybe you're knowledgeable on. WhatsApp. WhatsApp. That is becoming the standard platform around the world for a whole bunch of different groups.

And why is that happening? So in these different, many different markets, WhatsApp behaves the same way iMessage does in the US, where everyone, no matter what hardware they use, can use the same messaging platform and just uses data. I don't buy the encryption story. It's no more secure. That's not why they're using it. It's the data.

So they don't have to pay for it. No one out there pays for SMS. They're all using their data to send messages back and forth. So the same way we have Slack or GroupMe or whatever else you have in the US, the more people they can get on that one platform happens to be WhatsApp, that's very popular. Even as they pile more stuff, like more pictures, for example, the JP Journe Society,

the guys that are hardcore for this watch we talked about, we use Slack to talk to each other. And we're all around the world. And we're real hardcore guys. And we're sending videos and images and we're just piling onto that network and costing them more and more that we don't pay for, right? Exactly.

Yeah. And that's going to be a problem down the road, I think. Well, WhatsApp doesn't have that problem. They just have built the app and the infrastructure for people to send the media back and forth, but it still goes through their carrier, whatever that carrier is. So the carrier at some point may say, hey, guys, I have to charge you more for this. That's probably what's going to end up happening and we'll see if they adjust or switch back to SMS. But for right now, the cost and the load just makes perfect sense for that.

So you're walking around like I am with two phones all the time. Two phones all the time, yeah. So, I mean, that may be the standard, right? For certain people, yes. I think for most people, having one thing makes the most sense. But I can feel you on the two phones. And where are you on tablets? So I have one iPad Pro that I've almost leaned into also replacing my laptop. I really wish I had a better keyboard for it.

Yeah, the keyboard sucks. But I have the 11-inch iPad Pro, and I, 95% of the time, can do everything I want on it, because I don't edit videos on my laptop. 85% of the time can do everything I want on it because I don't edit videos on my laptop So no, there's some things you can't do with it. You can't do video capture With a Snagit type software on a tablet. Yeah, and I've seen people try but you know, it's not that great Gotcha on that one. Yeah So, uh, yeah, no, I appreciate the insight and and thanks for opening a little bit of a door I'll say for people who want a little more of this type of conversation, you should definitely check out the video we did on your YouTube channel. And a big shout-out to your YouTube channel, because there's not a lot of people doing both network television, like Shark Tank, at a level like that, and answering questions from people on YouTube.

It's interesting you say that, because the journey into YouTube is very new for me. It's only months old. And you are right. It is a completely different world. And I think it's going to be a long time before somebody can actually work both of those at the same time successfully. Although I'm trying. But it's Ask Mr. Wonderful and I appreciate you coming on. I think we're going to have some fun with that one. That was great. For sure. All right. Well, thanks for being on Wave Fun. Okay, so that was a lot of fun. Let's go ahead and take one quick ad break.

And next up, Andrew and I are gonna do our little holiday gift guide 2019. Stay tuned. This is an ad from BetterHelp. This holiday season, do something for a special person in your life. You, give yourself the gift of better mental health. BetterHelp Online Therapy connects you with a qualified therapist via phone, video, or live chat. It's convenient and affordable and can be done from the comfort of your own home.

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waveform. This holiday.com slash waveform. 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. All right. So you may have noticed, usually we do some sort of content that both of us liked over the past couple of weeks. But we decided we're going to do things a little differently this time. A lot of tech creators and just creators in general are doing some sort of gift guide for the holidays. So we decided to kind of do a mini version of that almost.

We're just going to both tell you guys a couple of things over the past year, a couple of years that we've really liked that we can personally recommend as potentially a gift. This is the thing. I told Marques gift and then we started talking about them. We're like, wow, you must really like someone if you're going to buy some of these. Yeah, I feel like a lot of people, when you do a gift guide,

you're like, give me something under $40 I can get someone, or give me something for $15. And a lot of tech is just not that good at that price. So a lot of my tech gifts, spoiler alert, are a little pricier. Yeah, here's actually something i find funny about that it's like i feel like there's a lot of people who think about buying something technology related for someone but technology is expensive so they cheap out on something and then you get them a bad thing and yeah yeah uh it sounds so uh like i love the christmas yeah the effort's great.

