WTF Happened in 2025 - Waveform Rewind

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Everyone but David has watched Hot Ones enough that we should all know this. The only Hot Ones episode I watched was the one where, what's his name? You better be careful. David has been right there. Marquez has been on it twice. I think I watched that one. Wait, twice? I watched one. I didn't know you went on again. Unbelievable. I talked so much about you on that episode. That's crazy. He was like my good friend David. There was a whole section where Sean is like, I heard you're friends with David. You should totally watch it. It was so good. All right, that's cool. Keep it up. Yo, what's up, people of the internet? Welcome back to another episode of the Waveform Podcast. We're your hosts. I'm Marquez. I'm Andrew. And I'm David. And this week, we've got a regularly scheduled... I said, Ellis is going to... I haven't interrupted you. That's right. Because... And I'm Ron Burgundy. And I'm interrupting you because this episode is not like normal episodes. Do you guys know why this is a very special episode? Is it because it's the last one this year? It is coincidentally the last episode of the year, but that's not what I was going for. Last regularly scheduled of the year. Yeah, but that's not what he means. Hit it, Rich. Oh, no. Guys, this episode is being taped at 5 p.m., which means this is the first ever episode of... Oh. Wait for him after dark? After dark. Thank you, Rich. You can get the watch. Oh. i was wondering why richard's here i was like this is a long clip for you um that was it should we talk about why we're here at 5 p.m yes we should that's a good transition okay so uh today i got to finally get some hands-on time with this thing right here which is the samsung galaxy z trifold uh this morning we went into the city got some info from samsung on what it was about and got to shoot some footage of it. And then we got back to the studio and the one that I bought from Korea had also arrived the same day. And that is this one right here. So how much did it cost you from Korea? Do you know how much it cost? So I'm going to get my invoice later. So I don't actually know, but I hear it's somewhere between $2,500 and $3,000. It's an expensive phone. But I, you know, I've watched other people's videos on it and I've seen photos of it and it looks like such a chunk. And I keep thinking, oh, it's kind of a gimmick, like whatever, Samsung's doing the trifold thing. But it's obviously not going to be reasonable to use. And then I picked it up and held it. And I used it with the screen closed, which is basically the same as the Z Fold 7. And it's fine. And then I opened it. And it's a whole tablet on the inside. And I'm starting to think this is actually kind of a nice, like a really nice phone this year. It's obviously super expensive. But I'm holding it up to the camera for the video viewers. This thing is a full diagonal 10-inch tablet on the inside. And I like it more than I thought I would. so are we going to get rid of short form video now that we're going to be able to have landscapes in our pocket no because like you said you said this before you don't you can put you can put three short form videos across it and play it like a slot machine you actually it's literally short form slots sure dude and if you get all three screens showing the same short like it's a for you page then you win and you can't stop until that happens yeah instead of it being like a seven a cherry three or four things it's millions of videos that you have to get lined up so yeah you can do three things side by side if you get all three videos being the same then neil moynihan has to step down and you become the ceo of youtube his name is neil moynihan station sorry neil i love the moynihan station that's beautiful so there's a couple quirks about this um i'll go through so the basic specs are actually kind of fine they're just like a one-year-old flagship samsung is using the snapdragon 8 elite for galaxy so not elite gen 5 but elite for galaxy the only spec is 512 gigs of storage and 16 gigs of ram so that's pretty sweet uh the outside screen like i said is the exact same as z fold 7 wait real quick is there one terabyte version i thought on the samsung press mobile something uh maybe that's not coming to the u.s because i was told it's only one spec 512 okay there might be somewhere where you can get a one terabyte version oh okay even better um but yeah the outside screen the cover screen is just your classic uh 21 by what is it 21 by 9 i think it's a wide screen obviously 2600 uh nits 120 hertz why am i it's hard to talk i've been talking all day it's been a long day but then you open the phone oh on the back has the cameras uh same as a z fold 7 as well so 200 megapixel primary and then an ultra wide and a 3x telephoto so mid great okay yeah but then you open it and it's like it's a tablet so no it's it's all the things you can watch full screen videos you can game you can have apps side by side and they're not actually cramped that's huge yeah uh you can type on a full-size keyboard you have decks all the time even without being connected to a monitor uh you can also connect it to a monitor mouse and keyboard and use that as a second display can i ask a stupid question go for it what does decks not on a monitor even mean because isn't the whole point of decks that it goes on windows it's just like it's just more computer like yeah yeah but on the screen okay yeah no that's a very valid question yeah so it's like full it's just full screen apps that give what's a computer different like like if you're in the files app it'll show the full tree structure and then you can resize windows and you can keep them in certain areas it's literally a desktop everything's computer everything's computer i know it's just an ipad well it's a samsung galaxy tab yeah oh wait that's kind of i've got three windows open here and then i go you know what i want to go to a new space whoa and do three more windows and then move back i'm gonna say something real quick those creases are pretty rough right now those are yeah not good so the creases are rough and whatever it's like it's kind of similar to the early generations of other phones with crease where when i'm looking at it and using it the content is more than enough to distract me from the crease but if i am analyzing the hardware yeah it's so obvious the creases the creases are two different sizes because there are two different hinge ratios because the left side is the inside fold and the outside folds around the inside folds it's even bigger so yeah there is a lot going on with the hardware engineering but uh i found that actually using the phone and just watching videos and like typing and emailing and all that stuff is really solid question yeah uh considering the square aspect ratio of a bifold is kind of lame uh for watching videos and doesn't really do anything for you in my humblest opinion um how much of a 16 by 9 video fits full screen on this how many black borders there's small black borders so the whole thing wide open is 16 by 11 so it's pretty close to like if you watch i don't know if you can find a 16 by 9 each video but our videos are two by one and there's reasonable black bars but it's way bigger than a slab. And if you go 16 by 9 videos you're even smaller black bars top and bottom. So it's like it's most of the display though you'd say? Yeah. It's pretty nice. Apps that use the whole screen like gaming or whatever. The split screen keyboard is literally there's no keyboard on the middle panel. That's so funny. Samsung's tablets do that too so they just treat it like a tablet. It makes sense. It's just really jarring to see a whole panel with nothing in it. I do love the idea of being on an airplane and being able to play a PlayStation 2 game with a controller. Is that not awesome? Oh my god, that's sick. Is that not awesome? God of War? Yeah. I'm preemptively thinking about what the comments will be. We just published our video, my hands-on with it. I think one common concern or question that I have is, all right, I already have a tablet. Why is this better than a tablet? It's not. It's just that it can fit in your pocket. Yeah. That's like the main, like obviously if you already have a phone and a tablet, this isn't for you. But the person who wants to have a phone and a tablet but take it in their pocket with them, this does that. I mean you have to have a bag to carry a tablet with you basically. Yeah. You don't with the 10-inch screen. Yeah. That is pretty amazing. So that's sweet. It has a cellular connection all the time, which is nice for a tablet. It's thinner probably than the tablet you're thinking of. But the other thing is it's definitely a smaller battery than the tablet you're thinking of. Yeah. Most 10-inch tablets have, like, an 8,000 milliamp hour battery, roughly. Even Samsung's, like, Tab S10 has roughly an 8,000 milliamp hour battery. This has a 5,600 milliamp hour battery. Is that YouTube's desktop site? No, that's actually, I'm trying to find a 16x9 video, so that's your iPhone 5S review. Is that a 16x9 video? I was guessing we switched to 2x1 when Brandon and Vin convinced us to, like, 2018. That's pretty good, and then you can enlarge it, and then it looks awesome. Looks pretty good. That's pretty... I don't know. That's definitely cutting a lot off the sides when it's full screen, full screen. It is when you full screen. But yeah. What is the IP rating of this, French? 48. IP 48, which is also the same as the Z Fold 7. Yeah. So you can drop some water on it, next to it, around it. That's impressive. Yep. For a Gen 1. A dust particle or like piece of sand being folded in not once, but now twice. Probably bad. Yeah. Probably don't get dust around it. I am concerned about that. That's going to be the longevity test for people that have this early. Yeah. I think this is fair to consider it a first-gen product. Like, it's a first-gen tri-fold. So, it's first-gen something. I think I'll turn the rotation lock off. Rotation lock. Rotate. Rotation. I turn rotation lock off. I've said so many words today. Have you seen that trend that's been going around that's like, it's on the TV and it goes, rock, sock, rock, sock, box, sock, rock, sock. I feel like you could not do that right now. I'd be very bad at it right now. Are you going to daily this? I've been thinking about it. You've got it. I imported it from Korea, so I'm not exactly sure what the bans or situation is going to be looking like. But on this phone, I think I would like to daily it. I think I can get my eSIM in there and try it. Oh, it's not? Landscape Block is not. Oh, wait. Yes, it was. Hold on. Oh. Almost didn't daily it because we almost just lost it. Just dropped it on the floor. The amount of products that we've taken out the box and dropped on this podcast is like... Linus, watch out. All right. Cool. Yeah, I'm more of a fan than I expect it to be. I really think there's a big difference between the on-screen presence and the in-hand presence of this phone. Yeah, for sure. Which is so hard to convey in video because you're watching this on a screen, so it probably doesn't translate very well, but you'll have to take my word for it. I can't wait until there's another Chinese version of this, but it has better batteries, and it's got like 12,000 million powers or something. Seems like that's in root. I mean, are we talking about this later, but isn't there some more steam for this iPhone fold this year? Yeah, it's coming out next year. People think it's going to be like kind of a squat regular size phone and then it opens up to be wider than it is