Waveform: The MKBHD Podcast - Tesla's We, Robot Event: Let’s Not Get Nuanced

Episode Date: October 18, 2024

This week, Marques, Andrew, and David discuss everything from the new Kindles that were just announced to the We, Robot Tesla event. We also get into the SpaceX rocket that was caught after its launch and some of the new AI Adobe features that were announced at Adobe Max. There was a lot to get into! Enjoy! Links: New Studio video: https://bit.ly/4heh0yv SpaceX rocket launch: https://bit.ly/3BQUSKk HDTVTest iPad Mini video: https://bit.ly/3UdnC6g Adobe Max announcements: https://bit.ly/3Ug1WX3 Music provided by Epidemic Sound  Shop the merch: https://shop.mkbhd.com Socials: Waveform: https://twitter.com/WVFRM Waveform: https://www.threads.net/@waveformpodcast Marques: https://www.threads.net/@mkbhd Andrew: https://www.threads.net/@andrew_manganelli David Imel: https://www.threads.net/@davidimel Adam: https://www.threads.net/@parmesanpapi17 Ellis: https://twitter.com/EllisRovin TikTok:  https://www.tiktok.com/@waveformpodcast Join the Discord: https://discord.gg/mkbhd Music by 20syl: https://bit.ly/2S53xlC Waveform is part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Support for this show is brought to you by Nissan Kicks. It's never too late to try new things, and it's never too late to reinvent yourself. The all-new reimagined Nissan Kicks is the city-sized crossover vehicle that's been completely revamped for urban adventure. From the design and styling to the performance, all the way to features like the Bose Personal Plus sound system,

you can get closer to everything you love about city life in the all-new, reimagined Nissan Kicks. Learn more at www.nissanusa.com slash 2025 dash kicks. Available feature, Bose is a registered trademark of the Bose Corporation. Support for this show comes from Misfits Market. Misfits Market is an online grocery store that makes shopping for more sustainable, high-quality groceries easier and more affordable. It's like a farmer's market delivered to your door,

with fresh organic produce, pantry staples, quality meats, wild-caught seafood, plant-based proteins, and so much more. Misfits Market is free to join, and right now you can get $15 off each of your first two orders. Just visit MisfitsMarket.com and use the code SHOPMISFITS to save money on your grocery bill. It probably takes like, what, like two hours, an hour to go up? 15 minutes? How long does it take to go all the way around? I think it was 45 minutes. 45 minutes? Okay, so it takes... This specific one. It takes 45 minutes, you know, to go up, round the world, land back down, right?

That gives you another 23 hours and 15 minutes where your rocket could be making you money. The thing is, it is self-driving already. That's true. It's full self-driving. Full self-driving. But all this to say, congrats to everyone at SpaceX because this was freaking incredible.

It was wild to watch. Yeah, it was so cool to watch and I recommend watching it on YouTube. Yo, what is up people of the internet? Welcome back to another episode of the Waveform Podcast. We're your hosts. I'm Marques. I'm Andrew. And I'm David.

We're all back in the same place it's been years uh it's good in one week in today's episode we've got a new ipad mini refresh we'll also talk about of course tesla's we robot robo taxi event and we'll wrap up with some big new adobe releases but first i just want to shout out the studio channel uh massive quintessential new studio channel video went live in the last Adobe releases. But first, I just want to shout out the Studio Channel. Massive quintessential new Studio Channel video went live in the last couple days. I hope you've already seen it. If you haven't, it'll be in the

show notes. Go watch it. I think I realized at some point in the past couple months that I have told this octopus analogy about YouTube many times, but only on other people's shows. I've told it on, maybe we did this on the pod, but on other people's interviews and I've, I've talked about it before. And so

we just told it ourselves with our own team, which I thought was nice because there is no how to guide on how to make a YouTube channel. There is no how to guide on how to add a team and how to get help with making YouTube videos and being creative as a creator online. So this is our own experiences and our own tips and things we've learned from what we've done. It's like 55 minutes long. Yeah. It's so worth it.

It's chaptered if you want to skip to certain sections, but every section is gold. So yeah, check that out. I mean, that's a lot of smarts, but also a lot of data. It was very, very well made. I think that the thing with the whiteboard writing over the screen was so cool and helpful. Many Easter eggs. Alex did a good job making that and it was a great idea by Eric and Rich.

How did they do that, by the way? Because I- We bought a piece of clear acrylic and then Alex took like foam core to cut out the pro display. So it had its own like bezels. So cool. And then we just could write on the clear acrylic.

It looked so cool. Yeah. It was really well done. There was a lot of thought put into that i think everyone was a little worried about posting a 50 minute youtube video naturally that's the meta right now people loved it it seems like a lot of people watched a lot of it i can't believe how many people said this should be a course i should pay for normally they're like we don't want to pay for anything well the funny thing is you did a master class yeah now we have this i've done various versions of this like i've done um i did a skillshare course which was more how to in the actual nuts and bolts of shooting videos and then i've done a master class which was also very broad but more on being an online video presence so those are two slightly different

skills this one was literally just here's what we do we have a youtube channel we are building a team around the skills to develop and make good videos on youtube and by the way it's one of 10 now it's one of 10 right now yeah that's wild i think it's what's awesome about it is like for all the just kind of people out there who are even remotely interested in a youtube channel it speaks to all of those parts but also to the people who aren't remotely into that but just want to see how we work it speaks to all of those parts it's really really well done one thing in there there's a part where jono and eric made this joke about jono firing eric but then i guess there's too much of a gap to when they make the joke again and jono just says like

since we got rid of one of our producers and apparently a lot of people thought i got fired i don't know how i got into that conversation but still here it was oh yeah that was a joke she got watered just apparently multiple people emailed Jono asking to apply for the position. People thought we fired someone. Camera out on YouTube. Wow. Oh, sorry to say that Andrew got fired. Is his job available?

I'd hate to not ask. I did that once and I regret it every day. I feel bad. Anyway, okay, yeah. So that's out there. Go watch that video. We do CTAas to other channels better than we do for waveform so subscribe to waveform also in the studio channel and the studio

channel but in waveform we we usually do the subscribe thing at the end and or in the clips but if you subscribe right now you have an opportunity to not have to subscribe again it's like early access signal signal for. You subscribing five minutes into the episode is probably a really good signal for YouTube. Now I see why we don't do this in the beginning of the episode. Anyway. It's like the bat signal. Moving on.

Okay, what did you write down here about Amazon, Andrew? I think Adam probably knows the most about it, but Amazon released its first colored Kindle. Is that a big deal? Yes. Okay. They have four new Kindles actually. One of them is the, is the Kindle color soft, I believe it's called. Uh, this is not the first colored e-ink tablet by any means, but it's the first one that Kindle is doing. Okay. Yeah. Which is a big deal. Yeah. Two 79. Yeah. And it just looks really nice i really like it like having color is something that as a kindle user you kind of get used to not having so like you're reading books

you know it's text for the most part whatever but there are some times where you're reading a book and like they have a graph or something or like they have an image or even like in fantasy books at the very beginning there's like maps and it's like oh if this was in color that would be kind of cool i love it because you said like you know maybe it has a graph like you don't come into work every single day with a fantasy book i was like there's no graphs in that well the also because if you read on the subway people will think you're smart and cool and attractive exactly if you're using a kindle people will be like i don't know people will leave me alone anyway make sure you wait i

have a question yes you read comics right yes i do can you read comics on this in color now you can but i specifically read comics via the marvel unlimited app and i don't know if that is on kindle let me suggest something called the books palma well imagine books color the books color go color it's real it's real they make it it's a tablet it's an ink tablet that's in color there you go they should increase the resolution and the frame rate and maybe like and add a wireless chip yeah so i'm not sure if you can use marvel unlimited but yeah i use the the actual marvel app but anyway pretty cool to have color on kindle finally it's been freaking forever yeah um then they

released three other ones there's a new kindle paperwhite which is just slightly the cheapest one right yeah i actually don't know if it's the cheapest one i know it's the it's larger and it's the thinnest one it's seven inches um seven inch display now which is cool wow that because i have the kindle paperwhite from like i don't even know how many years ago and it's still going but it is chugging along and apparently this one's like a lot faster which makes sense uh battery life is still crazy supposedly like months which makes sense for a black and white e-ink display the color one's eight weeks of battery yeah that's also crazy and usbc the color one though it's a and wireless charging actually no way yeah why does it have inductive charging with pins? Audio listeners, I'm staring blankly at David.

To me, that seems like a device that would have Poco pins to charge. Yeah, that's what I would assume, but I honestly don't know. Okay. But yeah, I meant to mention that specifically for you, David, because you're always yelling about wireless charging. I love wireless charging. Yeah. Especially with a device like that.

Like, wireless charging is slow, but if, you know, you charge at five watts on a Kindle and you get another month of battery yeah it's crazy yeah uh it's also waterproof which is nice can confirm because i used to be like who cares if it's waterproof like i'm not reading this in the bath like they love to say like oh you're reading this in the bath like that's not where i read but i read in the shower yeah i read like a man i actually do read in the shower really Really? Yeah. With a Kindle? No, with my phone. Oh, I thought you were going to say with a book. It was another new one, yeah.

With a book. Just soaked. Absolutely soaked book in the shower. Yes. But this one's now waterproof. And if you're ever like poolside, very handy. Someone splashed me once when I was poolside and I was nervous that my Kindle was going to break. But it didn't.

The book wouldn't break. Actually, it would would it would break by getting wet yes you're right i'll take it back it would actually break they also released the kindle scribe gen 2 which is gen 2 oh gen 2 yeah it's been out you read her a note taker i think it has like white bezels now which they're saying is better than 300 ppi yeah it's made to compete with the remarkable tablet sweet yeah i find it hilarious that like on their press release the first like feature they talk about is It's better than 300 PPI. Yeah, it's made to compete with the Remarkable tablet. Sweet. I find it hilarious that on their press release, the first feature they talk about is all new white bezels. And I was like, okay, so there's not much here.

It's an IMA. I also thought most people didn't like white bezels. I think they said it's so it looks more like the paper is expanding closer to the screen. Except it doesn't. No, it does not from that picture. But it does have AI summarization of your notes. Oh, no. It's like, I just bought this book for $15. Can you summarize it for me?