I appreciate the thought. That's the part that counts for sure, but also it's tech and it's not as great. Tech is a tough thing to gift to people because people are very specific about what they want. So that being said, you have some pricey gifts for people. We have some pricey. So here's my theory on it is there's some gifts here for people,

but like it's Christmas. You can gift yourself something yeah treat yourself it's like sometimes when it becomes christmas time i'm just like you know what i've saved i haven't uh splurged on anything really that bad it's like i think i want this i'm gonna yeah so this is andrew's three gift three gifts for christ Christmas brought to you by Treat Yourself. Hashtag not sponsored. Cool. Am I going first or are you going first?

You want to alternate? Yeah, let's do it. You first. Okay. I'm going to go with my cheapest one first. Okay. Also, mine's going to have a little bit of a theme going where I'm the gamer out of everyone in this studio. So a lot, actually all of mine are gaming related. I think we have a lot of gamers that watch and listen and they don't get a lot

of love here. So here's your shotgun. This is for you. Okay. All right. My first one's a mouse. I play a lot of multiplayer games that I get really competitive in. So it's a wired mouse with RGB and 75 buttons. Not 75 buttons. But other than that, pretty close. Yeah. So for a really long time, I'd been using a Logitech G303, which was very popular, but they discontinued it. I think you can only find them on Amazon for like $500 now because people are, here's why. Shroud uses one and everyone wants to use the mouse Shroud uses and they stopped selling them. So people bought a bunch of stock and are selling them for a stupid amount of money. Okay. That has a lot of parallels to the sneaker universe. So that's hilarious. Yeah, yeah. Kind of. Wow. The mouse was incredible.

I wish Logitech would bring it back, but it's just a light mouse fit in my hand perfectly. but it's just a light mouse fit in my hand perfectly so even though mine still worked it was beat to all hell and i wanted a new one uh so i grabbed the glorious model o it's called um you probably know the company because they sent us some keyboards i like the keyboard so it's like this super lightweight mouse with a bunch of holes in it which which sounds really weird, but it's to make it, I think it's 68 grams. And we're Americans, so we have no way of imagining that at all. How many pounds is that? But pretty much super light.

The cable is this really nice, elastic-y braided cable, so you don't get any mouse drag. Sometimes when you're playing with a low sensitivity and a big mouse pad, if you're pulling really far nice elastic-y braided cable so you don't get any mouse drag. Sometimes when you're playing with a low sensitivity and a big mouse pad, if you're pulling really far to one side, it gets tighter the further you go away from where the mouse is coming. So a lot of people put it up on something called a mouse bungee, which is like a spring that holds the cable up in the air. And when you pull, it kind of pulls the spring down.

Oh, my gosh. It doesn't drag as much. It's all these things to make it feel as wireless as possible while still being wired and not losing gaining any latency so so imagine having now you have a cable that almost stretches a little bit and then you also put that on a mouse bungee and then you also put these super smooth feet on the bottom of the mouse and it just feels super light um it also looks great they come in matte colors okay you got me yeah pretty much got you on that cool um it's like 50 bucks it's a really great mouse uh it looks great the rgb on it's crazy because it has all these holes so the

rgb comes up through all the holes as well classic yeah i've been absolutely loving it i've tried a couple other mice since and i've plugged it back in every time all right so they go to mouse i'm gonna actually my first item is also a mouse oh yeah yeah okay so i have uh this is a hundred dollar mouse so you have to really like this person but this is the the logitech mx master 3 you if you know me you know i've been using i sound that sounded like an ad a lot if you know me you know know, I've been using some, that sounded like an ad a lot. If you know me, you know, I love my Logitech MX performance mice. Um, no, but seriously, I've used them since the, like the original MX master, then the performance MX and MX master two and two S came out.

So this is the three it's USB type C it's wireless. Uh, it's got almost the same sort of layout, but generally just improves a little bit ergonomically each time. Um, not nearly as much customization, but there are some software macros where you can have different buttons do different things in different apps okay so in the Logitech software I have a left to right scrolling as left to right scrolling everywhere but in Safari it switches between my tabs left to right because I don't have to sideways scroll on webpages. But in Final Cut Pro, that scrolls on my timeline.

So a little bit of customization lightly in there. I'm just a fan of the way the mouse feels in my hand. I guess I'm super used to it. So Logitech MX Master 3. Get your significant other, your family member. Get your dog an MX Master 3. I actually remember an old video of you i think it's like you and lou at ces and you forgot your mouse so you're at like a best buy like going to find

one and it's just all the tech youtubers they're like i love my mx master it's the truth though see that's the thing in that video i think everyone in that video at some point goes hey i also kind of love my mx master yeah back in in the day. Yep, popular mouse. Wait, can we test something? Okay. We have a scale. Let's see the weight difference between the MX Master and the Glorious Model O. Okay.