tall, which makes sense because the whole idea with all these square folds is you don't really get a ton out of a lot of media situations. Is that a new leak that just came out? I saw someone posting it, but it looks so poorly rendered. It felt just like glazed. So it like opens up into like an iPad mini like turned on its side, basically. Kind of, yeah. I think I saw somebody did a mock-up of basically, like, imagine, like, the first-gen pixel fold, like, that sort of passport size, but then you open it, and it's a wider screen. And that makes it better for watching videos on the inside, which I could see that being a highlight, you know, of this film. Okay, a question for you guys about this. Fast forward 10 years. Are we using smart glasses, or are we using phones like this that unfold into, like, a giant tablet? This. I mean, we'll have smart glasses as well. You said 10 years or five years? I say 10 years. Let's do 10 years. I think that not everyone is going to... If you don't have a prescription, you'll use smart glasses as sunglasses. If you do have a prescription, people will start using smart glasses on the daily. But I don't think it's going to replace their phone. I think it's just going to be the Meta Ray-Ban style. You know, it'll have a display. It'll give you notifications. But I don't know. I probably won't wear it because I have perfect vision. I think there's a degree where now that we're hitting max dopamine technology, we're finding that outside of video games and vertical video, people don't really spend that much time using tech. So I think the value prop of a device that can't really do vertical video that well or game very well, I don't know if people are going to wear. No, no, smart glasses. Oh. Smart glasses can't do vertical videos. I would argue smart glasses, that's kind of the point of it, is it's just it's there when you need it, and because it's so convenient that it's there the times you do need it, and you don't have to pull something out of your pocket. It's just like right there. Fun fact. I ain't trying to waste time pulling out of my pocket. I use wireless charging. I'm efficiency major right here. Wow. You can doom scroll Instagram reels on the meta. Yeah, on the highway. That's right. Yeah. Oh, God. that's one of their use cases yeah i just looked it up um we went from not having any foldables to having foldables the way we have them now in about eight years has it been that long like the z-fold one is 2019 and we had foldables for maybe a year or two before that so like 2017 to 2025 and it's progressed so much that even this triple folding well the trifold is thinner than the z-fold five wow it was that thick for that long like when it's folded up when it's folded up it is thinner than the z fold five when the z fold five unfolded it's thinner than the iphone air we put it up to the to brandon's the panels are three different sizes are they all smaller than they're all thinner as thin as its thickest point yeah if you can't fit it through a slot that is one of the interesting things about this phone is each one of these panels is a slightly different thickness 3.9 millimeters on the left 4.2 millimeters in the middle 4.0 millimeters on the right to fit battery and usb type c and you know speakers and all the things happening in this phone uh that's just how it but yeah they're all thinner than the iphone here and then you fold it up and it's thinner than z fold one two three four and five kind of crazy i think i just realized a very small mistake we made in the video i cut that out i'm thinking the same thing because you said the middle panel for usbc but it's the middle panel when it's folded when it's unfolded it's the right panel yep oh god i caught that and cut it out i yeah i would never would have thought of that things are a lot harder to describe when you have 3d space audio people are like i don't understand what you're doing audio people when you're unfolding it they kind of looks yeah not doing that the phone's usbc port is on the bottom uh when it is folded up but because the bottom is actually the middle the right most wait never mind it's the right most panel is the right most panel which is the bottom when it's folded okay what is you ever you ever bought like a like a fish from a fishmonger it kind of unfolds like that like like you lay down you go one and then two and then you got your fish i actually have this is our answer isn't there like is it on reddit or something when you like retire a phrase because it perfectly hits like you found the perfect description for that yeah i think we can retire fingerprint magnet with this phone because dear lord the amount of fingerprints on the surface area of this phone it's crazy you gotta wear gloves it's like this black and gray carbon fiber mimicking fiberglass composite it's smooth ish and i think it makes sense in here yeah because you have to make something smooth with a little bit of a bezel that you can then safely close the outside screen over yeah So no real texture. But, yeah, very much a finger per match. Did you get the kickstand case with it? The case that comes with it is just a sort of a back spine and back cover case. So that's the Samsung case. It also comes with a 45-watt charger in the box. It's crazy. They throw you a little bone for $3,000. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That wobble is crazy. The wobble is next. I mentioned it in the video. Every time I mention it, people are like, you put a case on it. Okay, so fine. So you'll put a case on, it'll be fine. But this is one of the biggest wobblers of all time. The case that comes with this thin enough, it's still going to wobble like this. It wobbles a lot less. I tried it. I actually think that they thought about that one. All right. They should bring back the bikini case for this. The bikini case. Actually, it was kind of iconic. It was iconic. Ellis doesn't remember it. Search Galaxy S8 bikini. Was it S8? Galaxy S8. Can I hold it? I, for one, am excited for you to test this so that I can decide whether or not I definitely will not scream. I did it wrong and it yelled at me. Oh, I did want to see that. It yells at you. It vibrates at you. It vibrates strongly. Can I see that? Can I break it? Is it bad? I haven't. It's bad if you break it. Nothing's really happy. I mean, if you try to, like, smush it, it'll probably not be good. No, you can do that. You can do it the wrong way. It only does it. Stop! Yeah, it doesn't like it. It yells at you. but otherwise yeah very intuitive well i'm excited to see whether or not you actually get value out of this this is what i have considered like the dream device for a very very long time and uh if i could have something that i could just carry a little bit a little keyboard with me and a little mouse with me and i could just write on google all i want to do is write on google docs that's all i want to do without having to carry a laptop so if this can do that i'm very happy i just like that the light phone and this came out in the same year wow maximalist and minimalist i i do maintain like the most fun i've ever had on a foldable is e-reading with one page on each side and i don't know what that would be like because it looks like a real book it feels like a real book a real book couldn't even do this can this do three pages yeah yeah four dimensional book right yeah um okay great so yeah that was our we have the z fold in in house for real for real on god underscore final dot mp4 last week's episode we titled the galaxy z fold the galaxy z trifold is here for real for real on god what are we supposed to title this week's episode underscore final dot mp4 yeah yeah no i think yeah all right that title went hard last week also. CTR was fantastic. It was really. Speaking of the things that you can do on the Galaxy Z Trifold, if there is if there was this new social media app coming out that is supposed to replace Twitter, you could run it on one of the three screens. Was that a Segway? That's what I was trying to do. Oh. Yeah. C+. What? Come on. Was Segway Wordle last night? yeah it was swade i think it was segue it's either segue or suede segue i think i guessed to suede first well well what is this social media all right let me tell you about this yeah okay so a couple federated no it's not and this is why no point this is why i'm like if you're gonna make a social media up in the future just stop non-federating them come on guys so what is it we're in 20 seconds okay so a couple weeks ago this startup popped up called Operation Bluebird and effectively what they're trying to do is get the Twitter name back because they are making the claim that X abandoned the Twitter name when they switched everything to X which I would you know agree with I would disagree really dude I think they very hastily changed some things like the URL and the logo to X but for a long time pieces of the ui in the settings still said correct but that was them being like lazy yeah i like agree with both of you i think it is still everywhere and it's still almost considered twitter for the most part but i think the owners of twitter they said yeah it's not twitter anymore and like they make fun of people for calling it twitter still and like elon replied to you on x you said i'm still calling it twitter and elon said you won't yeah well is that that's got to be used in the litigation we're still calling it twitter today that's gotta be used in litigation yeah anyway so last week they filed a petition to the u.s patent office to cancel x's ownership of the trademarks for twitter and tweet trademark yeah trademark uh because x had made it clear that they didn't have any intention to use the twitter name anymore okay right um x has now sued them which they didn't need to do they could have just filed a motion to cancel the trademark infringing the trademark cancellation i'm sorry what's x you keep saying x okay here's another problem when i'm trying to google something on the x platform it's impossible because you just write x in google after and it nothing comes up twitter doesn't you're trying to search twitter and you're using like google spacex yeah it doesn't do anything it's impossible spacex.com does that work you could probably do site search is a different company yeah Look what happened! It was bad. Anyway, they're suing trying to stop them from doing this. They're arguing that as of December 14th, more than 4 million users came to X by typing in twitter.com. I'm one of them. Everyone is. That's all of them. This is so frustrating because I want to stick it to the man and call it Twitter, but I'm actually... You want them to lose the... Yeah, I want them to get f***ed, and I'm helping them not do that. I mean, they were big about changing it to X, so, you know, commit, you know? This is such a weird thing, because, like, if you, even if you, like, if I own a trademark or whatever, and I stop using it, that doesn't mean people immediately sue me to cancel my ownership of it. If you have no intention to use it in the future, then they can file to cancel your ownership of it. Interesting. So it's up to them to determine if I intend to use it in the future or not. It's like the guy who got Lambo.com. yeah actually that's actually a lot like that yes uh how long has it been called x i think since 2021 right no no no it was after i started working here 2022 i think it was 2023 oh wow okay well anyway uh this bluebird startup has this site called twitter up right now where you can sign up you can reserve your handle in case they ever actually do get the twitter name that brutal right now they don have it so it kind of a if we do um i just don think that they're ever going to make it be able to be exactly like old twitter was unless they literally copy the source code and the reason that old twitter was able to be old twitter was because jack dorsey did not care about it making money that's the only reason that it was the way it was for so long. I don't know if he didn't care about it. He just wasn't good at it. Well, he had, like, no, I mean, he had, like, majority ownership, and, like, he didn't have to, he didn't have to, like, go by the whims of some investors, you know, to try to, like, inshittify it. Well, until he sold it. Yeah. And then inshittified it. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I, there, I will say that there will never be another OG Twitter. Like, that was an era that came and went, and now there are things that are trying to be it, and it's not going to happen again it's not gonna happen and it's almost cringy that this new startup is trying to be the new twitter like i don't really think that's a good goal to have but i just got at elon musk on twitter.new my god i take it back i take it back you reserved it and it said nobody had already reserved it nope that's insane this is one of those things where the twitter.new thing is it's like i don't care this is stupid but it's really funny to watch x like squirm a bit and be like no no just kidding we do really want it yeah i mean even though we told everyone we don't i still use twitter.com to go to x oh yes so do i so yeah there's just too many there's too many micro chasms of the internet at this point and being able to have like one central social social media site where things are happening it's just not possible anymore is it i think you mean micro I think you mean micro contrast. They don't know that reference yet. Yeah, that'll be next week. That's funny. Yeah, well, I don't know. They're going to try, but I kind of think that we're just going to keep using the things we use. Which way do you think that they're going to rule? What's your prediction? The ruling? I think because Twitter.com still links to X.com, they'll probably go, ah, well, seems like that's still in use. That might be enough. But I'm not a lawyer, so. because it's illegal advice but i'm not a rapper that's funny all right well let's take a quick break when we come back we still got more to talk about end of the year type news uh but before we take a break yes trivia time guys let's get the energy up come on it's 5 p.m i know it's 5 30 it's 6 p.m we gotta we gotta get hype uh before i do trivia i just need to issue a correction from last week because last week i got mad and called out a uh a company that sort of sounds like buy mommy for raising the price on my domain and this is really embarrassing um because a very nice fan wrote to me who runs a website called domain details which posts helpful information and stuff about websites and whatnot and he explained to me that uh it actually wasn't go daddy that raised the price it was the registry which is really embarrassing i don't think uh i don't know who does vin donuts is the big one yeah it's pretty embarrassing because we did like three hours of podcasts on how this all works, and I still got it wrong. And if you want to know what a domain registry is, you can go to DomainDetails.com or listen to our two-part series on how the internet works. David and I and Adam go to Virginia. We did. We shared two beds with three people. Yes. And they did have an indoor pool. Watch the episode to find out. It's really weird you all slept in the same bed. Two of us did. And if you want to find out which two of us slept in the same bed, you'll have to go and listen to the episode. Yeah. We had two beds for three people, and we only used one. I mean, this is Wayform After Darks. Yeah, that's true. Wayform After Dark. Okay, guys. Next, we're going to kiss in the Vision Pro. Anyway, 6 p.m. What's the question? All of it. All of it's making it. Come on. Guys. I love it. what three letters represent both a chinese tech conglomerate and the initials of an american blues legend i want to write down what i think it is the blues legend it's their initials it's the initials of their stage name not their birth name i did not know that conglomerate or company is that going to help us at all it would it would because I know I feel like I feel like if I tell you which one I mean I did already say you said conglomerate yeah that might you know that kind of makes it a little easy but that's the question that's just the question we'll be right back after the break what What are the main takeaways of the foreign policy section from Donald Trump's State of the Union address? I do think they've made a decision to elevate domestic issues as we head towards the midterms. We'll see if that sticks because he keeps getting drawn back to the foreign policy issues. I'm John Feiner. And I'm Jake Sullivan. And we're the hosts of The Long Game, a weekly national security podcast. This week, we'll react to President Trump's State of the Union address, the situation with Iran, and the eruption of violence involving cartels in Mexico. The episode's out now. Search for and follow The Long Game wherever you get your podcasts. In the wake of the release of millions of documents related to the Jeffrey Epstein case, the rich and famous are finally feeling some pain. But even with corporate resignations here, and with former Prince Andrew being arrested in the UK, the question remains, how did Jeffrey Epstein remained a thriving member of the elite for decades when everyone seemed to know what he was up to. I don't think you could be friends with Jeffrey Epstein, whose M.O. was obviously having sex with young girls, even as Trump said, on the younger side and not know his M.O. Untangling the Epstein conspiracy. That's this week on Today Explained, every weekday and now on Saturdays. This week on Net Worth and Chill, I'm joined by Her First 100K, a.k.a. Tori Dunlop, a fellow personal finance creator who's changing how an entire generation thinks about money. Tori's journey is a masterclass in turning personal finance wins into a platform that empowers millions. She opens up about the real strategy behind hitting that six-figure milestone without the typical privileged blind advice and how she's redefining what it means to be a wealthy woman in 2026. We're diving deep into investment strategies for real people with real budgets and why financial feminism isn't just a buzzword, it's a movement. Get ready for an unfiltered conversation about money, entrepreneurship, and what it really takes to build both personal wealth and a business empire. Listen wherever you get your podcasts or watch on youtube.com slash you're rich BFF. Oh yeah. Waveform after dark. Whose voice is that? it's always else's voice i like the like the tone at the end like it's nice bravo no that's a ps3 startup music what do you think i'm doing in the audio room all day man making that all right so instagram launched a new app yeah but only for he it's it's for tv but it's not instagram tv correct it's for fire tv fire tv so i'm assuming this just lets me doom scroll my tv now yes sick i've been waiting for that but worse you know what's crazy i have a youtube app on my samsung tv at home and you can doom scroll shorts on it and i've done it that's all oh no me too wait do you do did you do it on purpose no well i didn't enter the carousel on purpose but once i entered the carousel i was like i wonder if i can oh no hold on you're like yeah yeah YouTube, I have a feature idea. Uh-oh. Let you rotate 90 degrees so you can lay down on the couch, use all of your landscape screen real estate, and do scroll that way. Whoa. Yeah. That was really efficient. So, new Instagram TV app. It's not the IGTV, though. We might be too old for this. You might be too young for this if you're listening. But Instagram did launch a thing called IGTV before reels were a thing that failed spectacularly. but it was also like you had to turn your phone sideways it was around it was around the quibby days if you know what that means remember when we asked the question it was just vertical video yeah yeah well people sometimes like me uploaded horizontal right only tv yeah um but remember when we used to ask the question is this like a product or a feature yes in hindsight it was so obvious that vertical video was just a feature of instagram and they should have built it in yeah but it really to them was so vastly different that it was an entirely separate product yeah it's crazy am i crazy because you guys have talked about this you guys talked about this a few times and i feel like i'm having like a mandela effect because i only remember igtv as being a button in the bottom of the instagram there was a put a button in the instagram app that launched the other app that's what that button launched the igtv app i never pressed it they eventually obviously moved it in to just be a section of instagram but there was probably a couple months there where it was a whole separate thing yeah they had a crazy launch party for that too it was the whole thing. The logo was kind of fire. Yeah. Well, now, yeah, it kind of looks like MTV. Oh, that's the other. I think that's the fake logo. This app is currently only launching on Amazon Fire TV devices, which is a very niche collaboration. Look, I think that short form videos is a scourge on humanity and is melting our brains. However, this is my like... Hey, subscribe to Waveform Shorts. yeah well well you can't subscribe to the shorts you can only you can try you can subscribe to clips but that's not that's not we don't we haven't done that's not vertical a year vertical short well that was embarrassing yeah so however and this is only like a two percent however this is like i still think this is bad but you know if you're watching on tv there's a much higher chance that you're watching it with somebody else and i think that considering people send reels to each other so much because they want like we have a whole reels channel in instagram where we just send it it's a studio channel where we just send it to each other yeah the social aspect of watching video together is very strong and considering the content quality of many reels has gotten very high I think having your friend, your partner, your dog on the couch with you, your cat, to watch your reels with you, there could be 2% value in that. You know? The social video watching experience. Yeah. Yeah. You're saying Lane and I should sit on the couch and watch reels together? I mean, there is obviously to an extent people already do this with every other form of video. It's just adding short form vertical video to the list of things that you can watch on your TV. Yeah. I mean, which, fine. If I'm going to be forced to watch Reels, I'd rather watch it on my TV with somebody than on my phone. I was just going to say, we're already forced to watch Reels. So would you rather have this split off into its own IGTV app that has Reels? Yes. Right? But they'll never do that. Yeah, at this point, yeah, it's better for us because we're less likely to open it and therefore less likely to get addicted. And we can go over there intentionally when we want that brain rot and then we come back. But obviously that's the opposite of what they want. They want us to just stumble into short form video and just start scrolling. Yeah. Which is hilarious because you used to just swipe over on Instagram and that would be your inbox. Now you swipe over, it's just Reels. Yeah. Convenient. I mean, if they swap them into separate apps, I would download Instagram again. But I undownloaded it because I was so tired of Reels and like looking through it. Does your