I think it's just for notes. Yeah, it's just for notes. It's just for notes. I got it. I had the same thought, though. It's $400. I bought this e-reader to not read. Sparknotes machine.

If Sparknotes made an e-reader, that would be fire. That's exactly what they should do. They actually should have made one. They should make spark notes made an e-reader that would be fire that's exactly they actually should have they should make a spark notes e-reader and all it does is summarize what you were gonna read anyway do people still use spark notes i was gonna ask that there's no way these days have any idea we're talking about cheating was so much easier now yeah you just ask siri now whatever um well speaking of mid-sized devices with roughly 7 inch screens me Apple also refreshed their mid-sized device

with a 7 inch screen the iPad Mini got an update sort of it's also a pretty minor update it has new colors and a new chip and it supports

the Apple Pencil Pro cool I think that's it we'll do the ad break we'll come back there's really not much to say I mean I think what happens here

is Apple knows they want to be able to support Apple Intelligence on their whole range of devices. And the old chip in the three-year-old, I guess, at this point. 2021. 2021 version would not really have worked. So parts bin, they grabbed A17 Pros, and they're putting them in with a slightly new color. A17 Pro also means faster USB-C, faster Wi-Fi 6E, and they also double the base storage. Thanks.

That's always great. For the same price? Same price. Yeah, same price. That's good. One of the first things they said in the highlighted clips of why they did this was built for Apple intelligence. So it's very clear.

It's literally, yeah. I was going to say, Adam, as an iPad mini owner since the first, well, the last generation came out, what would you have liked to see in this? Two things. One, and Marques is probably going to yell about this as soon as I say it, a better display. Blaze. Two, Face ID. The Touch ID is cool, but I'm over it at this point. I want Face ID. Especially because the way that, but I'm over it at this point. I want Face ID.

Especially because the way that I typically have and use my iPad, like I'm not, I'm holding it in portrait. So my finger isn't up there all the time. Like in landscape, it makes sense. But in portrait, I have to like continuously move my hand, which is annoying. And it's basically the same size as a giant freaking phone. So like, just give me Face ID. It does have big bezels too.

So. Browse to the big yeah they could have fit the face id in the bezel i will plus on both of those uh the displays had this weird jelly scrolling issue i don't know if people this is one of those things again like the display nerds we all see it and can't unsee it and then there's a whole population of people that's like what are you talking about i don't care i've never seen this same with pro motion they're like i don't care but if you do look at these ipad minis they'd have essentially like a lag between the left and right half of the display as you scroll they'd scroll

at different just slightly different rates to where it would be kind of weird to your eye called jelly scrolling we're hoping that that's fixed but it appears to be the exact same display the display driver may be different with the A17 Pro, so we'll have to check it out. We'll have to see. I don't know if that's fixed, but I was hoping for a totally new display. Like, give me OLED, give me 90 hertz.

This would never happen. Apple would never do this. But yeah, it's still a liquid crystal super retina display. It's an LCD. It's an LCD. Is the Mini ever going to be a pro device? Will it ever become an iPad Mini Pro? I don't think so.

So a higher-end iPad Mini is kind of a weird in-between proposition that, I guess, kind of similar to the Pro iPhone, would actually probably sell the least, even though it would be maybe some people's favorite. It's an interesting idea because, generally, people who buy small phones are a sort of power user people right that's the whole reason it sells in smaller units diabolically well it's people yeah i don't know maybe i'm wrong about that i could be wrong about that but to me it feels like

the people who are always shouting i want small phones are like in the minority which to me also says they're more invested in the product which to me says they're more power users. So if you're going to sell a smaller amount of iPad minis anyway, because most people buy the bigger screens, why don't you just go all out and sell it for $599? Because I would buy it at that price. Yeah, I think that they, I mean, this is right up Apple's alley. Make a $500 iPad like this, iPad mini like this,

but also make a, yeah, $9 ipad mini pro yeah that has a nicer screen that has a higher end chip and that is more capable thinner bezels face id and whatever and i would be into that totally but even smaller group than the regular ipad mini so that might be why it doesn't exist but i would buy it yeah to be clear blue purple starlight and gray i like the new blue color i I will say. They're pretty muted, but I think it looks nice. Yeah. I need to see it in person because often they are even more saturated on the internet

than they are in real life. This is not very saturated. If it is the same blue as the new iPhone 16 blue, it's not even close. Oh, man. Yeah, the iPhone 16 blue is like ultramarine. It's ultra marine. It's super blue. It's gorgeous. This is like, man. Yeah, the iPhone 16 Blue is like ultra marine. It's ultra marine. It's super blue.

It's gorgeous. This is like aluminum that if you squint, it's kind of blue. Aluminum that when you tilt it, the shine kind of has some more blue. If it's a blue sky outside, then it looks bluer. It's like when you overexpose your photo

and there's a little hint of blue in the sky, but it's mostly white. How many more blue jokes can we get? I blue there we go beat me to it that's pretty much it for our mid-sized devices segment um we have a whole bunch more to talk about though there is a whole event david apparently has a lot of questions i was there i have all the answers what event all of the answers all of them every single answer i promise you that after the break but before we get that when will it ship it won't trivia time trivia dude okay first question how long until marquez has to shave his head

just kidding not the question okay so the kindle finally has a color e-ink display it's only been how many years since the first kindle oh man oh i remember this but i don't remember the year the first kindle my sister bought the first one and i translated everything to an epub for me too yeah nice that's when Kindles were like all the rage. Yeah. They were really, really easy to access the memory on them and just steal things. Allegedly.

Allegedly. Never owned a Kindle? You've never, you didn't even get the, do you remember the Kindle Fire? The like super cheap one that they were going to like lose money on, they claim. It was an Android tablet. It wasn't a phone, it was an Android tablet.

The Fire phone was the phone. I had that. This was made by Kindle. Okay, I guess I had a Kindle if I had that. But I've never had the Kindle Fire, right? Yeah, the Amazon Kindle Fire. The old one, yeah. It was just an Android tablet.

Yeah, and their whole thing was like, it's super cheap and we're losing money on the hardware because you're going to buy so many things on Amazon with it. I had well amazon used to have the i don't want to look at what was around the amazon mobile store and every week they had a new free app that was generally paid oh to try to and you had to download it off of the internet because you couldn't get it on the play store so it was it was a third-party app store that they were like please use it please i remember that and then i would follow droid life on rss and every week there was a new free app and i'd be like oh yeah i'll try it yeah it's like t-mobile tuesdays all right well we'll think about that the age of

the kindle the answers will be at the end like usual we'll be right back Support for this show comes from Klaviyo. You're building a business. Klaviyo helps you grow it. Klaviyo's AI-powered marketing platform puts all your customer data, plus email, SMS, and analytics in one place. With Klaviyo, tinned Fish Phenom Fishwife delivers real-time, personalized experiences that keeps their customers hooked. They've grown 70 times revenue in just four years with Klaviyo. Now that's scale. Visit klaviyo.com to learn how

brands like Fishwife build smarter digital relationships with Klaviyo. Autograph Collection Hotels offer over 300 independent hotels around the world, each exactly like nothing else. Hand-selected for their inherent craft, each hotel tells its own unique story through distinctive design and immersive experiences, from medieval falconry to volcanic wine tasting. Autograph Collection is part of the Marriott Bonvoy portfolio of over 30 hotel brands around the world. Find the unforgettable at autographcollection.com. Support for this show comes from Misfits Market. Want to save money on groceries, discover delicious new foods, and help reduce food waste?

It's easy with Misfits Market, an online grocer that works directly with farmers and food producers and delivers high-quality, more sustainable foods to your door. They've got fresh organic produce, quality meats and seafood, plant-based proteins, and dairy products, plus pantry staples, wine, and so much more. They also source perfectly delicious foods with cosmetic quirks, minor packaging issues, or just extra supply that might go to waste. Misfits Market rescues that quality food and delivers it to you at a discount. Misfits Market updates their curated selection every single week, so you'll discover exciting foods like seasonal produce and unique snacks that are harder to find

at grocery stores. And they're all backed by Misfits Market's quality guarantee, so you can feel good about the groceries they deliver. The best part? Misfits Market is free to join. And for a limited time, you can save $30 across your first two orders with Misfits Market is free to join. And for a limited time, you can save $30 across your first two orders with Misfits Market. Just visit MisfitsMarket.com and use the code SHOPMISFITS to save money on your grocery bill. All right, welcome back. So let's talk about this. Let's talk about this hustle event. Okay, I have a question first.

Yeah, for Ellis. Oh, right. Oh. Did you watch the i robot movie yeah yes well you hadn't seen it before no i watched it for the first time this weekend yeah to know to get the context now that you've seen it do you think it's a good idea for a tech company in 2024 to try to do to emulate it with their own event no all right we're continuing the trend cool my famous watch the movie do not make the torture chamber well here's what actually happened so i i've made my video reaction to it

and you guys can go watch it if you want but as far as actual order of events it was uh it was a night event it was in california we go out It's at like Universal Studios in this sort of a... Warner Brothers, right? Warner Brothers, yeah. Studios. I grew up in the neighborhood, so I know. You grew up on the back lot of Warner Brothers? I was actually a small little gremlin werewolf who emerged every night to sneak on leftover crumbs from craft services.

He grew up in the cyber cab. It was a cool place to have an event. I will say that. Essentially, it's like an hour long. We get three main announcements. The first one is here is the RoboCab. It is this self-driving taxi. It is a two-door.

Hold on. You just called it RoboCab because he kept calling it RoboTaxi or CyberCab the entire time. RoboTaxi, CyberCab, RoboCab, CyberTaxi, whatever you want to call it. Is that what they're calling it? Any of those names are probably fine. Because it won't exist anyway. So it's a two-door Tesla. It's a two-seater.

It has no steering wheel, no pedals. Its main goal is to be essentially a fleet-operated vehicle. It is aimed to be under $30,000 and coming out before 2027. And it will essentially self-drive everywhere all the time with minimal human, almost no human input at all. It has scissor doors that go up sideways.

