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[Music]
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all right what's going on people of the internet welcome back to another episode of the waveform podcast we're your hosts i'm marquez and i'm andrew and today
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we've got a fun one a couple of uh different stories a sort of assortment yeah a very it's a fun time for a lot of
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assortment it's earlier in the year sometimes we get like heavy weeks sometimes we get light weeks this is one of those fun lighter weeks so andrew's
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going to dive into the reddit r slash place update for 2022 and how it went
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down we actually had a lot of fun with this this is so much fun yeah uh and also we're going to talk a little bit about well i finally did it and i
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swapped out the mac pro with remember last time i said i had that mac studio on order yup it's the
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new editing machine the last video is edited on the mac studio but we also have a weird trade-in story and what's
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happening with the mac pros here now so we'll talk about that and we're going to finish up with david interviewing jad from radio lab and what
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he's up to after his historic podcasting career a little bit of an og you know podcast
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podcast podcasts have a long history yeah we're not exactly uh veterans to this space despite happening
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so that'll be a fun one too but first twitter adding
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and edit button loyal soldiers of the twitter edit war this is crazy we have
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one this is the case we've declared victory how long have i been asking i want to find the first time i ever
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mentioned the twitter button because this has been a meme basically i feel like since at least college i've been
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asking twitter for an edit button dear twitter let us
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edit tweets it is 2017 and we have a giant machine digging a tunnel under los
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angeles to build an actual hyperloop but we still can't edit tweets we have the large hadron collider we found the
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god particle we still can't edit tweet and every time i bring it up inevitably of course i
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hear about the pros and the cons because you know twitter might not be the biggest social network ever but it
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does have quite the user base it's sort of like a public sphere if you will a lot of
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important people use it and there's a lot of implications for what editing tweets might mean and the
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bigger twitter's gotten the more vocal those downsides have been but i maintain
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editing tweets would not like be the downfall of twitter it would not ruin twitter i think it would be great but i
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do want to address all of the conversation around the edit button first
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it was announced well the announcement was kind of weird itself actually yeah the the whole thing was interesting
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and what's funny about it is because of how much of a meme you've turned this into and how you talk about it all the time it almost felt like you were part
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of it if you only look back at my twitter timeline it kind of looks like i was in on it i promise i was not in on
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this one no um i tweeted on april fool's day before the announcement from twitter
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tech company accidentally unveils product people actually won on april fool's day which is kind of a thing that
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happens all the time and it's not just twitter it happens a lot but it works perfectly because
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very shortly after that twitter did their april fool's joke a couple hours later in quotes
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saying they were adding an edit button we're working on an edit button straight up tweeted it and everyone went
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thanks a lot twitter we all know lots of people want it but in april fools they tweet very funny
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and then i think like a day ago or something like that i tweeted i tweeted something with a typo in it
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but it was like 20 minutes later and it was like too late to take back all the conversations i had about the tweet so i
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just left it and then i tweeted you think i make typos on purpose to like continue to argue for the edit button
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but i don't i really don't i just keep making typos which brings up the number one thing i always hear which is marquez
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just proofread your tweet yeah yeah obviously that's i i try if you're not
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if you're a human you make mistakes sometimes and you make typos so it's not like i'm out here saying
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everyone should be perfect if you've ever written a paper for school or something like you've most likely proofread it and just because you've
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written it and you know what is being said on the paper it's very easy to skip small typos especially when
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like a a word checker spell checker is not picking it up because if you're spelling
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what something that is a real word it's not the word you wanted exactly it won't show up so it could just be wrong
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everybody's done it if you pretend you didn't you're lying you've made a typo stop it real life typo yeah and even so
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that's my main argument by the way for twitter uh having an edit button just to finish the timeline a couple
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days later i guess this was yesterday for us as we record this but on tuesday this week twitter announces
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no seriously we're actually working on an edit button yeah and this is funny because this is like what a day after
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elon musk announced he bought nine percent of twitter and then asked if they wanted an edit button on
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twitter one step back here elon purchased a large number of shares
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for twitter i believe it's about nine percent he's the largest shareholder the largest shareholder then
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got invited to join the board of twitter a lot of people were talking about that then posted a poll asking if there
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should be an edit button and everyone started going crazy and within 24 hours of that is when the
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twitter comms uh handle tweeted that they're working on it they they said yes people working
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on an edit feature since last year no we didn't get the idea from a poll we're kicking off testing with twitter blue labs in the coming months to learn what
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works what doesn't and what's possible so yeah if for some reason you really think that elon poll is what created
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this it's not it's it's but the timing is like his announcement probably
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his his tweet probably forced their hand to just announce it so that people wouldn't think forced their hand or he
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bought all the shares was talking to people on twitter and that's also a good way to bring hype fair enough um either
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way it's going to be a twitter blue labs feature coming in a few months now i just want to re refresh this again
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because i've said this before like i'm for adding a twitter edit button under a few specific circumstances
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the number one thing i keep seeing that is an obvious concern is what if
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i tweet something i like cheese a bunch of people like it retweet it whatever
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and then an hour later i go in and edit it and say something horrific that obviously
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you'd never want to be attached to something like 24fps is better or something ridiculous
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like that right good way to go on that yeah i would never want to be associated with anyone saying that but i already
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liked this tweet so now it looks like i like to tweet saying 24fps
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or retweeted it like an endorsement that's horrible if you if you add an edit button that's what it's going to
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look like yeah my argument would be a couple fold one you need to make it very obvious
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that it was an edited tweet so i don't know it's probably more than an asterisk it's probably some sort of uh some print
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or something alongside the tweet of color something that shows that this is an edited tweet and that you should show
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the original tweet yeah so you can already edit an instagram caption a
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youtube description a facebook post all of these things have already existed
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news everyone's always been able to edit social media posts yeah other than tweets
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now these other mediums may often have other media attached to them like on instagram it's a caption but also a
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photo so if i like a photo and someone changes the caption does that imply that i liked the new
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caption no i like the photo but since twitter is just text you know there's a little extra concern yeah it's
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just the text we're associating with and the best way to compare this right now is how reddit does it which is also
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purely text a lot of people commenting and upvoting on it although uploads aren't displayed publicly but
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it adds an asterisk i believe it adds a history as well they also do it a little differently i think if you edit within
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the first 60 seconds you don't get an asterisk but i do think on twitter it should potentially still
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do it anyways just to be safe i like that because i'll just say the other thing you should
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do is you know add a limited amount of characters you can change yeah and a limited amount of time that you can edit
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yeah so really what that narrows it down to for me is typos
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which are gonna happen within like five minutes someone says oh did you mean 4 not 40. oh my bad it's already like the