brain feel better? Hell yeah. For a lot of reasons. A little wrinklier. much rinkler again yeah well anyway um open ai has also launched a new image generator model which is best for enterprise use they say and i think the only reason that they're saying that is because they just did a one billion dollar deal with disney um if you're we didn't talk about this last week but open ai struck a one billion dollar investment deal with disney where uh disney now gets to use sora very very extensively and there will be disney characters in sora and i've already seen what some people are doing with it and it's not good it's pretty bad the last thing i would want is my children's based animated characters to the heathens of the internet the reason that disney said they want to do this is because they are going to add short-form generative video feeds to Disney+. Which if you really want... What does that even mean? They're going to do the Sora app to Disney+. They're going to have generated Disney videos on the Disney+. app that are generated with Sora. User-generated? I don't think so. I think by Disney. People. It's really bad. Instead of hiring animators to do that, they're just going to have Sora do it. They're a lean team over there. lean team over at disney really weird this is a company that's known for a like bespoke making everything by hand like with armies of artists and engineers and imagineers and animators and b suing the bejesus out of anyone who uses any of their ip yeah yeah and now they and now they've now they've gone and done this yeah so i i think that open ai needed to make the new image model to compete with Gemini because Gemini 3's image model was really, really, really good. And that's the reason they did it. But the reason that they're saying it's best for enterprise use, I think, is just because they made this deal with Disney. And we also did not talk about this, but last week, the day after they announced the $1 billion investment deal with Disney, they also sued Google for massive copyright infringement on a massive scale. Oh, I thought it was the same day. It was the day after. Oh, okay. Basically, yeah, they're just trying to get everyone to pay them, you know, or to work with them in different ways. Disney pays, like they're trying to get Google to receive a billion dollars. Like what's the... Well, to work with them in some way, I don't know. I think they're like, these companies are just going to steal our IP no matter... You can go on Gemini right now and just generate Disney characters. So I think that they're like, all these companies are stealing our IP no matter what. We should figure out a way for this to work for both of us because otherwise, you know, it's just going to happen. Yeah. Sorry to depress you on a Tuesday night, Wednesday night. This kind of stuff hits way worse at 6 p.m. Yeah. Well, in more positive news that happens in the morning, Google has launched a new CC feature in Labs. See, that's the kind of high-quality segues I'm looking for. Thank you. You're welcome, Adam. And effectively, I think you would actually like this a lot, Marques. I'm on the wait list. Oh, you're on the wait list. Yeah. Well, you do like it a lot. It plugs into your calendar, your Gmail, and your Google Drive to basically give you a morning briefing of everything you've got going on during the day, things that you might want to schedule, that you might want to take a look at. It's basically a Gemini sort of butler assistant thing, but in your email. I have a theory about this that's going to be extremely nationwide and only apply to a few people. Do it. so for those of you who are like me who every morning ask hey gee how's my day or what's my day like and then google assistant goes through and does the normal routine of like here's your a here's your b here's your commute or whatever whatever you put in for it to tell you it does that this is that and i think when the teams that make these two separate products realize like they meet each other when these teams meet each other on google campus one day they're going to combine them and they will give me like an ai like good version of this at some point but they have to meet first so hopefully one of them is watching this podcast and they realize that they exist it's almost like they have a video conferencing app that's called the exact thing starling yeah um yeah so i don't know i mean i'm curious how it might use like your google drive to let you know what you need to do that day. I can see the calendar making sense. I can see your email making sense. Google Drive seems strange, unless there's some enterprise Google Drive feature with due dates that I don't know about. It could be fun if it knows which video script Google Doc I've been working on, and it's like, oh, you're going to need a link to this doc today. Yeah, it'd be cool. If it just opened all the tabs you needed at once. That'd be fire. That'd be fire. Starline is what I meant to say. Oh. Because I'm an idiot. I was like, Starlink? I remember Starline. Yeah. So it is in beta right now in Google Labs for Gemini Ultra and paid users in the U.S. and Canada. I think Google is just trying to put Gemini in every little aspect of people's lives, even people who live in their email inbox, which is a lot of people. It's me. Well, you also live inside a camera. You also don't use Gmail. I don't use Gmail.com, but I use Gmail. I thought you used Superhuman. Well, yeah. Yes. Which syncs Gmail. Yeah. But I mean, like, well, you wouldn't get this feature, would you? Unless you're using... I think you get it as an email. I think it arrives as an email. Oh, I bet it was like a pop-up in the email app or something. I mean, ideally, it's reading all the emails or whatever from my account and then just shows up as another email. Yeah. Maybe. What's interesting, if you want to talk to CC, you can email CC or you can reply to one of the emails it sends you and it will send you an email back. So it's kind of like... And then it turns into a chatbot, and then it's Gemini, and then suddenly you're in the Gemini app. Yeah. Yeah. And now I'm confused. The AI's name is CC, or you CC it in an email? The product name is called CC as a play on words to the fact that it's through your email. Okay, but you're not actually CCing. You're not carbon copying anything, yeah. I thought it was closed caption. No. I thought it was the famous Yankees closed caption. That's just so bad. He gets it. I don't know what that is. A phone driver. Anyway, speaking of things that are former, the Ford F-150 Lightning is discontinued. What? Isn't that crazy? Only as we know it, though. As we know it. So the Ford F-150 Lightning was one of the original competitor EVs to Tesla. Tesla was doing their thing for a while, and then we got a couple big new EV competitors. There was like the Mach-E. There was, oh, what was the other? I'm going to remember them, actually. F-150 Lightning was the pickup truck. And then Rivian R1T came along. And Jaguar I-Pace. I remember this era. Every new EV got compared to the Tesla. F-150 was one of them where we went, ah, that's good. That's one of the things that Tesla doesn't have and that people are going to want. And they basically just made an F-150 with all the same benefits and accessories. And every module would fit. It's just with an electric powertrain instead of gas. and it's okay i see them on the road once but it didn't sell to the rate that ford was hoping that they would and so despite their best efforts and their refreshes and their special matte black version that they brought to the studio here uh not enough sales so they're discontinuing it that said they are still going to continue to do like hybrid stuff with f-150 platform yeah there's lots of versions of f-150 obviously and they're going to do i guess they're trying to do a version that drives on electric motors as the powertrain but is fueled by a gas generator that fills battery and then powers the powertrain yeah so it's more of like a fisker type setup carlo rivero yeah exactly they said they can get up to 700 miles on that yeah i was confused by that because there's like no information but 700 got thrown around in like every article that i saw but i guess believe it's i'm assuming there's still battery involved into it and the gasoline engine is a is a generator is a generator that's extending range in quick scenarios um sounds like a really cool way to have two things to go wrong in your car the gas engine well that's what people say about hybrids it's more complicated but it is you do have the upside of more range so yeah i see it as a pickup truck especially at that 150 range of you know the most popular vehicle in america this making way more sense i mean you get the torque of an electric car which is great it's Weird, though, because that torque's not always the same kind of torque they want when it comes to towing, right? Yeah, I don't know how this will do with towing. I'm not a towing expert, but I kind of feel like the F-150 lighting was weak with towing, and that was one reason why a lot of F-150 owners wouldn't have wanted it as much. But it was really good at a lot of other stuff, obviously not as much range when you're towing or in general. Grocery is tough to tow. Yeah, that's the thing. There's two types of F-150 owners. There's the ones that buy an F-150 because they need an F-150, and then there's the people who buy an F-150 just because that's what I want. Or that everyone else has a truck. I want a truck, too. And it's a popular, here's the truck you can. I might have to help my friend move one day. Yeah. I had multiple people in my life that were excited for this truck just because of the giant battery that they could use in case, like, the power goes out in the house. That was a killer feature. Yeah. That was a really nice feature. Everyone was excited about that. Yeah. So vehicle-to-grid power is still, like, sort of a niche feature that a couple big battery EVs will do. I don't know. I'm going to mess up the list if I try to name them. But there are a couple that also still do this, where they can be your house's battery backup in a pinch. Pretty sick. It'll be like 150 kilowatt hours, lasts you for days. But, yeah, now that this truck is discontinued, that's one less option. That's not really good for anyone. Yeah, agreed. Can I say, there's a quote from Jim Farley that I really dislike. CEO of Ford. CEO of Ford. What do you say? This is a customer-driven shift to create a stronger, more resilient, and more profitable Ford. Is he implying that the customers are driving a more profitable Ford like we want that? No, I think it's just I don't care about any of you. We're going to make as much profit, which every company ever. But just like I'm trying to read into this because it's a CEO statement. Customer driven shift implies people weren't buying the electric one. So this is customer driven. You guys are doing this to create a stronger, more resilient and more profitable Ford. So the EVs were smaller margins and less profitable. and what we're going to switch to and pivot to will be more profitable for Ford. Do we all care that Ford is more profitable? Well, it's the CEO. He's talking to shareholders. And to be clear, customers were not driving the F-150 Lightning. But it was a great truck. Customer-driven truck. Yeah. I have a question about this. So the EU also this week just announced a plan to stop doing electric vehicles and stuff like that. Well, no, to stop the plan. Yes. So stop gasoline. They removed their mandate for all new vehicle sales to be electric by, I believe, 2035. Thank you for putting into words my incoherent thought. I got you. But my question is, is this more of a trend now? Are we, like, reversing the whole EV thing? Well, I think the bigger thing is right now is we're losing or have lost the U.S. EV tax credit. Yeah. And I think that's... We lost it. I think everybody understands that that is for EVs in general hurting sales pretty hard It interesting Just to be clear I don think this has that much to do with the F thing because it really hard to buy an f in europe period i think he just saying the trend like we seeing all these 2030 promises are probably just going to be that they were promises three or four years ago if you're if you're paying enough attention to this industry there is definitely a trend it's kind of like reading between the lines i remember like we saw porsche promised that the 718 Cayman was going to be EV in its next refresh. And then they kind of went, and also a gas one. And, oh, I was expecting that to be fully electric. But, like, we see stuff like that happening. We see companies who are going, ah, we're going to go, we're going to have all these electric cars and we're going to go fully electric by this year. And then quietly, they're just not doing it. Yeah. So customer driven, probably. And also just being realistic. Like, I'm reading up on this. and by reading up, I mean I googled EU electric mandate and the AI overview is telling me, that the recent change removes the hard 2035 ban on new cars that are gas powered, but they are still allowing up to 10% of sales to be combustion engines. So it's like instead of 100, it'll be 90. Just slowly walking it back to be more realistic and more in line with everything. 