It has a great idea. Wireless charging. No. And it looks a bit like a baby Cybertruck. Then they moved on and also showed us a robo van, I guess is what it was called, which is essentially.

Robo van. Robo van, sure. Which was an up to 20 seater, bus sized, but I robot army vehicle shaped. Iron man helmet. Yeah. It's basically.

No windows by the way. So you know how you go to CES and like in the car section you see a bunch of like future of mobility vans. Yes. Which are just like a bunch of seats facing the middle. The first thing I thought of. It's one of those. It's one of those. We see those all the time.

And then last but not least, we go. Oh, by the way, no details on that. No range, no price, no launch date, nothing. Just like here's a thing we'll do. Vans. Sure. 16 to 20 people. Great.

And then last but not least, they rolled back out the Optimus robot. As just to sort of remind us, we're an AI company. We're doing a whole bunch with AI and these Optimus robots are making major strides. And so as you wander around this event today, getting rides in the robo-taxi,

just note that the Optimus robot will also be wandering around, serving drinks, interacting, telling jokes, giving out snacks, and just having a good time too. And so that all also happened. Three very interesting things to all happen. And, you know, the tone of the event I actually think was pretty interesting because it's their most future-looking event ever. because it was their most future-looking event ever because as you imagine a world where plausibly robo-taxis are wandering around

and never needing to park and just wireless charging in a fleet somewhere, you need less parking lots theoretically, so now parking lots are parks. And now there's all these future interesting projections of cool things that the efficient and safer future could look like if all these cars are self-driving and never having any accidents like public transit the idea well yes also like well public transit is interesting but still the idea of all this

future stuff was really cool it was clouded though i think and i said this in the video by all these demos and promises that were uh not if you're not realistic and a little bit yeah just distracting i think is what happened i think the it started with the the main interesting controversy if you want to call it that was the optimist robots that were walking around where you could walk up to one and it would say, hi, what's your name? And you could talk to it and it would play charades with you and you could take a picture with it and it would react and it's doing all these animations. It would see you taking a picture and it would pose

and then you could ask it questions and it would answer. And it was very, very clearly either, okay, I'll phrase it like this. It was either definitely a human through like a speaker, or it was the greatest demonstration of robotics and LLMs live and in person that the world has ever seen. By a lot. So up to you to decide what you think we saw. Tesla never really confirmed anything but there

were tesla engineers on the ground like walking around like talking to people so if you could get a hold of one of them you could talk to them and get as much information as you could out of them yeah many of them seem to confirm that oh yeah okay yeah that's a person that's talking to you or that there is some human assistance with the animations and walking and things like that but there is some on-device stuff happening as well notably the tesla engineers i talked to didn't say any of that which i thought was you just said they said like minimal human when i first asked them are all of the speech things happening on device they said yes all the lms are happening on device and i talked to this robot in real time and it responded super fast like it usually did and i was just like okay i need to ask you again how much of

what's happening is human assisted i need to know and they said some of it is human assisted but they wouldn't really tell me much more than that there's a guy on twitter that said i talked to an engineer when it was walking that was autonomous, but everything else was a person controlling it. Sure. Yeah. And talking through the speakers. Yeah.

I think, I think what I, what I compared it most to was, remember the Disney video with the like bipedal robots with a steam deck controller? Yeah. It had all these cool animations that it could do if you press the right button. Yeah. And you could of course talk through a microphone. But it would also blend those animations together and walk around and balance itself on its own. I think that's roughly what's happening with these Optimus robots at this particular event.

Now, again, that's getting into the nitty-gritty details of how much is real, how much is fake about the Optimus demo. But if you zoom back out again, it's like they're thinking this robot could someday be a human like friend like it lives with you yeah it like does chores for you elon musk it can do anything you want yeah that's an exact quote from the event it's pretty it's a far out idea it's like very very future looking and it's interesting to think about and you can kind of twist that and turn that however you want like oh yeah i'd like it to do laundry for me oh yeah i'd like it to do chores for me people are imagining all these things with it but you know this one particular demo had all these these cloudy details about whether it was real or not which then cast out on the entire rest of the event and how much of it was real or not

is this robo van ever going to ship? Is this self-driving demo that I did around like the Westworld thing in the robo taxi real or not? Like how much of that was actually self-driving? We don't really know. And maybe that's not even the point. The point is still to be optimistic about a high-tech future,

but it is a public tech company holding an event to launch a product so they did make promises and lots of things that they're i'm sure hoping would juice the stock price and did not yet you know who wasn't optimistic about this event yeah the stockholders that also did happen it juiced it if tesla was the packet of juicero and the cup was the stock falling down there so yeah i i came away from that like feeling like i saw a lot of things learned a lot of things but also can't really uh take too much of it at face value and i did eventually in the video say that i don't think this robo taxi so the one promise they made was this robo taxi under 30 000

shipping before 2027 right i just don't believe that for a second and the reason i say i don't believe that for a second is because they've made many very aggressive price and timeline promises before and they don't come true they maybe do come true four or five years later like the 35 000 model 3 came true temporarily way wayarily. Way, way later temporarily, but at least you can say you did it. And the Cybertruck, they did say they were going to launch at a base price of $39,000 something.

That was going to be for the single motor base Cybertruck. Yeah. It's been five years since that announcement and you can't get one for anywhere near that price. I think at best

is like a pre-order for 75 000 but if you go straight to tesla's website right now the like it's 99 000 really so unless you do the potential savings then it's like 95 000 what about the lower performance package for the cyber truck there's there's a pre-order like only version of that like if you had had it pre-ordered if you're configuring in the app right now, but if you go to the website right now... So the point is it's been five years and the $39,000 Cybertruck is still an idea, right? Right.

So when Tesla says, or when Elon gets on stage and says, oh yeah, before 2027, we'll have a $30,000 version. To me, it's like, maybe one day you will have a $30,000 version, but there's just no way that's going to be the priority. They're going to ship the highest margin versions they possibly can first. And it's a fleet vehicle. Maybe that's not $100,000. Maybe that's $50,000.

But I am so confident that they will not hit that exact bet. I was confused also by what he really thinks this is of whether it's a fleet vehicle or a personal vehicle. Because it's like, you can buy it and have it drive you, but you also can buy a fleet of it and have your own taxi business so i wasn't quite sure exactly what he was saying there i mean maybe it is both and i think it has that's yeah why not it has fleet aspirations for sure i think when you sort of the cyber truck this is also true i will say that the economics of like, so again, talking to some Tesla engineers about trying to get details out of them about this thing. I'm like, what's the range?

What's the battery size? How much of this is even real? What did you, what event did you go to where you like talked about it? No, I wanted to tell the story because it's so relevant. I won't name the company. Okay. I was at CES.

Yeah. We were getting a demo of a product and i asked the product rep i said hey how many watts is the power supply for this thing is it really chugging and the product rep looks me dead in the eyes salesman smile turns to scowl and goes why would you ask that this thing is not real it is never going to come out. I mean, CES is, yeah, it's all demos. Yeah. But wait, so whatever. So I went up to the Tesla engineers and started asking them specific questions like that.

Yeah. Wasn't sure if I was going to get that type of answer or if they have real answers. Turns out it's somewhere in between. Right. There is still some internal debate about how some of these things will pan out. This is clearly a concept vehicle. It won't be exactly like this yes i said what is going on with the gold paint on the wheel and he said on the gold sidewall we'll see if that makes it to production right i said what's what's the range he said well we don't have a number for that we are

they say holistically 200 miles so here's where it went they said holistically we're aiming for this to be the most efficient possible electric vehicle we can build low rolling resistance tires amazing aero like we're considering every angle and weight and detail to make it super efficient and so we think 200 miles is probably a good range to aim for this isn't like a road tripping vehicle it's a taxi right so 200 miles is pretty good and we think 200 miles is probably a good range to aim for. This isn't like a road tripping vehicle. It's a taxi, right? So 200 miles is pretty good. And we think we can get five and a half miles per kilowatt hour out of this battery if we get to our efficiency goals.

So I'm doing the mental math. I'm like, that's a 40 kilowatt hour battery. That's a much smaller than typical EV battery. That's like a leaf size battery. The leaf is a cheap electric car. I'm doing the math. I'm like, okay, yeah, I can see how you think you could make a $30,000 EV if you achieve all these efficiency goals that you have in mind for this vehicle. So it's not like this insane idea that it's going to be a cheap fleet EV with a small battery that doesn't really do road trips.

It doesn't even have a charge port. It doesn't supercharge at all yeah it doesn't need any of the wiring or cooling though to support tesla supercharging so that's a benefit for efficiency allegedly how allegedly like what do you remember what happened in the event when you said it's going to inductively charge and then a video played of a robot snake vacuuming the car and then he never said anything else about charging. Wait, all I could think of with that vacuum is, like, you have your fleet of robo-taxis, and then just, like, every Uber driver's worst nightmare is that drunk person throws up,

and then the snake vacuum cleaner's just pushing around. Because we had that discussion last week, and I was like, oh, okay, inductive charging. Like, I'm really, like, let's see what he, nope. Just straight on through. So many questions. Hit me with all of your questions. I will tell you what answers I know to be true versus what I learned or think to be true. Okay.

So is this closer in size to a model three or like a smart car? Good question. It's right in between. It is significantly smaller than a model three, but it or like a smart car good question it's right in between it is significantly smaller than a model 3 because it's not a smart car it's it's definitely so they move the driver position back yeah so you have like real leg room got it but there is no back seats so that's sorry not just stuck in the past man the front seat it was kind of weird sitting in the front seat where the driver stuff should be and like i can't there's no pedals i'm like reaching for pedals

there's nothing there didn't they say there was like potentially going to be a way for because someone posed the question is there any manual takeover controls for like engineer that and didn't he say there might be something that comes up on the screen yeah i said what if i'm trying to align it better on the wireless charger or i just want to do a quick little manual input and he's like you know there may be some controls on the screen for you to adjust some things but we really don't plan to have any manual override so if there's a hummer ev in the wrong lane coming head on at me. You just cross your fingers. Oh my gosh.