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thread has already this is in the middle of a thread like i can't go back and redo the rest of this i just want to edit this real quick i jump in there
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edit the tweet make it say 40 instead of 4 like i meant to and then everything's good you can see that it was edited you
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can see what was edited and none of the engagement has to disappear yeah um so
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that's really the main thing like if as long as all that is super clear then i think that's a totally reasonable
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feature to add to twitter and that would save me a lot of the ocd of like having tweets
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out with typos because you have somebody quick enough telling you that something is wrong but
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enough to where if you change that the majority of the conversation is still going to be what the basis of the tweet
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was about and that's and that's what happens but like sometimes if you don't notice for five minutes or whatever
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there are a lot of tweets about that you've kind of lost that but you've also lost the traction because
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it just got wildly popular you lost all that engagement kind of yeah yeah this this is like a it's a small user problem
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or a small group of users that have the problem but when you have enough engagement very quickly that's usually
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when people find a typo so like if you make a typo in a tweet and an hour later there's no engagement but you found the
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typo then yeah you can delete the tweet and tweet it again because that doesn't change anything but if you have a lot of
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engagement very quickly usually that's how you find the typo but then that's
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also a lot of engagement very quickly and the conversation starting and the quote tweets and everything it's funny
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because twitter actually just acts did this weird thing where they changed the way twitter embeds work so a bunch of
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old articles that had embedded tweets now just have like blank boxes
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and that's like you just removed the conversation from the context of what it's like it's basically like if i were
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to delete my tweet everyone's quote tweet would now make no sense so the bottom line is you preserve all
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the engagement by having that quick edit button for i don't know five ten
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characters to just fix a quick typo yeah and it makes perfect sense for twitter blue we don't know if this is what's
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going to be how they finish it because they just said they're going to test on it right now but like you said it's a
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small user group that would really benefit from this so paying for it sounds it sounds reasonable yeah people
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were trying to tell me that the end the undo tweet button was was good enough that i don't i don't count that that was
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just like making sure you proofread but we just talked about proofreading doesn't necessarily mean finding things
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correctly yeah i was also broken on android for months i'm not that surprised on my phone
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anyway so we don't know how this is going to work yet the most we saw was a quick gif
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that they posted where next to your tweet in the menu option the three dots in the top right corner that usually get
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at the bottom of that is just an edit tweet button on top of everything else so we don't know what it entails if
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there's a character limit if there's a time limit what the um potential if there's a an edit history so
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we'll see what happens all those things i think they should do and i think that should be they're probably considering all that stuff as they build it but yeah
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you know people using the beta feature will be the first ones to give them the feedback about that yeah and i think though the only other thing i can add on
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this besides you will be getting it day one um i'm sure there's a lot of people who think it might get abused despite what
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we said i'm sure the first week there will be a lot of really weird twitter interactions kind of you
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remember when they changed it from 140 to 280 yeah and everyone's timeline was just like spammed just just memeing the
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new feature to see if they can pull the string all the way and yeah you want that viral tweet or whatever it'll
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probably happen for the first week and then i think it'll go back to totally normal like reddit has this feature and it works really really well and i rarely
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see a time where it's being abused by anything so it yeah it clearly can work so i'm ready for that twitter yeah i'm
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sure you wanna just hook me up with that alpha yeah can we can we unbox this on live for you guys can i be the first one
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to edit a tweet would that be like full circle that'd be pretty sick it's probably happened already i think you're going to buy it
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if you buy 10 of twitter stock that's how much it cost me you have to beat elon yeah fine all
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right i'll keep waiting i'm in the beta but no uh we wanted to talk a little bit about
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the mac pro retirement situation retirement the viking funeral it's kind of a weird
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feels worse yeah it's weird it's uh so there's no there's no one right answer but there's a number of things
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you can do with a computer when you're done using it all right perfect example we made planters out of the old mac well
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i don't know why we still have those but yeah we did we do still have the old 2013 that's how long it's been 2013 yeah
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trashcan mac pro nobody is gonna buy those we could have sold it for a thousand bucks for someone
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who might have used it but i think we had our good fun with it and they're gonna live in the studio the gpu was
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like literally damaged though on the one you had it was like showing green pixels as you used it yeah it was it was kind
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of rough so that we we got our use out of those the mac pro uh only two years old
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2019 and somebody i think tweeted at me pretty recently a snippet from our video where i'm like and i'm really happy with
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it and i'm really looking forward to it lasting me hopefully a decade and getting better over time
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lots changed yeah landscape's different yeah it's a little that did not age well nope um so i got
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the the mac studio with i maxed it out basically yeah i have 128 gigs of memory
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i have the eight terabytes of storage which is necessary for my workflow i couldn't i couldn't i could not use a
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four terabyte version we regularly go over four terabytes of working media on our projects and i edit everything on
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one machine so i maxed it out and you know set it up and started working with it and i did the first
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full pass edit on the the latest video which is about youtube comments it actually had a failure
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in the export and it was maybe 30 in and it said export failed and then it showed me
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exactly the time stamp at which it failed and i went into the timeline and it was from an old screen recording i
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was using from the previous mac so i just re-shot the screen recording dropped that in there edited everything
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went smoothly all my plugins work everything's good and so now i just have this
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mac pro that we spent i i spent 40 i looked it up 42 000 yeah
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on that mac pro um that i no longer need so
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so there's a couple there's some things you can do with a computer like that one you can try to sell it and there's a
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couple ways you can sell it craigslist facebook marketplace ebay two you can recycle it three you could
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throw it out i guess not ideal and apple also actually has a trade-in
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program which we looked up and you can put in the specs and the serial number and it'll give you a trade-in value yeah
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now i'm guessing most people would not have guessed which one we picked but we we originally decided we're
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probably going to try to figure it out just throw it in the trash no we it's
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it's a perfectly working machine but it's also slightly worse in almost every way at
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everything we need it to do so it doesn't actually have a use it's like if you have a
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a perfect any other perfect product if you had a perfect camera and you had another perfectly useful
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slightly worse at everything but very capable camera that cost 10 times as much you would
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never buy that camera even though it's perfectly good working camera you would never buy it
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so that's kind of the mac pro situation so originally we were like well we can sell it right so we looked on ebay yeah
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because this is what we've done with like old computers and gear in the past and
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there are a couple mac pros on ebay very few i think i maybe found 10 i found one comparable
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sold for about 11 grand that was as sold um a lot of the other ones were far far
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far smaller specs i mean some of them were like 32 or 64 gigs of ram yeah and
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just for context i basically maxed out the mac pro other than the ram which was
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still 700 i had 768 gigs of ram so i didn't have the 1.5 terabytes but i had the 28 core i had the after burner add
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dual vega pro 2 duo's that thing was very that was beefed up so yeah the closest thing we could find
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was someone listing it for 11 grand they did sold no they didn't sold it for 11. okay they sold it for 11.