10%? Yeah. Versus zero over that. Yeah. So I agree that it's a trend. It's a slow iceberg movement type of trend where it doesn't look like a disaster, but it just feels like we're calibrating to what's realistic and customer trends and profit. Yeah, but the realism is based on company profits. Profit. Well, if you're not if nobody's buying EVs and the government incentives go away and sales drop, it's like you can't make people buy EVs. Yeah. Well, that's why we were incentivizing people to buy EVs. We're incentivizing them because they're more expensive per car. So it's like if I want someone to choose the EV, it needs to be the correct choice for them. They don't get to just force people into buying EVs. So if it was, oh, $7,000 less, well, now it makes it a better buy. I'm going to choose the EV. But now that that incentive goes away in this specific case in the U.S., it's like now the gas car is a better buy. I'm going to buy the gas car in the hybrid. And Toyota's sitting there going, yes, more Prius buyers for us. It's true. So, yeah. That's true. Toyota sitting in the middle ground forever with the Prius was probably their best call. Because they just knew that no one was ever going to fully switch one way or the other. They're hybrid kings. They are. I'll throw one more thing out there. Yeah. Because I already can feel all the truck people yelling at me. I figured, why not have all the Tesla people yell at me also? Let's go. All in. Even though the F-150 Lightning literally is a car that Ford says this isn't worth producing anymore and still outsold the Cybertruck in 2025. Woo. Yeah. Yeah. Have you tried version 14, Andrew? Have you tried version 14, bro? Yeah, it's funny that Tesla sells... Well, Tesla only has... There's a lot of nuance to that, and I don't care. The joke is funny. They have four or five models. Ford F-150 is the most popular vehicle in America, so the fact that one of the trims didn't sell well and got discontinued is kind of not huge news, but it is what it is. Speaking of EV trucks, so easy. There we go. Because I wrote it in the outline. Oh, you did? I didn't even see that. I saw Rivian in bold, and I was like, I got this. But yes, speaking of EV trucks, Rivian had an event this past week. And it was really interesting because I couldn't tell who the event was for. The first part of it was this really engaging and interesting, like, AI chat from RJ, who's the CEO, talking about how they're going to be making their own silicon, and their Generation 3 platform of vehicles is going to be fully self-driving on millions of miles of roads and i was like whoa that's really interesting but this is also their autonomy day event so then it transferred into this really really long very detailed and honestly complex but explanations of how they're doing these things and the neural nets and the advantages of their approach mixing in lidar with radar with cameras why they believe this is the right solution for the future and it feels like they were talking to shareholders engineers yeah you know who they were talking to yeah and and the comment section was people watching a live stream on twitter.com or youtube so it was like people who are terminally online and maybe a little bit too in the bubble and they were like this isn't close to what tesla's doing and then they had uh hands-on after which was allowing people to ride in these new self-driving rivians and so there's some footage online of these these these rides and some of them look okay some of them look like they had some errors and misses which is normal they didn't do like a closed course thing um so there's a lot going on my takeaway which is very much just from my own perspective because i own a generation one rivian was i'm glad i didn't buy a gen 2 rivian because none of those are going to get the the new silicon it's the gen 3 which is basically r2 they announced new silicon sorry yeah you kind of to be in the lingo rivian has r1 which is the first generation of their vehicles and then they have r2 which is the suv like second generation thing and then they have r3 which is even smaller but they also have generation one which is rivian r1t and r1s and then generation two which is also rivian 2 r1s and r1t yeah and then generation three which is r2 and presumably there'll be an r1 gen 3 and r3 and probably probably an r1 gen 3 and r3 will be gen 3 so the takeaway here is r2 is the first gen 3 vehicle that will have the silicon in it that will have all the full self driving that they're talking about all these new capabilities it'll have lidar up at the top and they talked about how smoothly integrated that lidar box is and the gen 2 vehicles now that are like a slight update to my gen one r1 are not gonna get all of that thanks that for those people yeah they might get some of that but they won't have the silicon obviously they're already shipping anyway yeah it's interesting they're they're promising a lot uh it's kind of hard to take all their word for it because i do not love how much they promised yeah they promise a lot really tesli yeah and i you know i feel like that's a combo of like maybe a little bit of fundraising and talking to the public about like, oh, yeah, we are super AI first and self-driving and all that stuff. And then people who invest and have lots of money to give Rivian might go, oh, seems about right. Yeah. And be more down, whatever. I don't think it's going to sell them any R1s, though, because it doesn't have the stuff that they're talking about. To Tesla's credit, them going all in on the cameras, it was like now for their customers, their customers get to you know theoretically use more of the self-driving features as they get updated because all of the teslas for a very long time have cameras yeah and so they're not going to need like new sensors and stuff there's like yeah they've switched out the the boxes they've changed the sensors the cameras yeah but they're not there's no like hard limit on like your model three can do it yeah there is no i think there is i think it's like a joke right but haven't they not updated the hardware versions in like a while there was at least one statement on stage that elon uh sort of skirted around he'd said oh yeah all model threes are going to have full self-driving and then you hear someone in the crowd go like what about hardware three and he kind of just goes let's not pay attention to nuance like he literally says like let's not get new because he knows that this is for a certain x date and forward version of tesla and it's not actually all model threes that are going to get all these features got it but if you just kind of avoid nuance it seems like a nice thing to say um so i don't know if there's a lawsuit about that but it's like the same thing is going to happen with everyone who has updated hardware in their cars they have build new capabilities around the updated hardware and so everyone who's on previous gens like me a first gen rivian buyer who spent tons of money on a truck to support this earlier thing i'm not getting any of these features yeah so oh well too bad they can't just like update the box what features did they announced though so rivian's main thing was their current uh driver assist feature i'm not going to try to name them because they all have different pilot auto type names or whatever but the current driver assist feature is something like a hundred thousand uh fully lined highways 135 000 miles of roads that is getting updated to 3.5 million miles of roads i think the quote the one guy said later was if it has clearly marked painted lines you can drive on it to which every comment i saw from that is like well where i live doesn't have that yeah like i'm not coming to work yeah there's a lot more roads in the u.s but it's like the current driver assist that i try to use doesn't work on neighborhood streets doesn't work on lots of regular roads that you think it should work on it works okay on a lot of highways but it's like just a regular road with lines on it it wouldn't work so this theoretically multiplies by several orders of magnitude how many roads it can drive hands-free on um whether you choose to use that or not or if you were planning on using it for everything there's still a long way to go for them but and then that's the next the next level of things they're doing for the uh gen gen 3 gen sen wang that's a different company um but yeah in 2026 they're claiming point to point so like put it address to address and i'll drive you the whole way um and then gen 3 architecture is eyes off so he's claiming you can like read a book and do stuff like that and then after that would be personal level four this is the level of promising where i was like i don't like this yeah this is way too much that's also just out of rivian's hands for quite a bit of it in terms of regulations yeah and that's a lot to promise um yeah there are laws my question is if you're doing eyes off but you also can only do it unmarked roads if you are eyes off and it the road doesn't know the road has lines or not and you get to a unlined road what happens it'll just beep at you and says take over yeah because it it's probably not like you can sit in the back seat no no you can't be in the back but like if you're reading a book like he said and in a split second if you're going 60 and now the road doesn't have lines on it anymore what is your ditching the book and grabbing the wheel doesn't tesla just It's like slow down. Does it slow? It slowly slows down until it basically does it pull over. Okay. That sounds unsafe for other people driving on the roads. Better than barreling down a road that you don't want. So that's also true. Hey, listen, I'm not the one who made the problem here. What happens? It accelerates. It goes even faster. I think one of the most interesting battlegrounds on the Internet, which has been hilarious, and this may just be comment farming, but I think it's hilarious, is the LiDAR versus no LiDAR battle in the self-driving world. And really, it's just people who