Nice. Okay. If they expect people to own these, they cannot go anywhere that is not mappable, right? Mappable, what do you mean mappable? This is like, say you want to pick your kids up at school and queue in line with other cars or you want to like i don't know like what how do you tell it i want to go through the mcdonald's drive-thru instead of i want to be at in the mcdonald's parking lot like how does any of that work i will quote elon on stage let's not get too nuanced um i really do think there's a lot of edges to regular self-driving that i i guess will be prompts on self-driving like like when you go to pick up your kid at school for

whatever so you put in the school address let's say in the gps on the on the screen it it navigates to the school and then you hit a button that opens it like pulls up next to the school and maybe there's a line there already so it gets in line or maybe it it drives to the front of the line then realizes it's a line so it like like pulls over i don't know um i think a lot of the edges are unknown and are not meant to be thought about yet i think again but this is us getting into what will be thought about within the next year and a half well right okay solved in the next sounds right they have one other big thing they need to think about which is regulations and the fact that they don't have he did mention a little at the end like i forgot about he threw out this like if we're allowed to comment yeah kind of

towards the end yeah you have to get regulatory approval for level five self-driving you they had model threes model wise driving around the event as well in the exact same way with the robo taxi a closed back lot yes implying but implying though because he said on stage that they you know i think he said two states they had like a permission to start doing texas and california yeah yeah some testing of full unsupervised self-driving cool. Um, that's two States in one country in the world. That's like a very, very early start. And that will take a lot of good miles of no incidents for it to continue to get permissions and approval, uh, in a much more meaningful way. So yes, regulations, unknown question. We don't

have the answers to that, but that is also a barrier that they will solve in the next year and a half. Okay, another question. Yeah. Actually, this is a multi-part question. Okay. Okay. If it inductively charges,

one, and it's supposed to also be run in cities. Yeah. Nobody in cities owns like a place to charge their car. No, no, no. They're getting rid of parking lots this is that's one thing seven i get i know what he was trying to say is like manhattan please explain what was he trying to say because i was confused i think his thing was like a sporting arena where you would get dropped off at won't need parking lots but then completely

neglects the fact that all of these need wireless charging pads somewhere and now we need to build other parking lots that i guess are in different areas and i don't know also sporting areas receive dozens of semi-truck loads like they need parking lots like like sorry like yeah yeah so here's the dream wait sorry just other parking lot thing when he put up that graphic, when he put up that graphic, when it was like, we don't need parking lots, and then he showed building a park in the middle of an airport. It was like, who is like, we need more green space. We need people need to go to nature and relax right next to an airport.

Like, what are you talking about? That one didn't make any sense, but it was very stunning visual. No, okay, zoom out with me for a second. Here's the dream. Tell me if there's any flaws in logic with this dream. 15 millimeter. You have a car. Yeah. That you drive here to work.

How long does that take you? An hour? An hour and 15 minutes. Yeah. What does your car do when you're here at work? It sits. Sits there and does nothing, right? Doesn't make me any money.

So you're here for a couple of a bunch of hours. B what happens you drive home you get back in your car yes it's available waiting for you where you left it you drive home you park it then then what happens then your car just doesn't make you any money sits there in the street and doesn't do anything right so in a world where your car is, just stay with me, fully unsupervised self-driving capable, it would be plausible for it to, once you're done and get to work, it goes and picks somebody up and is an Uber for them and just makes you a couple bucks here and there oh there's another one somebody coming to the helipad for a tour okay it's just dropping people off here over and over and you're making money all day and it knows when you leave work and so as soon as you go to leave work you walk outside it's right where you left it you get in and it drives you home or you drive home and then it goes back out and continues earning you money as you're sleeping is there any flaw in this charging potential so yes the charging question is if this is a fully self-driving car and it pulls up to a supercharger who's going to plug it in nobody so they needed a solution one do you change every

single what about the snake that's the so do you change every single tesla supercharger to a snake or do you have like an attendant plugging them in what is this or do you do inductive self-driving so that nobody has to maintain them and charge one percent an hour they seem to have chosen the inductive route i don't know if that's the most efficient version it's not it's not i actually think paying someone to plug them in would be way better but hey here we are okay paying how about optimus plugs them in that's actually think paying someone to plug them in would be way better. But hey, here we are. How about Optimus plugs them in? That's actually, think about that.

I think. Wait, I have a question with the logic. In New Jersey, that could work. Yes. What is the incentive for me to buy the car if that's the case, if it's already doing that? So the car will eventually pay for itself and start making you money is the incentive. So the incentive is to make money. Yes. Because otherwise I could just walk outside, hop in any car that's driving by and go home. Yeah, so the incentive is to make money yes not because

otherwise i could just walk outside hop in any car that's driving by and go home you have to pay money yeah they're in a perfect world where a car i could just like take a nap on my hour commute that sounds fantastic yeah like i have no i don't want it to come up there be like i hate the idea of like having to pay attention my whole commute. No, I would much rather watch a movie. Maybe I would actually watch Dune if that happened, but there you go. I, there's just so many other things wrong.

Like that is not the part I'm hating on. Cool. There are tons of people who would rather take a nap in their car than drive. There's just so many other things wrong with this. Every single thing that this addresses is already addressed 50 times better by a f***ing bus. Which they also made.

Well, not really in America. A bus... Currently at the moment. In some places, yes. In the city. Yeah. In this city. Yeah, in this city.

Yeah, that's fair. Well, the lack of a bus existing does not mean the technology of bus does not exist don't disagree bring it to those places and he's made sure to be this point he's like it's going to be cheaper than a bus how you can fit a hundred people in some city buses yeah and this is 30 this is two well no no no sorry when he did that that was for a robo van right but still yes i agree i'm just making sure we have the right parts here okay even still which by the way the robo van looks exactly like the evil troop carrier they did this on purpose yeah definitely it's called wee robot i'm not sure why i wanted to

look like who wants to wake up in the morning and get in their car and find someone's f***ing Starbucks cup in there? Or puke. Yeah. I think the technology aside, I don't think, like if you could say you could get a Model 3 or a RoboTaxi and they're both capable of the exact same thing, i would personally prefer to own and not have my car i would prefer like i can get in my car and my car drives itself and then it parks and then nobody else gets in my car because i prefer that that's my own and i want to drive sometimes yeah the steering wheel that's just me i just think i kind of don't understand the idea of individuals owning individual ones i more understand it in

like say a taxi company decided that they were they have space they have their own like there's a taxi parking lot right across the street from where i live there's like 30 taxis there every night right so like if you had a bunch of inductive charging pads they could go out do their taxi thing throughout the day and then they come back that makes sense yeah but like why even pitch this as a thing that regular people can buy why not just say also your model 3 and model y will be able to do this they did say it it was just like super like glossed over and they felt very focused on these instead of like that the actual cars were going to do that.

I think a lot of people were into the idea of your car making you money passively. Yeah. Kind of like, remember like people would just be like, my car, my computer like mines Bitcoin when it's not in use or whatever. Right. Like that person would love this.

Cool. Yes. I mean, I also like, why two seats? So I think again we are getting sort of caught in the details of it i think they could easily make a four person and a six person and a 10 person and a 12 person version of this i think this one is a two-seater and i think a lot of people's first thought was i take cab rides with three people all the time like this seems dumb but in the case of yeah having one or two people go somewhere and they probably have some stat that some

majority of taxi rides are one person or something like that. Fine. I don't see any reason why it couldn't be a four-seater version of this. Counterpoint, Elon did say that most people are going to want two Optimus buddies and all three of you cannot get in the cyber cab. Wait, he did? He said

people want two Optimus buddies? He said people want two optimist buddies? He said people are going to want one, probably two optimist buddies. Why would he want two? Why did he say anything he got? I don't know. Yeah, that's weird. Also, a few other things we should think about. One, who's going to decide how much a robo-cyber Uber costs?

Does Tesla decide? Does the owner of the cars decide? Good question. That's a little scary. Number two. Do I have a rating? Yeah, if this thing hits someone, who's liable? Are you liable

for your autonomous car that you have no control over? I think in Waymo's currently parallel case, it would be Waymo that's liable. But Waymo owns the Waymo. I own the RoboTaxi. I don't think it matters who owns it. If I drive your car and it hits someone, I'm liable.

Yeah, but if Waymo. Whoever's operating it. Yeah. But no one's operating it. Yes, but they are operating it. They're operating the service. Right. Yeah.

There is another variable that I've talked about before with self-driving cars, which is there is the world we live in now. There is the world we live in now, and then there is the perfect world that companies like Tesla are hoping will exist in X number of years where every car is self-driving and every car is safer because of it. And maybe they all communicate with each other, blah, blah, whatever. 80% chance. actually really really difficult to flip that ratio to get self-driving cars so good among regular drivers yeah that people actually understand that they're better because they continue to be not like good at driving with you waymo's are really good waymo's are really good but they we see videos all the time of like someone putting a cone in the road and then it just panics yeah for a while or a bunch of them honking in a parking lot, like just weird stuff where they're not as natural as maybe good human drivers.

Because I will say the average human driver, trash. Oh yeah. Trash, let's be honest, pretty bad. For sure. So if you can say that the average self-driving car is better than the average human, then that's a good stat. The ratio is gonna be the biggest problem

and this is why it is surprising to me that waymo has just started testing in new york city because san francisco makes sense because those streets are not that congested at all ever there's not that many people driving in new york city in san francisco in new york city yeah i mean power to them because there's going to be a lot of lawsuits and a lot of accidents pretty soon it's either going to be a lot of situations self-driving car in new york is either a lot of accidents or a lot of beeping yeah waymo's are already really good at beeping so i'm saying like if i'm a self-driving car going through new york yeah this is if you've ever driven in new york you know what i'm talking about but like people just pop out into the road all the time there's huge

potholes there's insane, like weird random pipes of hot air coming out of the subway, random stuff happening everywhere, right? If I'm a self-driving car, I am either cruising through all of that with near misses constantly, and that looks insane, or I'm driving so slow that it is really safe, and I am just piling up taxi drivers behind me, just freaking out. And people are trying to cut you off, and then you can't react fast enough. People are throwing cones at me. Yeah, it's a good time. It's a good time. taxi drivers freaking out and people are trying to cut you off and then you can't react fast people are throwing cones at me yeah it's a it's a good time it's a good time i have a hot take about this whole tesla event yeah okay i think tesla's too early for all of this i think that's a yeah

what do you mean true like i think this this world they're trying to build i feel like is going to be what happens eventually just not in like in our lifetimes even yeah i feel like this whole event could have happened with way less scrutiny if they just never threw out a date or anything or like just made it a party just if it was just like a man the future seems cool we we made some like cool prototypes here like but then throwing like this seems like 50 plus years distant future and they're saying yeah by 2027 this robo taxi if they said like these are the concepts that we foresee and these are the concepts that we are trying to build into our self-driving capabilities of our existing cars and

our optimist robots and yes it's not running on its own software right now and it's kind of controlled and whatever i think that that would at least get people excited about the way off future idealism of that tesla's trying to build but elon even said like i'm usually pretty uh liberal about about delivery dates sure he did not say that well he didn't say okay he said optimistic correct yes um anyway yeah it's just why why and like clearly the the market responded it could have been yeah it could have been a really sick party where they didn't try and i i know no one's gonna say that they like tried to trick everyone but there are plenty of people who were tricked. I saw tons of videos of people being, I can't believe I'm talking to a robot right now.