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um and doing something like that is like it's nice that you can get you know 11 grand isn't anywhere near what we spent
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but you could get that money back and you have to ship it and you have to
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obviously erase it fully and send it to the person who hopefully can get it working again if they have any problems
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they're probably gonna look back to you there's a lot of other questions about dust and like cleaning it out and making
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sure we're getting them something that they expect to be in like perfect condition blah blah blah um
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and we did all that and we did all that and we cleaned it out and it's in working order and
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then we tried to list it and ebay has i don't know if you guys know about seller limits on ebay but if you
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mysteriously pop up as a new user on ebay and suddenly start listing a bunch of stuff you can get your account
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suspended for suspicious activity because it looks like you stole a bunch of stuff and started listing it to sell
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it yeah we've we haven't had the best track record with ebay probably mostly our fault i can't totally blame ebay
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because we've done like we'll do a big clean out of phones and we'll try and sell them for a really good price because we want people to be
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able to get some some good stuff we always sell it as like totally used when it's almost brand new but
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reasonably so ebay sees you selling like 10 phones it's a reasonable poor like yeah and then they get mad we've had our
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accounts suspended a couple of times yeah so he got brought back imagine what that looks like to you it looks terrible
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an account pops up and suddenly lists ten phones the first time they asked for receipts and i couldn't give them an
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answer for it because they're old review units and everything like that so it stinks but there's still a seller limit
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and the only way you can break through that seller limit is if you're consistently selling so they assume you as a store
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and that seller limits five thousand five thousand um so at that point you there's even a
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button that says request a higher seller limit you click it and it says not able to or for us we haven't been
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active enough on ebay yeah so 5000 was the most we could get plus we'd have to ship it plus we have to ensure the
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shipment plus we'd have to make sure everything got there in good working order and then i looked up um apple's trade-in
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program yeah now apple's trading program is a pretty big rip-off like for most of the stuff you you send it in like you
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put in your serial number you put in your specs and then the money you get back is just a gift card for apple so
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you get to spend that on more apple stuff in the future luckily you know we buy enough computers that we'll probably
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eventually spend it but well obviously eventually use apple money yeah so we uh
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we punched in the serial number and the the specs of the max that mac pro and the thing i spent 42 grand on
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two years ago it shot me back a value of 4 700 something dollars 4 700 yeah
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and that's a pretty big bummer but it is minus all of the headache of
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selling it shipping it insuring it and all that with all of that plus ebay's
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fees it probably actually would have been more money than selling it on ebay for the max listed price mathematically
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it did turn out to be more because if we got our five grand if we just listed it at exactly our max which was okay one
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item we can only sell one this month but we're gonna sell it for our max at five thousand dollars and it's gonna take 500
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bucks to ship it and it's going to take 300 bucks to insure it in fedex by shipping something that expensive and
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i'm probably going to have to what was the other thing oh ebay takes a cut you better out of all of that that would have been actually less than the money
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apple was giving so i said okay well whatever apple's going to do with it whether it's recycle
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it or use those parts for repairing other people's mac pros i don't know what they're going to do but they're willing to take it off my hands and give
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me 4 700 a credit i've gotten at this point i've gotten my
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value out of that mac pro yeah i've i understand in my heart i'm not gonna get 50 grand out of that computer anymore no
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one in their right mind would spend that much on it i'm fine with taking this l it's it's a
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hard tough pill to swallow because of how much you spent on it in our situation with a couple of factors it
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does wind up being it hurts to say but it makes sense biggest fact we got two years out of it we saved
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endless amount of time using it like it's been worth it just for two years of editing probably
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200 videos on that yeah we made content on it so we literally profited off of it
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and the second the mac studio got announced that thing's value just tanked plummeted
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it's just unless you're someone who needs to use intel for compatibility reasons on
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whatever software you've got it makes no sense that are the gpus yeah it still
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has the gpu power advantage for certain apps that are looking for those gpus like for our workflow it doesn't make
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that much sense because we don't use all that gpu power but like yeah for a final cut studio like we are those the value
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plummeted so yeah and if we were gonna get somebody to pay all of that value that they
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really saw on it it would still get swallowed up by ebay's fees so this turned out
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yeah this turned out to actually be the best thing for us to do with it so i i went ahead and hit the accept button
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and basically what they do is they send you a fedex uh qr code we put it back in its original box i just pulled that
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thing into my car brought it to fedex oh you brought it to fedex i brought it to fedex and i put it on the on the stand and they went oh a
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mac pro and then i said here's this qr code and they scanned it and they're like oh okay yeah it's free they shipped
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it packed it and it was out of my hands that day i thought you were gonna bring it to the apple store because that was
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an option and i really really wanted to see what they said it was yeah it's that
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that i'm not sure you would have gotten the exact same dollar amount because i think there's still one last step of
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that needs to get to apple and they take it out the box and evaluate it and make sure it's still in good condition and all that stuff they can confirm they're
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ripping they can confirm exactly how much money they want to give you for it and i i bet if you went into the apple store they would
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look at it and go oh the box is dented it's going to be minus the x dollars but whatever that we took care of it it's
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off our hands and that's what happened to the mac pro so yeah starting right now here's the funny part