All right, let me grab it. I'll get my mouse. Okay, we got our fancy scale here. You're weighing the Glorious O first. Yeah, I think this says 70 grams right now. I'm assuming a little bit of the wire, and this is also the glossy version, which these mice are so light

that the glossy version is actually one gram heavier than the matte version. Because of the coat? Okay, fair. Also, I will say, get matte. Glossy is not great. I don't like the feel of it. Okay, so I'm holding it in my hand.

It is really light. So I'm going to guess the mx master is 75 grams wait you say wait wait wait 70 grams and you think that's only five grams oh sorry this is 70 yeah okay let me hold on very scientific 86 grams 86 yeah oh wait what i must have the two mine feels so much heavier than this. Yeah. The three might be a little bit lighter just because the battery is a little smaller, but it lasts about the same amount. 144.

So I was super duper wrong. Yeah, it's twice as heavy. Wow. Wait, I'm going to grab the MX2 now. Okay. This is going off the rails really fast. This is a fascinating podcast segment. All right, MX Master 2.

2S. 152. 152. 2S is 152. So they made it lighter by going to the three and it's still double the weight of the pcmo p glorious whatever it's called glorious model o okay well now i know i have a heavy mouse yeah solid okay so that's my recommendation for a mouse. What's your round two pick? Okay. Let's see. Oh, my round two pick is by no means new, but I was thinking this the other day. I use them every day. I use them for gaming, but I don't think they're specifically meant for gaming. So it's the Sennheiser hd 6xx which is i believe a specific uh pair of headphones you can only buy on mass drop or i think they're just called drop now yeah right i've seen this um they're like 250 bucks which is expensive but when you think of sennheiser

headphones it's relatively cheap it's also a pretty common price point in this world of headphones like yeah you have your like premium noise canceling that's all like 300 to 350 and then like right underneath it is your your 199 to 250 yeah okay so these are wired um and they're open back so they're the literal complete opposite of like the the Bose quiet comforts or or something like that but they sound so good yeah they are so comfortable so like the reason i like them so much is one they sound incredible i i've tried multiple other um headphones and just like they sound better which honestly in gaming sound quality isn't that great as long as you hear everything you're usually fine but they just sound great to open back i think is amazing for unless you're in

unless your house or something is noisy all the time i'd way rather prefer open back mostly because the amount of times i'm sure everyone has had this happen you're playing a game you're super into it and someone in your house is trying to get your attention they call your name they call your name you don't hear it so they walk up to you and tap you on the shoulder and scares the crap out of you yeah yeah so i get to avoid that if claire calls my name or if someone knocks at the door i can actually hear it nice and then just in terms of comfort the padding i don't even know what it is some sort of cloth it doesn't feel like anything great but they're so light they're so comfortable mine are like two years old and look like they've been dragged behind a car at this point and i've never had to take them off because of discomfort

and i've played some long long days of of playing games yeah and i can vouch for that because i've listened to some of the sennheiser six series stuff for just like music testing and they're really good honestly i would probably be really into this parrot for myself if i didn't already have this insane pair of 820s right here for like editing and listening to music so i can vouch for the hd6xx or just any like this six this 650 hd these are also not the drop edition but i think the the xxs are matte black so yeah i feel like that's a pretty solid place to be. So good spot. I'm going to go with, I guess since we're keeping up with this theme, I'm going to go with some headphones.

We did not plan this, by the way. Yeah, but it works out pretty well. So you kind of have to really like this person to spend $250 on them. Or really like yourself. Or treat yourself. Treat yourself with some AirPods Pro. Honestly, AirPods Pro really impressed me this year. Maybe a runner-up.

I've talked about it before as one of the most popular viral products of the year. Right alongside Cybertruck as instant notoriety. Everyone knows about it. The noise canceling is really impressive. I've seen people flying with them. I don't think i would fly with them but if you have to fly with headphones and that's your only pair you would not be very mad um yeah so if you know someone with an iphone that's definitely a pair of headphones that they would get a lot of use out of so i mean that's really all there is to say i reviewed them i have two things to say about airpods pro okay one's funny and one's so the funny one is the first time i've seen them in the wild

was a guy working on the road in belize during my honeymoon whoa i saw he i'm assuming he was like a product manager like a production manager or construction construction manager thank you um but like you can tell what they are very obviously with that line down them and i'm like we're just driving to off into the jungle and on this like beat-up road that they're doing construction on and i'm like are those are those airpods pro is is this really the first time i'm seeing them is like whoa in this other country in the middle of the jungle, it was really strange. Yeah, and then the only other thing I could say is