And then everyone in the TikTok comments were like, bro, that's not a robot. Or like, that's a person. It's a remote control animatronic. I suppose it all kind of depends on what your goal is with this event. If you're Tesla, you're like trying to decide what am I actually trying to accomplish

by hosting this event? If your goal is to get the public excited about Tesla's vision of the future, that's one thing. If your goal is also to appear as a leader in this like driving for like very aggressive leader and disruptor in a lot of this AI and self-driving stuff, that's almost kind of a separate set of things you need to do. I would have almost preferred them to do kind of what Meta did. I was just gonna say that. They announced the Orion glasses

and they said, look, this isn't ready. But this is the amazing set of tech that we've built. And we think that if we iterate on this a little bit more, maybe in two, three more iterations, this can be ready for the public. So this thing I'm about to show you right now it's not ready but it is the most advanced thing anyone's ever made and look how that worked out for them and that worked out great very positive because nobody's asking about price nobody's asking about release date nobody's asking when can i buy this

thing all the people who are excited about it are like damn i bet nobody else has prototypes this good everyone else who's pessimistic about it can go, ha, that's never coming out. And maybe they're right, it's not gonna come out for a long time, but they never said this one would come out. It's some future version that will come out. I would have been totally happy, me personally, if Tesla was like, look, this is the future we imagine.

It's amazing. It's so far off, but we are clearly the leaders on our way there. And here's a little glimpse of some of the stuff we've been building that we think is the best anyone's ever made. And I wonder if the Tesla obsessives who have been sold the self-driving dream

for existing Tesla cars would have rejected that because they believe that the cars are already fully capable of everything. I don't think they would have had to reject it. They could have just lived in a world where they do think it's coming soon. But then Tesla never would have had to say it is coming soon. Because the Tesla dream is like, my car already has all the hardware it needs. I mean, Elon said this year after year for like 10 years or whatever.

But it's hardware complete, like feature complete. It's built, just needs regulation. It can already drive itself. It's totally fine. And many people are like, yep, yeah, my car that i own right now should be able to drive itself with no one behind the steering wheel and that's up for debate but if you show a robo taxi that just does the same thing that the existing car already does it doesn't feel like some new advanced amazing tech it's just another concept car yeah so that's that's the only difference but i still feel like

yeah tesla could have pulled a meta and probably just been a little more yeah uh this is what we've been working on it's also just the if say this this robo taxi does come out for its cyber cab i don't know whatever it say it does come out for 30 grand and the model 3 like especially used is like 20 grand right now um i would pay more money to have a car that has a steering wheel that most of the time will drive me autonomously completely but when i need the steering wheel i can use the steering wheel like i would prefer that over a thing that only has two seats that charges way slower that can't really do road trips yeah this can't do road trips at all right it can only yeah it's not designed to yeah it can only work in cities nobody in cities lives in a house that has like a parking area where they can

actually inductively charge this thing i mean 200 if it were 200 miles that would let's say i bought it and had the wireless pad in my garage that still could get me to and from work you know problem in your garage what you wouldn't even need in your garage i'm trying but in that scenario it would be fine if i had the wireless charging pad it still could get me and i don't live in the city it could get me to and from work no problem there's a whole lot of copper in that wireless charging pad that thing's gonna go quick yeah anyway i don't know yeah i i agree with you it's just very it's just very weird i don't know it Yeah, I agree with you. It's just very, it's just very weird. I don't know. It seems like a stock pumping thing that didn't work out. Can you explain the RoboVon?

Yeah. Wait, can I have a question before that? Sure. Why are we calling it RoboVin and RoboTaxi? I don't know. RoboTaxi. I guess that's because what you want to say. I've been trying to see.

It sounded like something he thought of as a joke, but then never actually called it. I guess he said, or you could call it RoboVan. I don't know. RoboVan. I don't think it matters what we call it. It doesn't. Yeah.

It looks like the Tony Stark Iron Man helmet and also the war vehicle from my robot. Sure. So in the same way that the Robo taxi is imagine a model three, but take out the steering wheel and pedals and take out the back seats. And now it's a robo taxi. This is imagine a sprinter van, but take out the steering wheel and pedals and turn all the seats towards the middle.

And at that point, who needs a front and a back? It's just a little, little pod that rolls around around through the streets they went a little crazy with the design it's got like no clearance you can't even see the wheels like i don't think we expect it to look like this at all totally but there's yeah that's there's no details wait his the way he announced it was this is roboven it's uh it's gonna look like that he's like that's how he opened it no that's true let's pull it i want to find the future should look like this or something he said the future should look like the future and he also said picture this thing coming towards you wouldn't that be sick no i would be terrified i guess how coming towards me is coming out of it like that's not what I want. What happens if you need a vehicle that

is bigger than a Model Y? The Reboven. The Reboven is... We're going to make this. It's going to look like that. Why does it sound like he's making it up on the spot? He said, we're going to make this, and it's going to look

like that. It sounds like he didn't see the slides before the presentation, and it rolls out, and he's like, oh. Wait, wait, wait, and then when he goes full Rick and Morty. Can you imagine going down the streets and you see this coming to war, too? That'd be sick. That's pretty much all he said about it, right? Yeah, it's all the details. But he said, we are going to make this, and it's going to look like this.

That's just what he just said. Those are the specs. I'm convinced that what he says on stage isn't real. I think he's just going with the flow and trying to put on a show totally there's no way that this is like a thing he preemptively thought i mean he had slides on in front of him on like a little screen but they looked pretty think about it this way if this was any other company picture name a random car company honda if honda rolled this out and their ceo said we're gonna make this and it's gonna look like this what would your honest thoughts be no you won't bet really that's

cs has been doing that about tesla though that's totally fair okay i had a lot of people point to the cyber truck for this they were like look everyone has said the cyber truck would never come out everyone said the cyber truck wasruck was too crazy, too radical. And look at it now. It's out and it looks just like this. That's fair. And that's a totally fair point. I do recall being one of the people who was like, I don't see why the Cybertruck won't come out.

It's pointy, yes, but they'll get there. And it came out. I think the main thing was the original one had no mirrors and no door handles. Yeah, there are some small details that are different. Totally fine. Let's not get nuanced. Let's not get nuanced. Exactly. That's like small details that are different. Totally fine. Let's not get nuanced. Let's not get nuanced. Exactly.

That's like the motto of this event. But the Cybertruck does come out. So now you see literally anything else Tesla makes and you,

it's like when people defend anything Apple does because the iPhone was expensive. We're like, well, the iPhone was expensive and that worked out

so now this new expensive thing, it's probably gonna work out. And I don't know if that logic works with and that worked out. So now this new expensive thing, it's probably going to work out. And I don't know if that logic works with everything that they announced. I think you can look at something crazy that this company that made the Cybertruck makes and go, that's more extreme than the Cybertruck.

I don't think this is going to come out anytime soon. Do you know what's less extreme than the Cybertruck? What? The Tesla Roadster. True. And that's, we already know that's not coming out how they announced it because they've already re-announced it in a different way yeah and it's still announced that was new announced 2017 yeah so now it's seven years seven years seven years later they

didn't even mention that at the event of course they actually had a bunch of uh they had like this little setup with a bunch of other stuff they They had Model Xs and Model Ss and other cars out. I didn't see any roadsters at all. Really? It's like a, just swept that under the rug, whatever. They, I don't know. I feel like Tesla has a branding problem right now because the Model 3 and the Y especially are just starting to look a little old in the tooth just because they've been around for so long. Model 3 refresh looks pretty solid pretty I think it looks better I think what David's saying is it's like

there's they don't have their new flashy thing right they're not when when people did not a lot of people had Teslas when like the S's were out they looked like really cool like very sports Kari yes and I feel like it would help them a lot to release the roadster just from a like branding perspective to have a halo car yeah because they don't really have i guess the cyber truck is a halo car now but it's so divisive that it's not like it's hard to look at the roadster and say that looks dumb yeah i think a halo car is typically super small volume and super expensive and not mass-produced and really well liked in general which they could do with the roadster every every car company has something like that like even if it's just a totally random like toyota

they might have a super i mean the super is not a supercar but they might have a crazy super high end car that you're like oh i would never buy that but that's cool that made that like that lexus lfa existed the century the toyota century so if if if every car company that tries to sell you a car has some halo that you're never gonna buy but you're like oh it's taking some tech from that thing yeah the roadster feels like it could be that yeah for tesla but it's so low priority for them that they will literally announce a 16-passenger self-driving van before shipping a roaster. Iron Man helmet. That looks like an iRobot military van. Cool.

Look, we all know Elon says a lot of crazy stuff. A judge in California recently said that he can say whatever he wants and it's whatever. The thing he said at the end of The Optimist, and I have the exact quote, and we don't even need to talk about it. I just feel like it needs to be said that he got on stage and said this. The Optimist section.