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starting right now mac studio is editing everything right now yeah i fully expect to be back on the new mac pro when it
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comes out and i think we will turn that mac studio that i've been using into another
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editor's machine or someone else's machine because it is that good at everything that we needed to do yeah for
00:23:16
sure um but for that new mac pro when it does come out i think we're still going to use a little bit extra horses on the gpu stuff
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on the plug-ins on the on the maxed out stuff so we'll see when that comes out i'm just speculating but yes as of right now
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that's what happened to our mac pro that's the story sad day said
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don't what's it don't cry because it's over be happy smile because it happened or
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something like that yeah yeah it was a good machine it was a great cheese crater it was a good machine we loved it we love it well i think that's
00:23:48
a good place to take a quick break we'll take a quick pause yeah uh i'm gonna talk about place when we come back but
00:23:54
before we do that adam came up with a fun little idea we're gonna start implementing into all of our episodes um
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basically he's gonna hit us with a trivia question before each ad break
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and then we're going to take our time to think about it and then we're going to come back you and i are going to guess
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so we'll have the whole episode to think about it we'll guess at the end and then adam will reveal the answer the answers
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so just a little little fun thing for everyone to be thinking about you know maybe you're on your commute to work and
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when we're getting boring talking about the place you can think about what the answer to the episode the question might
00:24:28
be yeah no googling aloud no googling i like that especially if you're driving no googling allowed if you're driving
00:24:34
fair rule all right what are we uh what are we looking at for week one of trivia okay carl pay the ceo of nothing and
00:24:41
co-founder of oneplus grew up in which european country
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that's a good one we'll be right back oh yeah i'm not supposed to answer
00:24:53
[Music]
00:25:03
all right welcome back let's talk about april fool's day 2022. we didn't have a
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whole lot of amazing april fool's projects ours is amazing what was our
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short our short that was a fun one okay if you haven't seen that which was interesting by the way we keep trying
00:25:18
this like uh vertical video format on different mediums because it was a short and we made it for shorts yeah but there
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are other mediums where that like kind of works for a while and even if you don't like keep watching in the future
00:25:29
it's fun for the day to see a video like that yeah we put it on tick tock instagram reels and youtube shorts and
00:25:35
twitter and twitter all good places for videos um and
00:25:40
for like the third or fourth consecutive time we've done this instagram reels has been the top performer like destroyed
00:25:46
them right yeah i mean this one was closer it was like 2.2 million versus 1.6 but like yeah instagram reel is
00:25:53
pretty instagram rails is doing pretty awesome yeah but yeah yeah as far as april fool's projects we didn't do a whole main channel video we did see a
00:26:00
couple good ones i really liked linus's video he just did he kind of memed his own sponsored reads
00:26:06
to the point good but he apparently got like full paid for all of them which i thought they were
00:26:12
just joke reads but he just kept going and they were all real it was good for him yeah uh so there were some good ones
00:26:17
we talked about dyson's non-april fools they think but probably our favorite april fool's day actual
00:26:23
project was reddit reviving r slash place yes we talked to josh wardle a couple weeks ago who is sort of on the
00:26:29
team responsible for the original version of this where they basically just have one place on the internet
00:26:34
where anyone can place one pixel every five minutes correct yeah and it's this
00:26:40
huge canvas and so inevitably communities get together and they sort of like plan stuff and band together and
00:26:46
we'll like they would crowdsource art they would make art you could say that together
00:26:52
um which is a bit of a dangerous exercise because hey communities will decide whatever they want to do and put it wherever they want i mean josh
00:26:58
specifically said that he was like our biggest worry in the original one in 2017 was
00:27:04
inappropriate objects there's just gonna be phallic images everywhere and apparently that's how it started but then people sort of like adjusted and
00:27:10
started making more wholesome stuff for the first time right yeah yeah yeah i think you did say there was some stuff
00:27:16
that they were a little worried about yeah but um it happened again this year i brought it back we kind of all knew it was coming
00:27:22
back i believe the day before um and they went on for four days and i followed it
00:27:29
very intensely so this one this time we got involved a little bit we got very involved i i had a stressful weekend if
00:27:35
i'm being honest so i guess the funny part is is that it was four days long yes so if you drew something on the
00:27:41
first day there's a very low chance that it would still be there if you didn't come back for four days but on the other
00:27:48
hand if you waited too long the whole thing would be so crowded yes with so many different communities
00:27:55
looking for spots to build their own art that you would be out of space so we had to find this like
00:28:01
happy medium of like we do want something there did we just go for it on day one and we did all right
00:28:07
i can kind of give a little brief overview here i think i wanted to i split it into two things in my notes here um i kind of have what happened on
00:28:14
our place in general and then what happened with our community building things on our place so what's what did
00:28:19
the overall our place look like okay so it started off almost exactly how it did in 2017 one canvas i believe is a
00:28:27
thousand by a thousand pixels so one million pixels it's not very much um
00:28:32
and the biggest difference here if you think about it is in 2017 it
00:28:38
popped up with zero instructions no one knew what to do so the first few hours
00:28:43
was just pure chaos yeah this time around this thing goes live
00:28:49
and communities are just already banding together discord servers there's uh subreddits
00:28:54
people are creating new subreddits just for the subreddits beforehand to just find ways we had streamers jumping on
00:29:01
and bringing their audience in there's all sorts of different things and immediately this thing was filling up
00:29:07
with different images i think when i first logged in there was there's a bunch of
00:29:12
country flags yes huge flags which that shouldn't shock me people are very like
00:29:17
attached and there's there's lots of huge communities to do that people like representation i think there's a huge
00:29:22
ukraine blue and yellow across the entire thing which was pretty wholesome i think there was a star wars poster
00:29:29
there is a star wars poster in the yeah in the canvas um yeah there's a couple old memes from the first one which
00:29:35
included so in the first one there was a windows 98 task bar at the bottom this
00:29:40
one event actually i guess not off the start but they made a windows xp task bar there's something called the blue
00:29:46
corner in the first one which was basically just a corner that was completely blue sure that started in this one as well sure in the top left
00:29:54
corner there was the old school runescape disconnected message which is when you used to play the game anytime
00:30:00
you had server issues it would pop up so they built that into the place that's a big community yeah and like you said
00:30:06
lots and lots of flags so in this first day immediately we wanted to build something
00:30:11
so i got on our discord server i tweeted out that we wanted to do the waveform logo i think we mentioned it in the
00:30:16
podcast last week um so we pick a spot it was right next to a french flag so it had a red border
00:30:23
already that felt like a really easy thing to reference and draw i remember when you guys were picking this and
00:30:28
decided and i you can log in and you can see every pixel you hover over it and you can see it has a core user oh yeah
00:30:35
you can see the user that placed that picture that pixel yeah and you could zoom out a little bit and you could see
00:30:40
exactly the names of uh the coordinates of every single one so you picked that place because it was a nice little spot
00:30:46
that was unoccupied to me it was a space that was unoccupied and everyone wants to go for corners and sides at first
00:30:52
because it's the easiest to coordinate from so we went to a french flag pixel which um
00:30:58
very quickly adam found out was where the elden ring subreddit and discord community we're starting to build which
00:31:04