I've listened to them. I like them so much that I've debated swapping to iPhone just because I think they're that good. Whoa, that would be fascinating. But I literally can't recommend them enough to all my friends who have iPhones, and it kind of makes me want an iphone yeah no they're really good i i do see them a good amount in new york city when i'm there

um it actually to the point where i see regular airpods now and i'm like those look really big like the stem like sticking out of the ear because it's so much longer i actually do like notice the the longer stem more like obviously apple's thought about this but yeah that's my that's my recommendation for uh either someone you really really like or treat yourself all right my well you really want to treat yourself um my way of potentially putting this in as a gift is maybe you're a parent and you have multiple kids and you want a group gift. Does that make sense? All right, sure.

So just like VR in general, I still don't think has made it quite to the masses. And I don't think the majority of people, if you walked up to them and said like, have you tried VR? They would probably say no. I really, it's a really fun experience and everyone I've had try it has loved it to where like I really think it's something you can buy like a family or you know if you have a

bunch of people living in a house together maybe you're in college and there's like five of you living in the same house it's just fun and it's fun even if you're not the one playing it if you're the one watching people play it watching people play vr is actually really it's almost more fun than the actual vr um but like it's so easy to get immersed in it's so immersive for one it's really hard to explain but it's one of those things where i think the best way to describe it is when you take the headset off it's like when you uh you have a really crazy dream and then you wake up and you're like where am I even though the place you are is the place you go to bed every night it's like we've played it in the studio and I'm on top

of some mountain in VR and I take it off I'm like oh I'm wait so which headset did you say which I haven't said I just so like, I'm just saying VR in general. There's a couple different ways you can go for it. We use the HTC Vive. Yeah. We love it. That would be my recommendation, but I know like you generally have to have

a pretty decent PC to be able to run it. And there are options like the PlayStation VR where I think it's more common that the average person has a PlayStation 4 and they can buy it for that experience. I know it has games like Beat Saber, which is my personal favorite. Same.

But VR in general is just super fun. And anyone who can get into it, can get into it even if you don't like gaming. My mom visited, I brought her to the studio from the airport and she played Beat Saber for like an hour and loved it. So it's just something that I think can be fun for the whole family. God, this entire segment sounds like the biggest ad.

It's really funny. I'm so sorry to everyone out there listening. Okay, yeah. So yeah, do your research on what sort of platform this person might have. Do they have a PC and a little bit of room for some sensors? Maybe a Vive. Maybe an Oculus.

Maybe they have a PS4. You get a PlayStation. Yeah, this sort of thing. Do a little bit of research and then really treat them or treat yourself. Treat yourself. All right. I'll go. My last one is going to be a little bit lower in price.

Google's, geez, what is it actually really called? Nest Mini? Nest Mini. Nest Hub Mini? Nest Hub Mini or Nest Mini? I don't even know. I think it's just Nest Mini now. So the Nest Mini is 50 bucks.

You can mount it on a wall. It's a Google Assistant speaker. And that's really all there is to it. Like it's not like an amazing sound quality or anything crazy that it does but if you just want to have something to turn the smart lights on, if you just want to have a hub

to be like the beginning of voice controlling your Nest or maybe you have something else you want to control, this is like an easy way to get into smart home stuff. Yeah. And I'll caveat that with you can also grab like something like an Amazon Echo Dot or a regular Echo or something like that. I think the Echo Dot is also 50 bucks. Yeah, they're pretty cheap.

Yeah. I think both of them go on sale pretty often also. Like I've seen Nest Mini down to like 30 bucks. I think that's a legit like really good gift to get someone, especially if you know they haven't tried smart home stuff yet. I feel like as a gift, some people might get it and be like, oh, cool. I don't really know what I'm going to do with this. And then in like six months, they'll be like, I have seven of them. There are two of them all over my walls. There's a little solid gift guide

for anyone who you may be considering getting a gift for in the tech space. So you don't even have to know a nerd or someone who wants tech. You can introduce them to some sort of tech. This has been Waveform. What episode number is this? 11. 11. Thanks for listening to Waveform episode 11.

If you do want to go check out the pillows that we've collaborated with Throwboy on, I'll shamelessly leave those linked below. And also all the other stuff we talked about. The portless iPhone, the T-Mobile 5G, all the other stuff we talked about, the portless iPhone, the T-Mobile 5G, all the other stuff will be linked in the show notes. So thanks for tuning in, and we'll catch you guys in two weeks in the next one. Waveform was created in production with Studio 71, and our intro outro music was created by Cameron Barlow.