listen to what Tesla slash Elon says, which is, LiDAR is stupid, you don't need it. Or what a lot of others like Jaguar with the I-PACE and Waymo and obviously with Rivian now are doing, which is adding LiDAR to the suite of sensors to help augment the downsides of vision only. And the argument is like vision only can do a lot if your systems are really good, if your AI is really good. But there's this really, really, really, really, really long tail of edge cases of things that are kind of weird to solve for with vision. Fog. Fog and rain and all that other stuff, but also just weird stuff that happens on the road. And LiDAR can see further and has obviously a better long-distance vision than just the cameras. And so I guess what RJ was saying on stage with Rivian's event is lidar has come down enough in price that this is not prohibitively expensive we're going to do this we're going to map build this into all of our data and so the camps are people who say this is doomed you're just adding noise to your neural nets or this is actually better than not having it of course you should add it they fight a lot on twitter marquez people have been driving cars for millions of years without lidar in their eyes i don't know what you need lidar well that goes to my like humanoid robot argument too which is people going that human robots should be human shaped and like you just inherited all the blind spots and all the downsides of humans including drivers of course human drivers are worse than robot drivers we have no eyes in the back of our head do you know what the best part about this episode is what we get to leave for two weeks not read any of the comments it's gonna be a brutal episode can some machine learning engineer please explain to me why all the ai companies were like no we need to steal everything because the more information we have to give to the models, the smarter they're going to be. And that somehow doesn't apply to cars. Like, oh, no, that's too much information. Get the LIDAR out of here. No radar. Just cameras. That's too much. It's like, how does that make any goddamn sense? Well, to be fair, they are working on ways to not just feed more data to the language models. They're working on ways around that. After they stole everything? Yeah. Yeah, after they stole everything. One other thing they did announce, rivian assistant this is interesting which was kind of like yeah exactly what you imagine is your own in-car assistant but one thing i thought that was interesting is rj shows a way that you can like obviously you can do vehicular commands in terms of with your car that definitely sounds like yeah breaking a lot like a charge um manslaughter but uh you you said vehicular command yeah like turn on my heated feet i didn't say that out loud um but it also like it could make changes to google calendar and other google things which if you're partnering with google somehow or connecting with google give me android auto you can do it coward just do it it makes no sense to not do it wait i'm trying to think okay what their logic would be like if i asked them right now what would they say because a lot okay i use rivian software rivian gets all the data about how i use the car if i have Android Auto, I will just use that. And so I won't put all my navigation data or anything else like that into Rivian's system. So Rivian's system can't learn and get better. So what they do is they plug in certain parts of Google's ecosystem so that I keep using Rivian's software, but that I can still interact with Google's services. That's probably what they would say. I don't f***ing care. But yeah, I will definitely use it to do things in the car and I will definitely not use it to change my calendar. I do not trust that. Do you trust that? Would you ask your car to change your calendar? Absolutely not. I feel like I wouldn't trust that. No, no way. I like having my calendar in my car. Yeah, but on something I can see and do with my hands, I guess theoretically it's self-driving. Yeah, is it going to show me my calendar? We're just old. I need to physically see myself moving it. I don't know if I would trust some automated system to do it just for me. I don't even trust people's system to do that. The automated system, no. But if it showed, like, a little calendar widget on your screen, and then I could see the box move, I guess I'd trust it then. Yeah. I'm a very visual learner, I guess. I don't want my car to have any thoughts. I don't want my car to have to think about where to turn. I don't want my car to have to think about my calendar. I don't want my car to think at all. It's just APIs. I want it to go pedal down and go. Go forward. I want car to go. I want car to go go and beep beep. And that's good enough for me. No breaks. It's just worn. Oh, yeah. I think we need an ad break. Let's trivia. I'm really... Wait, I'm really curious what's the last... No, it's okay. This is a trivia question. Oh, okay. I'm just really curious what the last trivia question of the year is going to be. Better be good. Oh, I really want to get it. Don't you want to know? All right, so this is a bit of a teaser for this next segment coming up. Oh. But... I'm looking at Ellis as I say this. Question number two of this episode Last one of the year What is the Scoville rating of Da Bomb? Closest without Closest without going over Scoville I think we should just do Delta We've all watched Hot Ones enough We should know this Everyone but David has watched Hot Ones enough The only episode I watched Was the one where What's his name? You better be careful David is right there. Marquez has been on it twice. I think I watched that one. Wait, twice? I watched one. I didn't know you went on it again. David, just leave. Just leave. Unbelievable. I talked so much about you on that episode. That's crazy. He was like, my good friend David. There was a whole section where Sean is like, I heard you're friends with David. You should totally watch it. It was so good. All right. That's cool. I'll key it up. Anyway. I'll key it up on one of my three screens. well we'll think about this one answers will be at the end like usual we'll be right back oh yeah and we're back i was petting zuri okay sorry he's just sitting right here next to me My shirt's back on now. So, 2025, how do we end the last episode of this calendar year of our regularly scheduled programming? How should we end this? Well, Adam was nice enough to go back and look at all the predictions we made at the start of the year. And kind of has a little recap going on, too. So, I think we just jumped straight into what we predicted. Is this waveform wrapped? Kind of. Kind of, sort of. I hope I got everything right. You didn't. You didn't. I did not. Damn. All right. What did we say? Do you want to go through these, Adam? You wrote them all down. We'll just react to them. Also, quick note, this is the last regularly scheduled program of this year. We will have a bonus episode next week at the time of you listening to this. So if you're traveling for the holidays, yeah, next Tuesday there will be an episode. Yes. Okay. The 23rd. Yeah, 23rd. Random 2025 predictions. The first one was, will the S25 have Q2 wireless charging? David? said yes chi-two meaning with the magnets yeah with the magnets with them oh because that was chi-two as we knew it yeah we knew it ready wait okay chi-two got announced like five times and they kept changing the spec they're like chi-two as we predicted ready andrew also said yes marquez said no i said no ellis said yes so i got that right So Marquez and I got it correct. Whatever. The only phones that had Qi2 were just the Pixel and the iPhone? Speaking of Pixel, that was the next one. Marquez. Was it only the Pixel? Pixel Snap? Oh, well, then the Pixel. HMD Skylux. Yeah, whatever. Well, yeah. Marquez, you said that 2025 would be the year of the Pixel 10. Oh. Oh, no. How do you feel about that? You shut me down last week with my hot take. i remember what i was thinking when i said that and it had a lot to do with tensor and that did not happen yeah damn you were saying that this year it would take a big leap and then next year in the in the 11 we would get a big visual refresh i don't know why i have that much faith that might be true because it's a 10 yeah i mean this would have been a great year yeah well that was the question david you said because it's the 10 do you think they're going to do something big and Marquez was like, nah. Wait, he said nah or he said ya? He said they wouldn't do anything big to the hardware. It would be the same hardware. And Tensor's going to be a huge leap. And it's going to be the year of the Pixel 10. It should have been. It ended up being that Pixel Snap was a bigger deal than any of the rest of the stuff. Yeah, yeah. It's true. It's true. It's true. We like Pixel Snap. Yeah. It's called Tensor, right? And then it's Pixel 10. Come on, guys. Tensor with the 10. How many hot dogs would you like? Tensor. Tensor. Exactly. Why is it hot? Like how many... It's always hot. I told you. It's always hot. Yeah, so it's hot. Okay. Then we had our hot takes predictions. Okay. Which, all right, mine, I'm just going to get it out the way down. You can all laugh at me. We only had two predictions? Well, no, that was the... Those are just like random ones that he... We had a bunch that I felt like were worth re-talking about. Random hot take predictions. Mine was that someone will get the AI wearable right this year. how do you feel about that one the pebble the what it's not out yet it's not ai when does anything ever come out anymore okay like come on yeah i don't feel great about that one but it's in 2026 i don't know mark has had like three different ai wearables on the testing desk that's cool i do does no because they're so boring because i don't i cannot confirm or deny this about the pocket one that i got or the friend one that i got i gotta try those i can confirm they did not get it right i've seen friends definitely did not get i've seen those subway ads subway ads it was like everywhere on which one friend friend they booked out the entire new york subway did they spend any money on the hardware or just a website domain of subway it's the size of an it's just a air tag yeah that's all it is kind of looks like it yeah yeah no he was whining on twitter the other day though i mean turns out when you're just like a chat gbt rapper you don't have to spend that was the tweet i swear hey 20 of the people on this podcast are paying customers of chat gbt for friend friend you bought the you you pay you can buy the friend you pay for sitting on my desk and you're paying for this you know what's funny i don't think that's i don't think that's a different ai necklace i'm pretty sure oh the one that i have yeah whoops there's another one that kind of looks like that oh god all right well i'll test them all later That just shows that Adam was especially wrong. I want to confirm that, but I'm pretty sure it's something else. I'll go back and find that. I cannot confirm or deny. Well, the next one was Andrews. Rabbit will survive and release the Rabbit R2. I was close. You're close. Safety survived. They are not out of business yet. Yeah, because they didn't have to pay any of their employees. If they haven't paid any of their employees, are they still technically... Still alive and teased a new one. Exactly. Okay. Oh, my God. Are we going to see another CES where a bunch of influencers talk about how cool it is and it ends up being sh** Can they afford a plane ticket to CES? They'll get flown out there David, you said This is a little crazy You said, I think Humane gets sold in 2025 Correct But you also