is massive i actually think somebody at the end of all this did a um
00:31:10
a breakdown of which communities had the most pixels and eldon ring was in the top 20. so we picked a rough opponent it
00:31:16
was funny because it wasn't there at all when we started and then we started to build our logo there i think i dropped
00:31:22
like four pixels and i had like every five minutes you're like all right i got a new pixel and i drop it in and then i refreshed once and it was just like gone
00:31:29
like all of it just got dominated in like two minutes we had a very very modest 15 by 15 pixel logo that was
00:31:37
we were not trying to take a lot of space i mean the the french flag that we were building
00:31:43
next to was probably like 100 pixels tall i mean like giant compared to 100
00:31:48
100 is a yeah well yeah i don't know exactly what the dimensions were but it was taller they
00:31:53
were taller than they were also but okay either way so um that was our first step
00:31:59
just to like give a little hint of where our went we we got covered by eldon ring we actually talked to someone from elton
00:32:05
ring put it directly above theirs to use their border and then they decided to expand and just wipe this out again
00:32:10
completely so that's a vibrant community because that was the thing when you when
00:32:16
you do the math and you're like all right we want to make a 100 by 100 thing not too crazy just 100 by 100. yeah
00:32:21
that's 10 000 pixels you have to actively maintain that is so many people that need to be online at once fighting
00:32:28
for this spot and to overshoot and be like oh we we kind of dominated our spot like why don't we just keep going yeah
00:32:34
that's pretty serious so good good job eldon ring subreddit you definitely uh you definitely took those pictures we
00:32:40
died yeah we died so what did we find in your spot so yeah we found a new spot um
00:32:45
actually funny enough right over lttstore.com there happened to be some blank space up there that's where we
00:32:51
nestled in created our logo had no trouble for a little while until a croatian flag above us started taking
00:32:59
over um we defended against them for a while but it wasn't looking great
00:33:04
then a pokemon started getting built next to us i believe let me just i want to get this favorite
00:33:09
dream it is the most random thing it is very very interesting kind of what happens because there's this like what's
00:33:16
really fun about it is you like create friends with and allies with these other communities and they're generally
00:33:21
communities you've never i mean obviously we know ltd stored none of them attacked us we never attacked them it's just fun being next to each other
00:33:27
as far as i know it's good linus good that's good thanks linus um let's see
00:33:33
the pokemon next to us was called suabloo
00:33:39
it's literally just that funnily enough somebody from that community listened to our podcast last week
00:33:45
recognized that it was us trying to build it came into our discord server and created a truce and we actually wound up sharing a few pixels in between
00:33:52
them and wound up defending and they had already built an alliance with croatia so we all worked into the croatian flag
00:34:00
so we actually became allies with croatia um suabloo and i believe it's an
00:34:05
anime called nerve this sentence is um unbelievable so that was our kind of like little place and what's funny about
00:34:12
this is i'm gonna call this we have a spot on the old world because after we finished that on saturday they
00:34:20
decided to double the size of the canvas and add another thousand by thousand pixels to the right and then later on
00:34:26
that day they actually doubled that again so now it's four times the original canvas so we're on the original
00:34:31
thousand bytes our yes our logo is on the original thousand by thousands it's kind of like the old world which is really fun but um after they doubled
00:34:39
that and quadrupled it is when a lot of the like pure chaos started happening and just throughout the weekend was
00:34:46
super fun to watch there was there's communities all over the place there was a bunch of french streamers and a bunch
00:34:52
of spanish streamers banding together to build new flags and stuff like that there's a lot of just
00:34:57
one streamer i like was like they would attack different places they didn't like there was also a group of
00:35:03
like kind of trolls called the dark void which would in random places throughout the map they would pick a community
00:35:09
attack it in this they would just turn the whole thing black and this like black dissolving void and then like some
00:35:15
sort of demonic face would start coming out of it and then all of a sudden it would disappear back to what it originally was
00:35:21
it was wild um they made some really really cool
00:35:26
uh art all over the place like you said star wars a couple of my favorite were like a lot of the flags were really cool
00:35:33
so originally the french flag the irish flag got built underneath it and at their border where they crossed
00:35:39
um france drew a wine bottle so ireland responded with a guinness pint underneath it and they both started
00:35:45
adding references to their countries like stemming from the middle of them wow um a lot of the nordic countries did
00:35:51
stuff like that too um they all kind of like any of these countries are carl pays country is that all you're thinking
00:35:58
about for the rest it's bouncing around in there in my skull right here yeah um so
00:36:03
there's a lot of fighting there's a lot of taking over on saturday our discord without even being prompted
00:36:11
actually wound up finding a space in the second canvas and creating a pixel art of mac and the waveform logo
00:36:18
which held true for a really long time actually until sometime on sunday
00:36:24
got completely taken over by what felt like some bot accounts because one of my biggest complaints here is there's
00:36:29
obviously a lot of botting happening because some things you can be consistent with
00:36:35
and have large communities work together but some are just too obvious and there was a lot of when you would click that
00:36:41
name under the pixel it would have like an account made that day and i saw that
00:36:46
probably 50 of the time i would click a pixel which is one of my bigger gripes
00:36:51
okay about the whole thing um i lost mac in waveform we lost mac in waveform um
00:36:57
but just like without attempting to gatekeep reddit and our place
00:37:02
i'm fine with people using alt accounts because that feels like it's part of reddit but doing same-day accounts in this just felt like such an easy way to
00:37:09
game the whole thing and like a little too
00:37:14
it's less wholesome it's way less you're supposed to just use your own normal account um actually just real quick i have in the
00:37:20
doc if you click i have the 2017 version and we can put this up on the screen um
00:37:25
the 2017 version and the 2021 version and you can just kind of see the difference in scale between them 2017's
00:37:32
got a big flag right in the middle it's got a moment i see the linux penguin a lot of these
00:37:38
we're actually really close to the linux penguin on the new one of course the linux is on both all right 2021 yeah
00:37:44
oh wow that took a while to load that was huge the 2021 one is gigantic i mean i think i mentioned some of my favorites
00:37:51
the flags are all really good it's less clear who has the largest piece of art right now unless so if you look france
00:37:56
has like the bottom left corner which is crazy and then that whole thing is that's not even what i'm talking about the one i'm talking about is closer to
00:38:03
the left hand's top quarter portion and it has an eiffel tower and the moon and a
00:38:09
wine glass and one thing they did that was really cool is they basically knew time lapses would
00:38:14
be created of this so the wine bottle they had the liquid goes slowly down and then they built it back up and the glass
00:38:21
would change on the side and they were like some people were literally animating something this is this brings
00:38:26
me to this was my favorite part of like i saw like the chaos and like you guys
00:38:31
talking to the discord for a couple days and then the slack over the weekend my favorite thing that came out of this
00:38:37
was at the end of it since it was a four day event of people placing these pixels over and over again is the time lapse
00:38:44
that they made of how this thing exploded into existence and then like ebbed and flowed and things appeared and
00:38:50
disappeared over time and that was sick watch that if you get a chance that's where you can see the
00:38:56
dark void that i was talking about it just kind of shows up all over the place um
00:39:01
another thing i loved among us while they didn't end with a lot of things they probably paid played one of
00:39:07
the biggest roles in this whole weekend because constantly giant among us characters would just show up in the
00:39:13
middle of nowhere at one point the entire left hand corner was just small like four by four pixels of among
00:39:20
us characters and then rather than expanding that they decided to go into other art pieces and take the colors and
00:39:28
go one off of all the colors and make among us characters that were hidden inside of the images around it to the
00:39:34
point where i think someone created an ai that scanned for all of them and found like
00:39:40
over 2 000 of them littered around the entire canvas just like small among us
00:39:45
characters all over the place um it was really really cool uh i'll get back into because
00:39:52
i couldn't handle mac getting destroyed so so many other dogs on here there are a