Optimist robots, and he said they, but he was referring to Optimist robots. Optimist robots will be producing products and services. I predict actually, provided we address the risks of digital superintelligence, 80% probability of good, a good outcome. Look on the bright side, the cup is 80% full. The cost of products and services will decline dramatically. And basically anyone will be able to have any products and services they want. It will be an age of abundance the likes of which people have not

almost no one has envisioned it will be something special is that a genie we don't need we don't need to talk about it i think we should all just sit with it we should all just go to bed tonight and just remember that elon said that the 80 is like ringing in my head right now i think that he tends to do this thing where he just throws things at the wall that seem way out of reach. And sometimes they worked like the SpaceX rocket that we're about to talk about. Like that kind of stuff. Yeah. Awesome.

Incredible. And I feel like Tesla was like that near the beginning of the company when he was growing at the beginning. And then for some reason, they just made this hard turn towards i robot utopia right you utopia right yeah right not me topia you oh right a lot of companies have kind of lately become a little bit victim to this like looking too far ahead because of all the ai promises that they have to make and this is like the most extreme example like we were talking about apple a couple weeks ago apple's always like pretty lockstep. Like here's the product.

Now it's shipping. Here's a product. Now it's shipping. Right. Now this AI age in 2024, suddenly it's here's this new iPhone built from the ground up with Apple intelligence coming later. Well, and also because you're right, Apple does the sort of other thing that they're doing here where, oh, someone's about to start controlling my mouse.

I just got the trackpad connected. Anyway, Apple did the other do you remember the launch of the original the first apple watch ultra when the pitch was just sort of like the world is dangerous you will die and your watch will save you you know it's like but like yes you're right this is utopia is so much more extreme than i've ever seen one of these companies do. Yeah. So it feels to me like the more AI focused a company actually is, the more extreme and far out they have to project to feel like a leader in the space. And if you're Apple, you've never been expected to project crazy AI stuff. If you're a Silicon Valley AI startup, you got to go pretty hard. If you're Google, you got to go pretty hard if you're google you got to go pretty hard if you're tesla and you're talking about ai self-driving ai like full vision like

autonomous robots walking around and you need to project further than the autonomous humanoid robot you already showed two years ago you got to go so hard and so far. That's because people like Sundar Pichai are out here saying AI is a more important invention than fire. So when you were saying those things he said that to Neelai on Decoder. So, you know,

when you're making these statements you have to like you kind of have to try to live up to it. And the other thing is that ai so far we are being told is greater than fire but we have not seen almost any benefits from it like outside of like what we already had from like kidding me i erase backgrounds of photos all the time yeah which i was gonna say like we've art you know we already had machine learning stuff that was doing that stuff no there's this new this new wave that may be a bubble, may not be a bubble of AI has not yet produced really much.

Like there is some interesting stuff. There's some voice cloning stuff. There's fringe stuff that's useful. For audio stuff, it's great. Sure. You know what I mean? At MoMA, there's a kind of interesting ai kind of interesting ai art exhibit right like there's yeah there's been disease detection yeah there's

yeah for sure there's totally consumer based it's pretty low-key right yeah but i just think there's so much money being put into artificial intelligence as a as a category and consumers are not really seeing the benefits of it yet that these companies have to keep saying like just wait it's just in a couple of years the world is going to look totally different can i before we got to move on to this next step but just i just just one because we are talking about this and it made me realize and this company is a sponsor of the show they did not approve this message in any way where's anthropic and all of this like while all these at google and like tesla everyone's like our ai is going to like rip your current life to shreds and elevate you to the next one like a phoenix and anthropic's like claude can like read some of your emails if you want like yeah

their ceo did just did just write like a manifesto about the future of AI this weekend I just keep seeing like I'm a product company and AI is clearly like this tidal wave that's going to hit everything so I need to turn AI into a product yes and so AI has had incredible

advancements in things like disease control or whatever like all these other things that we've seen optimizinguring optimizing things in in all sorts of manufacturing and farming etc but if i am tesla apple or whatever i make products they feel the need to like okay i gotta package this into a product and sell it and that's when you start getting the most extreme weird far-fetching not ready yet versions of products so that's where we're at we're trying to like analyze if they're good products or not they're not done yet we we have talked and this is the last thing i promise this is like the fifth time we've said i promise we

we have like talked about before how it's insane that apple's marketing is like the first phone built up like ground up for apple intelligence on the 16 i literally saw an ad on because i was like i don't know there was a football thing happening at the wedding that i was at the other night and like they had an ad where it was an apple ad and there was a person that like grabbed their iphone they're like yeah apple intelligence on the iphone 16 is pretty cool and like they just showed him and he was saying it's cool and it's like but you if unless you use a beta you can't use it at all yeah i've never that's insane like he didn't have apple intelligence well well he didn't it didn't show you can't the person watching that can't go it didn't show the

phone it was just a guy that was like is that the new 16 he's like dude yeah apple intelligence on the new iphone 16 is really really awesome and i was just like but it's not out and you're telling people to buy the phone now but it's not it's i don't know anyway i just i just i just thought that was crazy that they were actually leaning into the this phone has apple intelligence when it does not i think we already live in an age of abundance guys that's true we truly live in an age of wonder i'd like to live in an abundance of rockets trivia questions oh what about the rocket okay i'll do really really quick yeah we've tried to talk about space stuff on here before but we generally have no idea what we're talking about but hey spacex like three special space episodes spacex caught a 70 meter stage falling back to earth with this thing called chopsticks

and it was pretty incredible. We can't do an hour on Tesla event and then five sentences on this amazing Oh, you want to do it after the break? Oh, after the break. Well, we can do it after the break. Well, it sounds like it's time for trivia! We'll do it after the break. Because it is pretty amazing. It's pretty

sick. Before this very special trivia question, we here at the Waveform Podcast would like to wish you, Paul George, SPD recovery. Good words. Who? Don't worry about it. Today's trivia question, last week we did a Marquez one,

so I figured this day we'll do, this day, today, we'll do an Andrew question. And David, we'll get you next week. Cool. But Andrew's very special trivia question. David, we'll get you next week. Cool. But Andrew's very special trivia question. Which of the following countries does not currently have a Taco Bell location within its borders?

Would you like the list now or at the end? Let's hear it. A. Sri Lanka. B. Cyprus. C. Finland. Or D. Mexico. sri lanka b cyprus c finland or d mexico in mexico they just call that american food does not have a taco bell three of these countries you can get a crunch wrap supreme one of them You're sure they all sell Crunchwrap Supremes? I will double check the menu. You can definitely. No, I'm not so sure.

I feel like I saw. Okay, the question is Taco Bell, though. Yeah, which one does not have a single Taco Bell location currently? They could have historically had Taco Bells and not stuck. Okay. Wow. Cool. This is a pure guess from me.

I don't know about you. Yeah, we'll think about that a little bit. But we'll be back after the break. Support for the show today comes from NetSuite. Anxious about where the economy is headed? You're not alone. If you ask nine experts, you're likely to get 10 different answers.

So unless you're a fortune teller and it's perfectly okay that you're not, nobody can say for certain. So that makes it tricky to future-proof your business in times like these. That's why over 38,000 businesses are already setting their future plans with NetSuite by Oracle.

This top-rated cloud ERP brings accounting, financial management, inventory, HR, and more onto one unified platform, letting you streamline operations and cut down on costs. With NetSuite's real-time insights and forecasting tools, you're not just managing your business, you're anticipating its next move. You can close the books in days, not weeks,

and keep your focus forward on what's coming next. Plus, NetSuite has compiled insights about how AI and machine learning may affect your business and how to best seize this new opportunity. So you can download the CFO's Guide to AI and Machine Learning at netsuite.com slash waveform. The guide is free to you at netsuite.com slash waveform. netsuite.com slash waveform. Support for this podcast comes from Huntress. If you're a small business owner, then the threat of hackers isn't just a threat. It can affect your livelihood. Small businesses are easy targets for hackers.

And Huntress wants to give businesses the tools to help. Huntress is where fully managed cybersecurity meets human expertise. They offer a revolutionary approach to managed security that isn't all about tech. It's about real people providing real defense. When threats arise or issues occur, their team of seasoned cyber experts is ready 24 hours a day, 365 days a year for support. They provide real-time protection for endpoints, identities, and employees, all from a single dashboard. It's because their cutting-edge Thank you. 125,000 other businesses. Let them handle the hackers so you can focus on what you do best. Visit huntress.com slash fox to start a free trial or learn more.

70,000 people are here and Bob Dylan is the reason for it. Inspired by the true story. If anyone is going to hold your attention on stage, you have to kind of be a freak are you a freak hope so and starring timothy chalamet as bob dylan he defied everyone turn it down they lied to change everything make some noise bd timothy chalamet edward norton el fene monica barbaro a complete unknown only in theaters All right, welcome back.

All right. We've talked a lot about far-off future software, not-yet-delivered products that consumers may eventually get their hands on someday. Let's talk about something that's happening right now, which is advancements in rockets. Okay. Just to put it in context,

you guys have heard this spiel before probably but if anyone's not been paying attention rockets have been single use for forever and they're really really big and really expensive and you launch a rocket and drop down into the ocean and that's it you don't get to use a booster anymore you got to build another one right so spacex was built around this idea of reusing rocket boosters. Totally cool idea, but how do you reuse a rocket if it lands in the ocean? Well, you land it somewhere after it launches and then use it again. You refurbish it, fill it back up with fuel, and send it back to space again. Dramatically reducing the cost per launch of sending things into space.

Incredible idea, but engineering- wise, that sounds crazy. And then we started to see them actually pull this off. They started doing tests. They started doing test launches of like just a rocket booster flying up into space and then lowering itself back down to the launch pad. And that was incredible. It was on a pad in the ocean. Yeah, first from the pad in the ocean,

not even into space, a few hundred feet, coming back down, landing. Well, no, sorry, just to correct, it launched from the launch pad and landed on the pad in the ocean? not even into space, a few hundred feet, coming back down, landing. Sorry, just to correct, it launched from the launch pad and landed on the pad in the ocean? Oh, before all of that. Oh, okay. Before all of that.

Just launching from the ground up a few hundred feet and then coming back down. Just that. Amazing. We've never seen that before. Holy shit, they did it. Then they started launching higher and coming back down and landing in the same spot.