said probably not to HP No way How did you do that? Did he really say that? It did seem a little obvious because, like, HP, humane, pin, you know, a little on the nose. Thank you, Alice. Did I really say that? You did. I think it was because it was around the time that rumors first started popping up. It hadn't happened yet, but it was, like, around the time that there were rumors. I think I was just thinking that would just be too funny. It would be too depressing and funny. Wow. Andrew also asked if one inevitably sold, if it would be more or less than Juan Soto's contract. Not even course. Player of the Mets, which was $765 million. They sold for about $116 million, so not close. That's still too much. Although his contract was for 15 years, so they made that in, like, what, three? Are they making the AI for the printers better over there? Do you have an HP printer? Yeah, what's going on over there at HP? Who? They're just printing money. HP decided to buy Humane? I have so many questions that are not yet answered about that. They did invent some sort of projector technology. Hey, printer. Hey, printer, connect to Wi-Fi again, please, for the love of God. HP makes laptops still. Dragonfly. Yeah. They make a lot. They make Chromebooks. The next hot take was, Marquez, you said, the browser wars are back. True. I got that right. Yep. I think you were correct. I got that right. But there are so many browsers. Useless. He also didn't expect the main browser war to be the company killing their own browser and starting another one and causing a giant risk between their families We got side plots We got main plots We got ChatGPT threatening Google threatening How is it threatening Well existing enough for a little code red action Oh, I thought you meant like Atlas. No. Well, I mean, that's one of the things. Yeah. The browser wars are back. I thought you meant they sent a threat to the other. I wouldn't shock you anymore. Yeah. A little lunch with Sundar. And that's it. Yeah, that's it. Oh, wait, no. There's one more. Ellis, you said last year that Microsoft will not be adding live translation to any of their products in 2025. You also said that if they do, you will sit at the big table and apologize while eating the bomb. The bomb. Sorry. The bomb. Did Microsoft technically... Did Microsoft... Teams. But did they really... Interpreter mode... Well, I don't... I haven't heard anything about... We've joked about the live translation thing all year. I'm pretty sure I'm wrong. Even if I did just say Microsoft, my whole thing was like, this is not real. And the reason I say I'm pretty sure I'm wrong is because, like, earlier we were talking about this. And I was like, yeah, because now the Pixel Buds and the AirPods both have live translation. And everyone was like, but do they? And I was like, no, they do, right? Who's used it? And no one in the office had used it. Yeah. and it's still like doesn't mean it doesn't exist no i agree i feel like it got added to everything and i haven't heard a peep about any of it but now i the pixel has it for phone calls now have you heard a single person that doesn't mean it doesn't work i'm just saying yeah i use it i just thought if it would be like real like life-changing we would have heard about it a little more anyway this is all to say how much do you speak a different language yeah we don't we don't use that that doesn't mean it's not good for people who do speak another language like i use it i remember when the pixel came out everyone was trying this demo in all of our first hands-on in our reviews and they literally would call us and have someone in another room speak another language to us and we would hear the translation in english we'd speak back it would translate and it would work and i haven't used it since then because i don't need to make phone calls people who i don't speak to in different languages but it works yeah i am a man of my word uh after we finish the next part of waveform wrapped i will take a seat at the big table i will issue my apology. Stick around. And I will I will da bomb. You should do the readout with you should do the bomb and then do the readout. But you got to I was going to do the bomb and then read you guys a trivia question. I like that better. Yeah. Because, uh, man, that waiting music is going to feel a little wrong. Are you going to do a spoonful? I don't know. I think a dab is plenty. I'm going to do a dab. I also it's dinner time and I haven't eaten. So I'm probably going to like put it on. This is bad. A Pringle. we do have milk in the office can you scar your stomach lining? no it's just gonna spit there for a while until you cover it with other food I did hot ones on an empty stomach it was bad you did hot ones? I feel like every time I say it I'm like maybe I'm flexing maybe it's just unnecessary I did watch one of them yeah? did you? I did Okay. Which one? I don't know. One of the two. I think it was the first one. Anyway, yeah, so. I've been here a long time. I think it's safe to say that while some of us were kind of right, I was the most wrong. It's okay, Alice. That's, yeah. I think you had fair data, you know, because they have announced live translation like 50 times over the last 10 years. I had 11 years to make this bet. And the one year I made it is the year I... Probably not best to guess the year that all the LLMs actually started working. Well, that was our predictions. So now looking back at this past year, what do you think was the story of the year if you had to pick one? What's the theme? Tech story of the year. I like your list. I just liquid asses in the middle of it. Damn, there was actually a lot of stuff this year. Do you want to just read this list out? Okay, this is the list. These are all things that happened this year. It's all stuff that happened in 2025. Okay. Nintendo Switch 2. Let's go. Nintendo Switch 2. Nintendo Switch 2. TikTok got sold? Question mark? Sort of. Kind of, maybe? Yeah. The first Waveform livestream, which Ellis added. I completely forgot about that. I think another one of those has to happen in 2026 somehow. At least one. The Galaxy S25 happened. I feel like Galaxy and iPhone just by themselves are big things of the year. I guess. I would argue S lineup. Basically not news this year. Is that news? Okay. Next, Apple Vision Pro turned one. I don't know. Don't remember. Deep Seek. Remember that? Yeah. The whole industry shook. That was this year. Yeah. That was crazy. Did we ever find out if that was tap or not? I don't think it was. They just released some new stuff last week. Then there was the iPhone E, which confused us all. Woof. and got us of the year yeah i forgot about that yeah sigma bf camera remember that oh the sigma boyfriend yeah that was this year coolest thing for two weeks and all metal baby hey two weeks is longer than a lot of stories that's true yeah live at south by that was fun our first show that was cool uh the dodge ev charger room room that was this year that was this year with loudest tv of all time yeah that marquez really hated the frat sonic chamber exhaust man you could hear us pull up from outside the studio that was the muscle car that was too heavy to do burnouts yeah like not enough power yeah wow yeah unfortunate damn uh iphone air yeah happened big story yeah big story and iphone are getting discontinued allegedly uh liquid ass of course yeah an orange iphone that might be the story that might be cool what liquid glass yeah it's wonderful yeah well there was also the jimmy fallon pixel 10 event that's the one meta ai glasses part part two or three whatever uh humanoid robots coming back steam machine and steam frame announced which everyone yelled at me because they said people were actually excited for the steam frames oh the frame yeah i think people are excited for the frame i don't care that much but i'm excited for the steam machine i had a lot of normies hit me up and say they were stoked on the steam machine yeah it's kind of surprising yeah um i think you are kind of surprising that normies care about steam hardware really yes yeah yeah was i not just saying this elliot's grandma has never heard of steam machine for the steam deck he's in our discord server oh sorry he's the guy whose grandma thought that the fold was AI. Someone doesn't watch the video. Airdrop coming to Android. Come on. I think that might have been one of the big Titanic news. We'd know more about it if they got Jimmy Fallon to announce it. Xiaomi 17 Pro Max. That did happen. I don't think I pronounced that correctly. Xiaomi? That was it. Xiaomi. The Xiaomi Su7 that happened this year. I'm pretty sure it's Su7. I made a Su7 joke once around the office and no one has referred it as the SU-7. Well, that's why. It's the SU-7. It's so perfect. I mean, I'm sure it's not pronounced that way in every market, but it's literally SU-7. Like, how else would you pronounce it? Maybe you're not supposed to ever pronounce it. It's SU-7. But I naturally just started saying SU-7. So, yeah. SU-7. Or was it today's episode with the Trifold? Is that the story of the year? The Trifold is pretty crazy. No. No? I like the story of the top three. I have a Mount Rushmore. I have a top three as well. I'll take that. I'll take that. I have a Mount Rushmore for this year. There are four heads on Mount Rushmore. Yes, I have a top four. I was adjusting. Sorry. I had three, and now I have four. So I have a Mount Rushmore for this year. The last one, George Washington. My Mount Rushmore for Waveform and for Stories of 2025, number one is Liquid Glass. Okay. Yeah. It's Liquid Glass. Not even necessarily number one. It's just on the mountain. Yeah. Liquid Glass. Yeah. Number two, Live at South by Southwest. Oh. Yeah. I have to throw that on the Mount Rushmore. I like that. That was pretty bomb. Pretty bomb. number three su7 su7 i didn't even do that let's kick it off we're too old for this dude and number four let's throw uh let's throw meta ai glasses on there hot take switch i think that was really interesting switch two did kind of make a repeating yeah i could make an argument for that all right throw the switch two in there switch two is in there over the meta ai glasses but i did find I got more people asking me in real life about the AI glasses. I'm not going to do a Mount Rushmore, but I think the cool full circle thing is we got Project Muhan in January and we went to that event and they teased the trifold in that little timeline and we got it right at the end of the year, which is kind of cool. Just barely slipped it in by the end. I think that Liquid Ass being such a story that was just so prevalent throughout the entire year. People still are talking about this. And now a lot of the normies are updating their phones. And they're all like, what the f*** is this? Nobody likes it. Notably, a lot of the Apple executives have moved on to other companies. The design chief that made Liquid Glass left for Meta, so he's going to make everything over there. It's going to be horrible now. even worse than it already is so i feel like yeah i feel like liquid glass has been the most like it's been a story all year you know i mean we it got announced in june of was that this year no last year no this year no this year this summer this year they showed it off this summer this they showed it off this summer coming to an iphone near you now it's coming to every maybe so we're gonna change it a few times yeah so and considering all the other companies like copied liquid glass and to for their uis in china i would say that's one one of the big ones i do have a sorry i can't say this one more i guess um i'll like i'll just bleep it it'll just be one yeah okay yeah