00:39:58
lot of dogs yeah um but on monday our discord had been fighting all day sunday and we unfortunately lost that
00:40:05
battle but on monday i decided we we had to finish this it was ending on monday afternoon so i hopped on our discord
00:40:13
i fired up my stream which i haven't done in like three years and our discord community just went off the rails trying
00:40:20
to make this happen we shrunk mac a little bit we finally i think after five tries of of fighting people and losing
00:40:27
found a spot that we could defend it also helped sam sheffer came in i saw my stream and then brought his
00:40:33
whole audience in and we kind of all battled together and it probably took like four hours but we finally
00:40:39
got mac on the canvas accurately defended him um and he's there it seems
00:40:45
like streamers would have the most would have the best audience to do something like this because they're all
00:40:50
engaged they're all plugged in and they're all here in the same place together at the same time they would literally just like pick somewhere and
00:40:55
say attack and then you would watch it on screen just turn black and then something else pop up um but yeah this
00:41:02
to me this is like one of the coolest online social experiment kind of things
00:41:08
we've ever witnessed it was way different this year because everyone knew what to do so there's far more creativity i mean there's like
00:41:14
full-blown renaissance paintings in here yeah there's a lot of crazy stuff i found a waldo where's waldo did you
00:41:20
really there's one near the i don't want it i don't i'm not even gonna say where it is yeah it's right here lots of sports
00:41:26
teams lots of flags lots of video game references and anime references um yeah there's a lot of things someone created
00:41:32
an atlas where you could go in and now the mkbhd logo and mac are officially recorded in the atlas for this final one
00:41:41
and then it all ended where towards the last couple hours you could only place white pixels so
00:41:48
essentially they made it so everyone would just place white pixels until the whole canvas turned back to white uh and
00:41:54
then it was lost into the void wow not before people got screenshots and time lapses of everything so like we'll definitely
00:42:00
put some stuff in the show notes for people to check out time lapses but um as
00:42:05
a small i mean like we're a big channel but we're still kind of like small community in comparison to like entire
00:42:11
countries right yeah or elden ring yeah um but it was really really fun to have our discord and our
00:42:18
reddit and other people's discords like band together this is all really cool experience and like to me this is what
00:42:25
discord feels like it's about like our community just all came together no one fought about anything they just like
00:42:32
wondered where pixels had to go placed pixels and defended it for four days straight days essentially um i
00:42:39
i have to give one shout out to someone in our discord named bangle game who
00:42:45
literally like 20 times over the weekend he built a spreadsheet with each pixel
00:42:50
and then each what color it should be and a hyperlink to the pixel on the page and he constantly updated it every time
00:42:57
we had to move pixels that's crazy that's that's the that's the conductor at the front of the train like
00:43:04
everybody's all aboard like this is what we're doing here's our mastermind behind it all um tim obviously created the
00:43:09
logos adam was fighting the whole time he was the one scoping out who he was the one who found elton ring was about
00:43:15
to destroy us he was our lookout tower i guess um but it was it was super super fun huge shout out to our discord to
00:43:22
twitter to twitch to everybody who helped us um and also shout out to linus who's
00:43:29
let's just say his place thing didn't come out exactly how they were yeah it was close expecting it it looks like it
00:43:35
got close i liked it yeah it got close um but yeah that was super fun that's the place i i do have to say
00:43:42
i hope they don't do this every year it's different when it's every few years it feels more special yeah yeah no this
00:43:48
is good i'm glad they did it super fun yeah sick all right let's take another quick break we'll come back dave is
00:43:55
going to talk to jad from radio lab and then we'll get on with our trivia answer do we have another
00:44:01
question here we're going to add one yeah we'll do one each ad break all right let's add a trivia question yeah
00:44:06
let's brainstorm a bit okay so the headphones you guys are wearing right now are the audio technica ath m50xs
00:44:14
what year were they released in i'm phoning a friend okay marquez is the
00:44:20
friend i have an idea all right that's a good one that's a good one
00:44:26
[Music]
00:44:34
brb right welcome back so as we mentioned from the beginning this last bit here for this week we have a guest
00:44:40
and it's chad from radiolab david actually got to speak to him and and went over sort of his origins and the
00:44:46
beginnings of like podcasting as a whole it's really in-depth and and really interesting we've done this podcast
00:44:53
thing for two and a half years is that right two years we're at 110 episodes is that
00:45:00
including audio and video yeah or just audio audio and video yeah so we have a little sorry audio only yeah audio only
00:45:06
so we have a good amount that seems like a long time actually but this is a man who's been in the thick of it for way
00:45:12
longer than we have so we'll let david talk to him and then we'll come back at the end and go over our trivia question
00:45:18
answers yeah take it away david all right well uh i guess do you want to just start off with your name and what
00:45:25
you've done for your whole life and what you're into and uh yeah my name is chad abumrad i
00:45:32
created a show called radiolab and a couple of related podcasts
00:45:38
and radio shows and uh that has been the last two decades
00:45:43
but i recently um announced i'm moving on from that and uh it's funny i think i think when i
00:45:50
announced you reached out to me right or did i reach out to you i tweeted that you had an incredibly
00:45:55
long and great career yes and then you reached out to me and i saw your byline and i was like oh oh can i yeah
00:46:02
okay i was like okay you work it with you work out out here at mk mkbhd i don't even know what you call the actual
00:46:07
umbrella thing uh yeah that's basically what we call it okay but i was i've been
00:46:12
a a massive consumer of your tech videos uh
00:46:18
and i've seen this space maybe 55 times in the in those videos so
00:46:23
when you reach out i was like oh my god can i come over yeah and see the space so i'm b this is basically me forcing my
00:46:29
way in well when you dm'd me back and followed me i had the same reaction so we'll just call it mutual mutual
00:46:35
positivity cool cool so you've been you've been like building podcasts for 20 plus years yeah since um
00:46:42
before they were podcasts before well or as as most people as as i like to call podcasts radio
00:46:49
right exactly yeah it's amazing to me like people who are in podcasting now are just like they
00:46:54
feel like they're inventing something and uh and they are i mean everybody is everybody's inventing themselves every
00:46:59
day but like i when i first started radio lab which was first a radio show
00:47:06
it was i was airing early documentaries from from like the golden age of radio and so i was
00:47:11
listening to a lot of stuff and when you start to listen to like orson welles in 1930 you realize nothing that we are doing is
00:47:18
original right it's all been done yeah and i find that quite liberating but uh
00:47:24
i'm curious about that though would you say do you mean that everything you've made has been a mixture of other things
00:47:29
that you listen to yeah i mean yeah isn't that isn't everybody yeah um derivative yeah i mean
00:47:36
it's funny we all get credited for doing things that we might not i don't know that we deserve all the credit we get
00:47:43
i say we meaning all people who make stuff yeah but specifically radio lab gets credited
00:47:48
as like doing something new to podcasting and maybe maybe we did but uh it was just generational like that
00:47:55
stuff existed before us um like way before us right um
00:48:01
and uh and so so yeah i don't feel like i invented anything i feel like i just recombined stuff in a new way but not
00:48:07
even in a new way isn't that what inventing is in a way yeah everything else is built of everything else before
00:48:13
it yeah totally but we forget yeah right we forget right um seriously you
00:48:19
should should listen to like the shadow radio dramas from the 1930s
00:48:25
not only are they amazing and like terrifying like in a horror movie kind of way they're really scary
00:48:30
you just realize like oh we're all just like we're just like riding the coattails of like i mean radio was invented in
00:48:37
1920 by 1938 they'd done everything they literally fixed they
00:48:42
they'd done everything yeah and so we're just kind of mixing the same stew yeah
00:48:47
that's what i feel like yeah but in a different conglomerate way yeah with new digital i
00:48:52
mean i think that with podcasts in particular um because like you said radio lab was like a thing before
00:48:59
podcasting was really a thing right so what was that transition into
00:49:05
you i mean i know you still call it radio versus podcasts but like what was that transition like from
00:49:11
airing on the radio and like hoping people would hear it transitioning into people actively
00:49:17