But of course, rockets' scale goes hard. So if you go really, really high up, the Earth literally rotates underneath you. You can't land in the same spot. So they would land on a different location from where they took off. And it would be like a launching pad in the middle of the ocean. It would land and it would actually work. And they kept getting further and further and more and more impressive. And they seem to have gotten incredibly good at this because the latest version of this, which we've just witnessed was, I want to say the

biggest rocket ever. So 200 feet tall, that's a building sized rocket. That's 20 story building. So wherever you live right now, look outside and see if you can find the nearest 20 story building and imagine that taking off flying up into space getting some cargo into orbit and then lowering itself back down to the same launch pad where it took off where it got caught by the tower that it took off from so it literally had these giant arms that just closed in and caught the rocket yeah the rocket is 200 feet tall yeah this is the coolest thing i've ever seen yeah i wish i actually saw it in person with my eyes i have spent a long time since i've watched a rocket launch in person but this might be the coolest damn thing ever i would have loved to

see it in person yeah just seeing the video like on the timeline had my jaw on the floor the videos don't i they can't do it justice either because you can't there's no scale so you're seeing this oh it's a rocket shaped thing coming back down but then you see like the cell phone videos of people who are like maybe a few hundred miles away and you can see this like building falling out of the sky with like rockets coming out of it it's kind of sick yeah so i'm sure i got some of the details wrong on like the progression of like how they launch these rockets and land them but dude they're landing rockets in giant tweezers one of my favorite thing about this is that the tweezers close on it but it just has these little two crab leg linchpin things

that are barely jutting out of the two 20-story building that hold the whole thing up. It slowly lands on the tweezers as the tweezers close. So originally it was supposed to be landing on its own legs, which I think, is that what the Falcon 9 one did in the ocean? But I guess they just decided it was so big and getting back that it's easier to put, those are specific load-bearing points just to catch it.

Which is crazy, because the points were very small and it held up a 20-story building. They're small and the rotation has to be correct, right? Because it comes in from the side. So if you're going parallel with that, it doesn't catch it. What's a 20-story, math is crazy what is uh what is a nice math goes how tall is the eiffel tower a thousand feet tall okay that's a little tall

fifth of the statue of liberty imagine the statue of liberty actually that would be so sick wait really imagine the statue of liberty just blowing off into space right now liberty is 300 feet tall with the top of the torch so like lady liberty herself is probably 200 feet tall imagine the entire lady liberty flying back through this was a starship but then you have to catch her well no no starship is 165 feet tall the booster that it caught is 230 feet oh yeah oh the stage that fell back down dang because starship still went i believe in this launch around the earth's atmosphere and landed in the indian ocean so the total height is like 365 i don't know what the total height is because i don't know i don't think it's directly on top of each other. Oh, 400 feet. Yeah, Starship total is 400 feet.

Oh, it is, okay. Yeah, everything combined is like some insane, massive thing. But just the rocket booster was 200 feet tall. You know what's crazy about this too? Like, imagine that 200, like Lady Liberty launching her into space. You know how much like fuel you need to do that? Oh, yeah. To just get that thing out into orbit.

And then imagine that falling down and needing to also still have fuel left over to like push it to slow it down to slow it down like that's a that's crazy i know nothing of really nothing about rocket science yeah but i in some of the books i've or audiobooks i think we're experts actually in some of the audiobooks i've heard it's just it obviously is an insane science experiment but all the things that can go wrong usually end in all of the evidence being exploded which is a unique challenge like you ever think about i don't know you fail at something and you can sort of and that you can look at what you did and see okay i was putting a puzzle together this piece didn't fit so i could pull it out and pull it back together

but in rocket science yeah it'll be like oh we realized that the fuel was sloshing too much as it changed directions and that's why the whole thing exploded yeah so now we'll put it back together but like change the angles of some of the like fins inside the fuel tank so that doesn't slosh as much when it goes back down yeah and they'll figure that out from the like remains on the ground this is insane crime scene yeah so the fact that it all worked out and that's that was the first try for this rocket for this yeah which is wild already a pretty good i did not know was it the first try was it yeah it was um this impressed every single person on the planet except for shania twain

wait okay who's that i need to know this this is now the most interesting part of this oh damn it because i don't impress her so you're a rocket scientist that don't impress me so much i thought she actually commented on it so you've got the brains but do you have the touch andrew oh yeah i see i think you're all right i have a question I have a question for you guys about this. So like, it probably takes like, what, like two hours, an hour to go up? 15 minutes? How long does it take to go all the way around? I think it was 45 minutes.

45 minutes, okay. So it takes- This specific one. It takes 45 minutes, you know, to go up, round the world, land back down, right? That gives you another 23 hours and 15 minutes where your rocket could be making you money. The thing is, it is self-driving already. That's true. Full self-driving.

And there was a point in time in which Elon said that you would be able to get to China in like 40 minutes on a rocket like this. He did say this. You don't have to productize everything. Let's not get nuanced. Let's not get nuanced.'s not get nuanced but yeah but all this to say congrats to everyone at spacex because this was freaking incredible it was wild to watch yeah it was so cool to watch and i recommend watching

it on youtube and thank you to scott manley in 2013 for coming up with this idea and that's a reference six people will get and i love you for it none of those people are in this room they are they are because every time i mentioned kerbal space program oh i like did this happen in kerbal space program one of like the original like super legendary kerbal space program let's plays was like this 200 part series where he wouldn't let a single part get destroyed like every single part had to get returned to earth um and then like eventually the rockets did become reusable where like he never actually like loaded them back into the game he would just load a fuel truck that he designed oh wow so very cool last you know what else starts with the same letter is awesome animatronics. Oh.

Adobe. Adobe. Okay, got it. Adobe, okay. Every year, Adobe has a conference called Adobe Max. It's basically their little conference where they show off all the new updates to all their creative apps. I was there last year. That's where they introduced the whole content credentials thing and a bunch of other stuff,

which we made a video about on the Studio Channel. Now, Adobe is definitely an ai company yeah because every update they make now is an ai update they're all in um i do want to say there was something interesting um there let's see this is quoting directly from the verge it's an article it's like a mini article adobe looks to a new era for generative ai after joking about ai being a drinking game trigger at max adobe's cheap product officer said the company is moving away from the prompt era of the tech which cheapened and undermined the craft of creative professionals by generating things from text descriptions um which is interesting because a lot of these things are text-based uh updates but okay if this is true if they're actually moving away from the like type something into a text box and generate it because nobody really wants that like some people do but it's not it's a cool demo

what we yeah the coolest things i think that they showed off at max were things that were kind of just magic behind the scenes ai updates that made a lot of things easier to do that people like creative professionals already want to do yeah um so we can either go through all the updates from each platform or we can just go through some of the interesting gen ai stuff i mean i'll i'll highlight the one thing i saw which is on on my twitter timeline i or i think someone put in slack there's a video of a compositing tool that's like built into photoshop so we keep talking about how the barrier for entry for a lot of these tools gets just a little bit lower with each of them like oh you click a button on your phone you can erase the background of a photo. This one was like full-on, yeah, compositing, heavy editing,

but built into Photoshop. So you need to have Photoshop and know how to use it, but the tool was like I dragged a PNG of me into this background image of a table, and I hit remove background, and it just perfectly removes the background. And then I hit, I forgot what the button's name was. It was like synthesize or something.

Yeah, something like that. Harmonize. Harmonize. It said harmonize. She hit the harmonize button and the harmonize button did all of the work of matching two different images

in a compositing effect, which takes typically a lot of work, matching lighting, matching exposure, matching color, and just blended the two PNGs together so that it looked like the subject was in the background. And she did that with a couple of different objects

until she created a scene, and then the scene was just formed out of thin air. So it wasn't a real image. It was just something she made with this harmonized tool. And that felt like stuff I've seen from some of the more AI-forward editors, not from Photoshop. So you can tell Adobe's turning the page and like really embracing,

okay, it seems like our users actually want to use this stuff. Let's give them the best we can. Very impressive because it understands the lighting. It understands like the spacing of things and it casts shadows. In the example, she puts herself in the scene with her boyfriend that lives across the world, and she uses a picture of her which has different kinds of lighting on her face because it's a photo of her in front of,

I don't know, some sort of blinds or something. And it completely gets rid of all those shadows and makes it so it looks like they have the same lighting source on them. Very cool. I need to note that this is Project Perfect Blend, and their projects are not yet available and not yet ready or going to be available in the near future like meta yeah but

yeah this is like during their sneaks event where they basically say this is technology we're working on we will probably have this within the next couple of years ah no firm release date yes but but adobe does generally ship this stuff within like a year or two after they show it off which is quite cool they also had another um interesting ai thing that ellis got very excited about that was an audio generation can i do one more photoshop one before we get to sure yeah um this is just more because it's kind of a reference to something we talk about all the time on the pod here. But there's one called Find Distractions, which in this video that they show, it's essentially a photo of that San Francisco, right? Yeah.

San Francisco of all the houses, but there's a ton of power lines in the way. And it can find the power lines and remove all of them without having to select. You just click Find Distractions. It finds them and masks over all of them without having to select you just click find distractions it finds them and masks over all of them and it feels so much like the chain link fence from google i o yeah from years ago yeah so i thought that was pretty awesome especially since you don't have to select each like yeah each one but right cool sorry they're actually able to do that that would be awesome um yes okay so the other like big AI thing that they had was a audio one where you were able to basically, it was like an animation tool and they had these animations of these, uh, dinosaurs. This is the supersonic AI, right? That's what you're talking about?

Yeah. So they had these animations of these like dinosaurs and they wanted to produce these roars for them. And so the idea is like, you can sort of generate a sound based on a text prompt and a vocal input. So the guy on stage goes rawr, rawr. The idea is that it takes like the intonation and the intensity and all of the things that you are voicing. And then it generates a sound based on a text input. So he said like dinosaur roar or something. And it created a very um very cool dinosaur roar is that why that's what you were excited about right yeah i think so yeah because you said you'd be in the audio room pew pewing a lot yeah i mean there's definitely like

certain like when you're sound designing it can be you can have a sound in your head and then it it can be like i actually don't know what that sound is. Like one of the hardest ones for me was like the Apple Vision Pro cinematic intro. The shot of the band tightening, like that's essentially silent, you know? So like what, what, and like I had all these. Ratcheting. I heard like ratcheting and like fabric rubbing on each other but it's like what actually like what do you search for that you know and so

yeah so it'd be easy to just go like yeah so but will I get it is this a thing oh this is also are they going to make this and will it look like that probably in a couple years I thought that was kind of funny.