just bleep it yeah so the fleek is still going just fleek it when tech i like bands for the night that's so true right i forgot about that i do too so like i can picture and you had and then we started scrolling like i know this is a finite scroll right now like that's yeah that did happen i remember reaching the end that was like it crashed and i was like oh my god that was january i remember walking out of a bar with like my friend and he opens his phone he goes oh my god yeah tiktok is gone yeah it was like a it kind of staggered because i remember i was still scrolling but my friend stopped so they came over and watched that was january yeah all the the video content was like this could be gone it was basically people saying like goodbye and where else to find me yeah yeah on red note and then 12 hours later it was back it's all back yeah the next day scroll did it cross any of your minds because it crossed my mind because i'm like logged into tiktok and you know all that stuff on my phone for like the waveform podcast did it cross your minds that we should say goodbye on tiktok no it didn't cross we're not like tiktok needs i think it was the tiktok creators those who have no other channels anywhere who were like i need to like take these people with me somewhere like the panic in the strategy of i'm just going to spam like please go follow me on instagram now it was very real we have a diversified audience on a couple platforms our tiktok going away would kind of suck but wouldn't be the end of the world so we didn't feel it needs to say goodbye yeah but it would have been pretty wild if it went away yeah dualipa interviewing tim kookos last year right yeah i guess that won't be on my that's on my mount rushmore period this year i interviewed tim cook and he just didn't answer any of the questions that was this year yeah really i was like you want to do a blind ranking of some apple stuff and he was like what's that i was like this is not the magic mouse yeah yeah i forgot that moment is on my mount rushmore this year yeah where i could see the clip as it was happening the ergonomics ergonomics yeah this year just felt like a bunch of nonsense to me i don't know like yeah i it's hard for you to make my mount rushmore you know i like like samsung put out some really great stuff orange iphone was great you know what did samsung put out that was good well we don't know if it's good yet but they did it you know they said they said they were going to do it and they then they did it yeah they did do it and android xr goggles too Yeah, you know, even Meta said they were going to do a thing, and they did. I have a hot take. They also... It's cooking. Yeah, honestly, my Mount Rushmore is all of the unsealed documents from the Meta lawsuit. I don't know if there's four of them, but man. There's definitely at least four. Yeah. And the Nintendo Switch 2. And the Nintendo Switch 2, a device I don't own and have never played. Yeah. But there was a lot of hype for a lot of months. marquez what's your hot take we're also going to start the next year with predictions again we'll do that next episode in a couple weeks well what's next step is the week oh yeah you're right another regularly scheduled yeah in the new year i was just gonna say samsung ships a car in three years well what xiaomi just shipped a car do you know something we don't yeah but xiaomi is chinese and China pumps money into car companies. Samsung is going to show up. Samsung owns South Korea. They have a lot of funding. They're going to scrap a bunch of stuff together, a bunch of metal, a bunch of collaborative companies and they're going to make a car. They're just going to collab with Kia. I want LG. Insert Korean. But it'll have a Samsung logo somewhere in there. Samsung sold their car division to Renault a bunch of years ago and it got rebranded to just Renault Korea. They still have a minority stake in it, but it seems like Samsung's auto business is now mostly a Renault thing, and Geely also has a minority stake in it. Did the twerking hamster in the... Dude! Did that happen this year? No, that was last year. Really? I think that might have been two years ago. I think that might have been two years ago. That would have been on my run much more for me, for sure. I'm really hoping I get one more trivia point this year. It's been so long since I got a point in trivia, It might have been before Thanksgiving. It might have been when the corgi was twerking on the makeover. Yeah, that's true. So I say we do trivia. Trivia, dude. Trivia, dude. But first, Alice has to... It's what's... Okay. It's us, us. Sorry, Alice was just shaking the... You're holding a computer with two hands, Marquez. Wait, where'd your computer go? It's in my hand. Alex, he's a phone. It's in my pocket now. Where'd you... Sorry. Sorry. It's time for Ellis to eat the bomb. Guys, okay. So as promised at the beginning of the year, I said live translation wasn't going to be a thing because every tech company had been announcing it every year for the past decade. And lo and behold, the year I place my bet is the year it all comes out. And so as promised, I will be doing the bomb on a spoon. I have with me some aids, a glass of milk, some extra toasty Cheez-Its, and string cheese. This is just what I ran and got from the... There's some solidified stuff at the top so I'm just going to get that out of the way because I feel like that's going to be extra concentrated. My heart is already racing. I'm nervous for you. I've had DeBom before. Have I had it raw on an empty stomach? No. I think it would be an ulcer. Probably. This smells horrible. It smells like battery acid. yeah it tastes like i'll just let you experience it you know battery it tastes like it tastes like what you imagine battery acid tastes like i don't have to taste battery acid to tell people this tastes like battery you know fair enough okay it's just that is a whole dab ladies and gentlemen ellis is being very brave right now i'm worried i'm worried i'm gonna am i allowed to am i allowed to coat my palate with cheese at first it's not gonna save you bro it's not gonna help is there anything okay i need like a safe word for you like is there something where if you actually need an ambulance, I don't know, what am I supposed to do if you are going to die? They don't come after 7 p.m. I'm nervous. I will say, I am a spicy food expert. I'll save you. Something I do know about spicy food is that the trick is small bites. And that is impossible on a spoon. So I'm just going to touch this chopstick to my tongue a few times as a ramp up and then we're going to dive in. No, the trick is a glass of water. I never apologize. It was the whole thing. I never apologize. Computer programmers of the world, software developers, machine learning engineers, AI, venture capitalists, Apple, Google, Microsoft executives, Mag7 employees. I'm sorry. I thought y'all were full of shit. I thought y'all were mad full of shit and taking billions of dollars from people who were also full of shit to sell people stuff that didn't work. And I still think that's what's going on. Welcome to America. I was wrong. and now I'm going to pay the price. So let's get a little warm-up going. Do it. It doesn't work that way. It's just like getting stabbed by a thousand tiny knives, basically. I thought I was smart. Yeah, baby. Give him the first question. You should prepare exactly what you plan to say because I know it's going to be hard to tell. You can back out, Ellis. Thank you, Marquez. You're in. I wrote down the answer already. Oh, I forget the question. What was it? Oh, you're going to say it? Is that the whole amount? Yep. That's enough. He did it. He took a spoonful. Careful around the eyes. Marcus Brownlee. Andrew Mangadeli. Yeah. David Amell. It gets worse when you talk. Oh, yeah. Yep. What three letters represent both a Chinese tech conglomerate? Oh, no. Chinese tech conglomerate and an American blues guitar legend. Oh, I... I don't usually do trivia from here. I see Marquez's board. I was never going to guess that, so I'm just not going to guess. I'm so sorry. We've never done this before. Alice is at the big table, and Andrew is next to me at the producer's table, which has a great view of Marquez's board, so that didn't work out. Didn't think about that one. I kind of thought that bomb was going to be too old. It did say refrigerated after oak, and it has been on our table unrefrigerated for like two years. It seems like it's getting pretty good, though. Okay. Marquez, what did you put? I put E-C-L. And what American blues legend has that the initials up? She's going for the milk. I don't know. Tom. I don't know. I hadn't thought that far ahead. David, what did you put? I put BBK. Okay, that's right. David, what? David gets the point. What? What? What? Blues guitar legend. BB King. BB King is correct. Good job. Thanks. Can you play the After Dark music or something? Reform After Dark. I'm ready for the next one. Next question. What is the Scoville rating of the bomb that Ellis just inhaled? And it's Delta? Wait, Andrew didn't answer. He's not going to answer because he saw Marquez's board. Oh. Actually, I'm going to change it. Are we doing Price is Right or Delta? Oh, we are doing Delta. Okay, cool. I prefer United. Just kidding, I don't. All right, we're good. Okay. Wait, real quick. Before we flip, quick update on the score. Marquez has 10. David, after that correct question, well, after that correct answer, was 12. Andrew with 14. All right, slip him and read. What do you got? Please be. Oh, my goodness. What did you say? Big range. 2.3 million. Marquez? 835,000. 835,000. 10,000. Y'all really going to make me do some crazy math? Yeah. Is it like one point something? It's 135K. That's what I wrote the first time. So Marquez is closest. Wait, wait, wait, wait. No, I'm for it. No, he's not. I'm closest. David's closest. David got the point. You can even kind of see it. I wrote, I thought it was 135,000, and I was right, and then I erased it and wrote 835,000. I doubted myself. I almost nailed it. Never doubt yourself, Marquez. Never doubt yourself. It's going to be a whole year before I get a point. This is tough. Ellis, how are you doing over there? Actually, pretty good. It's just my lips at this point. I mean, I say that, and then I'm sure it's going to come back. It also, like, it will on the toilet later. It somehow, regardless, is in my nose. Didn't touch my nose. but um that's a wrap that's hot man congrats on on keeping it to your word hopefully hopefully the bets that we make next year are out no I already know next year none of those f***ing humanoid robots are coming out and if if one of them does I'm doing this f*** again baby I love it do it do two of them next time if one of them comes out okay that's perfect I like that that's a great place to end it a humanoid robot can serve you the spoonful of last day yeah that's actually that's what we'll do if one of these humanoid robots actually comes out and it actually works. That robot can come on the show and spoon me another man. From the same bottle. It smells so bad, even from here. Please take us out. Thanks for listening for all of 2025. See you on the other side. 2026 is going to be sick. Do it. Except for next week's episode. One more bonus episode next week. Play After Dark 3. There's a third one. Waveform is produced by Adam Molina and Ellis Robben. We're part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. We're, uh, Vain Still Wrote the Music. This has been 2025 on Waveform. Let's get it! Whoops. Just fade to black. All right, for this clip's outro, Ellis is going to be taking another hit of the bomb. Ellis, where'd you go?