deciding to download yeah podcasts and just become fans of a show they could
00:49:22
listen to at any time yeah well that that transition that you just articulated from like
00:49:28
serendipitously just being in the car and it happens to be on to like people
00:49:34
subscribing and actively consuming it that made all the difference for us like
00:49:40
it a radiolab never really made sense on the radio you know because it's so highly produced there's so many layers
00:49:47
it's so musical and it's fast right it moves very quickly um it when you're driving and you're trying
00:49:54
to like figure out whether you should take a left turn or a right turn or when you're in your kitchen doing the dishes
00:50:00
and the kids are screaming it can be a hard show to listen to because you're having to like to divide
00:50:05
your brain in a way that that is difficult with a show like radio lab it's not a divided brain kind of experience
00:50:13
um and so it was i don't want to say languishing on the radio but it had like a small band of
00:50:19
followers but very very kind of way off in the margins and then podcasting came along
00:50:26
2006 like og podcast right yeah you started to sync your ipod to the computer yeah
00:50:33
exactly yeah people forget if i guess it was kind of old right actually yeah um
00:50:38
and uh uh when that came along and you could suddenly stop and start
00:50:44
and you were telling the story and you were deep in someone's ear canal right um suddenly the show made sense you know
00:50:50
like oh we were making for this medium we didn't realize it but we were making for the medium that just
00:50:56
appeared and uh and then we just got lucky we made a thing and then ira glass at this
00:51:02
american life promoted it and then suddenly like our audience went like from like here to boink
00:51:09
here and then suddenly the rest was history um i don't know it was weird i mean we were we were there right at the
00:51:14
beginning when podcasting became like that first wave of big shows yeah uh we we just i don't know it's weird
00:51:21
like we're a product of the historical window that we were in which was between
00:51:26
um public radio i mean not even public radio like all that existed was this american life and
00:51:33
a few other shows and then news right yeah yeah so we were coming out of that like space and then suddenly podcasting
00:51:39
happened and we got grandfathered in in a way and then suddenly we were a massive podcast
00:51:45
but um it was it's funny it's funny to look back on like how much luck played into
00:51:52
it like if i were to start radio lab now i don't think it would have the same trajectory because
00:51:57
podcasting is an established thing and did it feel like it like popped off instantaneously or was it like a a slow
00:52:04
growth that just eventually got big it was that slow yeah yeah it's like inverse power law yeah yeah we were in
00:52:11
the long pretail for a long long time and then finally i'd say around 2008
00:52:17
or 9. uh somewhere in that zone i have a theory and i would like you to i would
00:52:23
like to see if you agree with it oh please the mobile internet and the ability to sort of download
00:52:31
anything at any time over wirelessly um
00:52:36
i think sort of allowed people to just listen to whatever they wanted at any time yeah and
00:52:43
it's funny because you mentioned earlier like podcasting is actually kind of old yeah but the ability but but podcasts in general
00:52:51
have only really seen mass popularity in the last like decade or even less
00:52:56
and to me it feels like it's mostly just people having the ability to listen to whatever they want whatever they want
00:53:02
without having to you know plug their ipod into a computer and sync something and just like reducing layers of of
00:53:09
friction and complexity in that system yeah i would agree with that and i would actually double down a little bit and
00:53:15
say when apple baked in the podcast app to the phone yeah that was a huge
00:53:21
moment right suddenly it was this thing that was on your phone and anybody could like one day flip through and be like
00:53:28
huh what is that let me just like that yeah um and like that was a massive moment and
00:53:33
that happened like one or two like we were around a few other podcasts were around and gaining popularity
00:53:40
that happened uh i think the rise of the wireless mobile internet was happening
00:53:46
and then serial happened yeah right so all of those things kind of came together at once and then suddenly
00:53:53
uh it became like a meme at that point like it became it became uh
00:53:58
you know spoofed on saturday night live and like people were writing articles about it
00:54:03
and it became like an idea that was talked about in the culture um but it had been around for a while
00:54:09
maybe things were playing catch-up the technologies were maturing and uh and also like there were shows
00:54:15
that you know there were there was uh this american life there was us there were other shows that had back catalogs
00:54:20
that people could dive into yeah at that point so um yeah we just happen it's it's funny to just be standing in the street
00:54:27
in the middle of the street when all the cars show up yeah yeah yeah yeah you feel excited about that
00:54:33
but you also feel like i don't know that i necessarily did this just like 14 things came together that i had no
00:54:39
control of yeah yeah so like we obviously create a lot of youtube videos here and we
00:54:45
recently about a year ago switched to doing youtube podcasts as well um and i remember when i was i used to
00:54:51
like watch youtube live shows all the time but they weren't really podcasts and there were podcasts that weren't really live shows
00:54:58
and i feel like that's a sort of recent convergence and i know that even um radio labs started putting they made a
00:55:05
youtube channel and started putting stuff on there how is that how do you see like the future of video and storytelling in a
00:55:12
podcast format it's kind of weird right because like video and audio are very different mediums
00:55:18
and we did episodes back when uh we were only an audio uh show
00:55:24
that i felt like it was a lot easier to sort of create that world in your head and tell the story with sound effects
00:55:29
and all these things suddenly if we were sitting here with cameras which we are which we are it's a
00:55:35
little different you can't really force someone into that world as much because they're also in the real world sitting
00:55:41
here with us yeah yeah it's i mean it is it is a weird experience to have i mean these three very beautiful looking
00:55:47
cameras you have pointed at us um and each of them has their little monitors showing different images of us
00:55:53
yeah that's a totally different experience than like making making a podcast in an airless booth and
00:55:59
then putting it out and knowing that you're just going to be into people's minds and not into their eyeballs right um
00:56:06
but that said you know i mean i i feel like if the conversation is good
00:56:12
it does i mean you just kind of want to be where people are at right and and uh
00:56:18
and uh having a conversation i mean would we do an episode of radio lab the way we're
00:56:23
doing this now no you know but when you're talking to somebody
00:56:29
what do i do when i'm like when terry gross is talking to somebody i'm like oh that's that's fascinating i go and look at what i look them up on
00:56:35
the internet and then within 10 seconds i know what they look like right you know what i mean yeah so it isn't
00:56:41
it isn't that much of a stretch what are we actually talking about we're talking about having a conversation yeah
00:56:47
and we're talking about telling a story there's some like there's age-old things that we just wrap new words around but so i don't know i guess i guess it was
00:56:54
more like the convergence of the audio and video mediums in that storytelling
00:56:59
format do you see that as being like because we have movies right and we have
00:57:05
youtube videos and they're sort of the same thing but it's different from like a podcast
00:57:11
where you create an entire world in someone's head and bring them through sound effects and do you think that there is a a place for
00:57:18
a emerging of those two things where you're able to like use the sound effects and yeah create those universes oh like
00:57:24
emerging of like a podcast on youtube but that's using sound in the way radio labs yeah i guess yeah
00:57:32
i mean maybe i mean it it really depends on it it depends on uh what
00:57:39
what you're doing to people's eyes right mm-hmm if it's a literal representation of two people talking then it would like
00:57:45
it would be strange to watch us and then suddenly hear sound effects co-mingle right
00:57:51
but yeah that's a weird thing there are all kinds of like essays i mean you do essays there are all kinds of essays on
00:57:56
youtube who are creating uh narrative experiences which feel like
00:58:02
podcasts yeah right yeah which are using sound and artful ways um but those are more like movies right so
00:58:09
it's like i don't know there's something right it's it's weird right yeah we sort of define things in categories but no
00:58:15
the categories aren't don't make sense yeah anymore um yeah i don't know there's like i feel
00:58:21
like there's there's just the thing that happens in the first 10 seconds of anything which is if it's if it's a
00:58:26
podcast it's if it's a video where you just you establish the rules for the
00:58:32
experience and whatever you do in those 10 seconds can can permit anything i feel like
00:58:39
whether it's crazy sounds or or completely naturalistic to people sitting in a room talking yeah