Clearly you guys didn't. Yes, it will look like that. Oh, I see. By 2026. Yes. You're going to, they're, yes. Maybe. I don't know. It'll cost less than $30,000. Yeah, definitely. Adobe, if you want to, I would like to play.

In Premiere, they now have generative Expand, which is where you can extend a clip either from the beginning or end by up to two seconds. Unfortunately, it can only do 1080p at 24 FPS. For now. For now. Interesting.

I guess this could be useful if you just have, like if you walk out of the room and there's like a plant moving and it just makes it continue to move. If you just need slightly more B roll or something. This is good for all those people on camera who like to cut immediately after the action happens. Yeah. Which is way too many people.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Is this available right now? This is, this one is available. This is available right now. I think Mariah was messing around with it the other day. Yeah. Yeah. Is this available right now? This is, this one is available. This is available right now.

I think Mariah was messing around with it the other day. Yeah. They have image to video on web where you can use text prompts with a source image to make B-roll from photos, which is interesting. They showed this example of this astronaut taking out a Ethernet port from like a, from like a cable array or a hard drive array or something and they had it like extend the clip and also generate part of the clip in it it did not look good it definitely looked very

like as he's taking the cable out the ethernet port is just sort of wobbling and this like a really weird way so I don't you know i think that's one of those things that was also a tech demo that will eventually get better surprisingly this is actually available uh limited to five seconds at 720p though which 720p is not i don't think anyone wants to use a 720p clip maybe for web i don't know uh and then in lightroom they added a bunch of instant edit options that are like those magic edits that google photos has classic and my take on this is they're trying to get more people in the subscription realm or get trying to get more people to use their services more often because lightroom has traditionally been structured as a

like professional tool and now all of these apps like google photos and apple photos are adding these like editing tools built in and because lightroom is a subscription service people are using google photos and apple photos more so i think that they want people to understand like lightroom it can be a power user tool but we also now are introducing all these auto edit buttons that can make it so you can stay in our ecosystem um yeah that was like most of the very big stuff so that's cool they also had like a 3d like a 2d to 3d animation thing for um uh what is it called the thing that tim uses a lot the computer did one design no no oh illustrator illustrator illustrator they had illustrator and then they yeah they had like an easy 3d designer for illustrator as well um yeah it was sounds like cool tim's facing off against ai again pretty soon round two round two

it was a cool event i think that like last year it was last year was just so cringe because it was all like text to image based stuff and because that's all they had they were trying to compete with canva and everything that they were doing felt like it was like not enabling creativity but replacing creativity uh this year they definitely had more things that felt like they modified or made easier tasks that you already had to do. And the fact that one of their, uh,

the, their chief product officer said they're moving more towards that direction, I think is a good direction to head towards. Um, so I have one maybe far out question. Okay. Does this potentially make people better at editing or worse at editing because they don't want because i can see both skills to do it by hand is what you're saying like or because

if this tool gets really really good like some of the examples i saw were people just tossing in like ingredients that just shouldn't ever be blended like if i was gonna composite three photos together i would at least try to match the lighting and like try to like match the angles but you don't even have to with these so i feel like i would get worse at this because of using a good tool but the results are so good that it's better than what i could have made so i'm getting better are you worse at math because you can use a calculator damn Damn. Oh. Yes. Yes. Yes, I am.

But I'm getting the answers better. I think. Exactly. I think even with all these examples, someone who's very good at editing would still do a better job or someone who put the effort in to match the lighting in the photo would still do a better job. I thought it was still pretty obvious those people were editing into the photo,

but it was good. Would they get a better result if you spent the extra time pre like taking the photos i guess we don't matching lighting i think so maybe i hope i do agree though that i think a lot of this seems like it would help with like uh the busy work aspects of things so it'd make you better at editing in the sense that you could probably hit a deadline faster of getting rid of the things that are just like super like minuscule that just take forever like busy work kind of stuff but yeah over time those are the things that keep you sharp and uh keep you like continually working and finding better ways so yeah maybe worse you are relinquishing control of the creative aspect in order to have it be more efficient.

Because the result it gives you could be better or worse, but it depends on what your bar for quality is. Like Magic Wand. Yeah. So, yeah, I don't know. I think that the compositing area of movie production and that kind of stuff has been very quickly being automated by artificial intelligence, especially in movies.

Like you can key things instantly now it's crazy. Um, and the people that. I had a friend that was working at a movie studio and his, for like four years, he was an intern there and all he was doing was masking, manual masking. Oh my gosh. Yeah, dude, I can do, there's a plugin now for motion VFX that lets me do automatic rotoscoping. I just click the subject

and it tracks forward through all the frames and it does a moving mask cutout for me. And it's really good. And it's really good. It's accurate. It does individual hairs. I'm like, well, I will never need to learn how to do rotoscoping now.

Damn. Yeah, that's, yeah. So it's good. I found this interesting because we talked a lot about Google's re-imagine I'm like, well, I will never need to learn how to do rotoscoping now. Damn. Yeah. That's, yeah. So it's good. I found this interesting because we talked a lot about Google's re-imagine feature, right? And there's been this big discussion around like the access that you have to creating something that is not real. And this is sort of an in-between because with Google, it was like it's on your phone. Everyone has a phone. Everyone can use Google Photos.

It's a button or a Pixel 9 or whatever. The difference here is there is a little bit of a barrier because you have to kind of understand how to use Photoshop in general because you have to understand layers. You have to understand like cropping and putting things around. It's still obviously like creating the opportunity for people to make things way faster i think there's going to be positives and negatives that come from that capability but um at least there's the barrier of needing to have a creative tool sounds like what a ceo would say well i'm not funny enough that's where david was last week accepting Accepting his position as CEO of Adobe. Adobe CEO.

Yeah. I don't know. Sick. Anyway, so yeah, definitely something to keep an eye on to see how much of this stuff actually ships and when it does and how good it is and how useful it is to maybe some of our workflow. Yeah. And then we'll talk to Tim.

Make a video with him. Hello, Tim. Well, I think that's about it for this week. A lot of AI stuff. A lot of AI self-driving, a lot of AI Photoshop stuff, a lot of Light Rune Premiere, and Kindles. Colored eating. Really good stuff.

We should end it, though, with, of course, some total shot-in-the-dark guesses at some trivia questions. Trivia, trivia. Trivia. Trivia, yeah. i completely forgot this episode started with kindles she what a journey that wasn't last week quick update on the score marquez with 20 andrew and david tied at 22 all right did you guys get points last week i think marquez got

one marquez got two, I think, actually. Or was it one? Did he get two? I forget. I thought it was just one. Okay. First question. When was the first Kindle?

Oh, right. Released. I should finish that sentence. I should have been thinking about this. The first Kindle. Damn. Wow. The actual question was, how many years has it been since the first Kindle?

I ain't doing that math yeah can we just put the year sure yeah I'm gonna steal the reason think about what songs were popular actually when you held your first Kindle flip him and read that's thing I never owned a Kindle, so I... Oh, I originally put 2006 as well. What do you guys got? I put 2009. Nope. Next. I put 2006.

Nope. Next. I put 2004. 2004, no. I'm guessing it was seven. Closest without going over, though. Andrew gets the point. What was it? 2007.

Oh, that was pretty close. Question number two. But first, a quick correction. Since speaking about AI, Marques sent me a Verge article about the Anthropic CEO talking about ushering in a new utopia. Yeah, that's the one I was mentioning. Right, right. I just didn't realize he literally used the word utopia. Indeed.

So. Yep. Everything's bad. Chill. Anyway, on to something more fun. Taco Bell around the world. The dong herd around the world. The dong herd.

Which of the following countries does not have a Taco Bell location currently within its borders? Hit it. A. Sri Lanka. B. Cyprus. C. Finland. or D, Mexico?

Oh, sorry. You're good. Andrew doesn't look like he knows the answer. I'm just going off vibes, but I'm also not sure if I spelled it correctly lots of people put in Cyprus that's true we all put Cyprus guys I hate to break it to you

there are multiple Taco Bell locations in the country of Cyprus I don't know it just felt like the odd one out I almost put Sri Lanka the correct answer is... Mexico. Mexico.

That would make the most sense. They gave it a try, folks. Did they really? It just feels... Yeah, they all closed. I get why. Wow. It's just too close to the U.S.

that that's why I had a hard problem imagining it. Yeah. Zero? You can get real tacos in Mexico. Zero. I know. Taco Bell's not Mexican food. It's totally different. Yeah. It? You can get real tacos in Mexico. Zero. I know. Taco Bell's not Mexican food. It's totally different.

Yeah. It's like Domino's. I like my pizza. I also like my Domino's. I feel the same way, brother. Not a single one. Wow. Well, today I learned something new. Well, cool. I can still go to Cyprus then.

But not Mexico good place to end it I think we've we've yeah we've covered just about everything there was to cover this week much more upcoming of course so get subscribed if you haven't already

and we'll catch y'all soon in the next one peace Waveform is produced by Adam Malina and Ellis Riven we're partners with Vox Media Podcast Network and our intro to music was created by Vain Sil bingo let's go bingo let's go produced by Adam Malina and Ellis Roven. We're partners with Vox Media Podcast Network and our intro to music was created by Vane Silk. Bingo. Let's go.

Bingo. Alright, let's talk about the tweezers. Support for this episode comes from AWS. AWS Generative AI gives you the tools to power your business forward with the security and speed of the world's most experienced cloud. Support for this show comes from Misfits Market. Misfits Market is an online grocery store that helps you save on groceries by saving food. They work with farmers and food makers to rescue perfectly delicious food that might have gone to waste and deliver it to you at a discount.

Plus, they carry hundreds of other curated, high-quality items you can feel good about thanks to Misfits Market's quality guarantee. Misfits Market is free to join, and right now you can get $15 off each of your first two orders. Just visit MisfitsMarket.com and use the code SHOPMISFITS to save money on your grocery bill.