00:58:45
yeah yeah so you you grew up doing music engineering right and you moved into podcasting from that
00:58:52
yeah music i mean music engineering would be me composition i was compromising yeah okay i mean one of my
00:58:59
favorite things so i i went to music school before i fell through the side door into
00:59:05
into podcasting and uh i went to like one of those music schools that taught you music in a way
00:59:12
that's completely useless but but fascinating i mean it was i learned like about music concrete and all these
00:59:17
things that no one cares about anymore but i remember coming out of music school
00:59:22
and i and i just like taken a whole course on stockhausen and the way that he used sounds
00:59:28
from the real world as music and the first few few radio labs that i made i was like
00:59:34
what would stockhausen do like how would how would he tell this story so you hear a lot of strange noises and and sounds
00:59:41
and and it was really just like me trying to be a composer but in a different way
00:59:46
and then as i learned the journalism and i learned how to tell a story and how to interview and all those like more
00:59:53
journalistic things um [Music] the music just became a way to like
00:59:58
augment all that you know at first it was very much like i want to be a composer and then i realized oh no i'm
01:00:04
actually what i think i am as a journalist who who speaks music um you know and
01:00:11
when you say speak can you expand on that a little bit it's like creating the musical version of of a conversation or
01:00:18
a story yeah in a way yeah like the language that i speak into the story is a musical language but what i'm trying
01:00:24
to do is basic journalism on the front end of it does that make sense yeah yeah yeah yeah and you said
01:00:30
you said that you know now that you're retired you're going to be doing more music stuff what kind of music stuff is
01:00:36
that going to be what does that look like i don't know if i'm retired as a funny one yeah like
01:00:42
not that old yeah but uh you know just it was time for a new chapter and um
01:00:49
i am actually i have a couple of music commissions i'm working through um
01:00:54
i have like a ton of music i'm writing that probably no one will ever hear um but that i'm really enjoying
01:01:01
and um you know like i mean did you do you want to hear that i mean i tell you about the music it's like i almost i'm
01:01:07
embarrassed to talk about it because it's just it's like one of those little like things you do that you almost
01:01:13
feel like why would anyone listen to this but i i'm i'm writing a ton of music that's um
01:01:18
meant to be listened to when you're asleep oh doing like through i'm doing these like hour-long pieces that are time-to-rem
01:01:25
cycles that use some of the um the brainwave frequencies that people
01:01:31
uh have when they sleep as musical content i'm sort of creating like um like nocturns around that
01:01:38
basically so uh quite literally no one will ever listen to it when they're conscious
01:01:43
um and so you know i'm doing that which is just like a fun project and um does that like help people sleep or is it
01:01:50
sort of just based around the ideas of it's more based around the ideas i'm not sure if it'll help people sleep or not
01:01:56
um and then i'm developing a few like long-term projects that might be
01:02:01
podcasts i'm not sure um helping a friend with the documentary so i'm just kind of like playing around
01:02:06
right now yeah um very much in the same spirits why i'm here like i was just kind of reaching
01:02:12
out to people i really respect and admire and uh seeing how they work yeah yeah i feel like i'm in a learning mode
01:02:18
yeah yeah yeah that's awesome yeah that's awesome does it feel weird to like have been doing something every
01:02:24
week for 20 years and then flip into a new mode like that
01:02:29
uh it feels strange it feels like um riding
01:02:34
a bike a little bit um but it's feeling less and less strange
01:02:39
and it's just so cool to see the just the the breadth of people making cool things
01:02:45
right um it sounds like such a like trite old man thing to say no but it's a i mean it
01:02:51
really is amazing like to be here for example and to see see how you guys make make uh videos and content
01:02:57
um the thing about the weekly deadline is that you get locked into not just that work but that life right
01:03:05
in that you're spending all your waking hours making the next podcast
01:03:10
and then you're also listening to like two or three podcasts ahead and editing those oh yeah and so the the entire
01:03:17
project closes in around you and you're not able to like watch tv anymore or read books or do any of the
01:03:23
things that you know you need to do to feed your creative energy creative energy yeah um
01:03:29
i probably lived like 10 years in that space where it's just like you feel like yeah you feel like an 18
01:03:35
wheeler is chasing you down the street yeah um every minute of the day and so it's been really nice to break
01:03:42
out of that i mean even though i love the work and i love the people i was doing it with i love them so much
01:03:47
they're so incredible it feels nice to break out of that rhythm and to just you know
01:03:54
like sit down and read something yeah and not feel like it has to be like goal-driven yeah yeah right yeah just
01:04:01
yeah just entertaining read it because i want to yeah and i'm still getting comfortable with that yeah it's a thing you have to train yourself to actually
01:04:07
think that that's okay again so i'm in that process how long did it take you to like build
01:04:13
a general episode from like start to finish because you said you were like working on multiple
01:04:18
things at this multiple episodes at the same time yeah two to three i mean it depends there is there are some that are
01:04:25
fast and fast is probably never faster than four months yeah and there's some that take two years you
01:04:30
know of just like slow incremental work so you're not working on it all the time yeah you've got like 12 things happening
01:04:38
right but that's reassuring because when we do long-form episodes sometimes they take
01:04:43
like three or four months and yeah that's fast for me yeah yeah yeah yeah that's super fast i mean just finding
01:04:49
the story can sometimes take that long you know yeah um i mean like i i think of one episode we did which was sort of
01:04:56
a profile of this guy who hunts big game he like deliberately hunts oh yeah
01:05:02
yeah it's called the rhino hunter yeah and like he hunts uh endangered species and he would argue he's doing it to help
01:05:08
them and so it's a really weird ethical complicated thing uh just getting that guy's trust and
01:05:15
allowing him um getting him to allow us to trail him right i took i took years really yeah so
01:05:22
you expressed to me when you got here that you're really into you're like weirdly into technology
01:05:28
right deep what is your favorite category of technology
01:05:33
my favorite category would be um andrew wang okay so you know andrew yeah it's andrew
01:05:38
huang and today i am using my face to control a synthesizer setup so like uh
01:05:45
watching someone like that some crazy talented dude make music with a balloon or um
01:05:51
talk about his particular modular synthesis patch that he made that makes a cool bubbly
01:05:58
sound or um listen to various people give tutorials
01:06:04
in ableton right so it's a lot of like music related software tutorials uh a lot of gear
01:06:10
stuff um [Music] and uh and then i watch you guys all the time like and i've and that has been my
01:06:17
gateway into like video like that whole category of youtube where people talk about lenses and cameras yeah i don't
01:06:24
know about any of that but i watch it all yeah i don't know something about it i'm just like it's like um
01:06:30
it's like comforting yeah you know yeah i i will i will never in my life buy a
01:06:37
samsung phone but i look i watch all the videos it talking about the strengths and
01:06:43
weaknesses of the samsung phones it's like i don't know i just find it fascinating yeah yeah but mostly it's
01:06:48
audio tech is what's interesting is what i really nerd out on yeah i'm sure adam could relate to that if you guys ever
01:06:54
need the like deep audio nerdy take on whatever just like call me
01:07:00
okay because i i'm done and done all right perfect yeah i love that stuff i uh i watch way too much of it yeah it's
01:07:07
like yeah i feel like we have the same youtube algorithm probably probably you're probably the same suggestion i go
01:07:13
really deep though i mean like i just like how do you use fm synthesis to make a bass drum and that kind of stuff like
01:07:19
i'll watch stuff like that for days just like how to how to program stuff in
01:07:24
in various like phase plant and those kind of synths like i'm listening i have no idea what
01:07:29
i'm hearing right now it's uh there's so much there's such a wealth of stuff out there yeah people who who do that
01:07:36
that's what's amazing to me i was like man these people can make a living on youtube maybe not a living but something
01:07:42
i mean probably you know it's like it's it's kind of insane like i i dropped out of college and ended up
01:07:48
doing a a job that is not even really related to what i went to college for you know and
01:07:54
so and i learned most of the skills on youtube it's just wild yeah and i feel like a
01:08:01
lot of the world is kind of moving towards that you know where they can just learn anything like audio engineering or like any of that
01:08:07
stuff like you're even still watching stuff and uh yeah i want to learn to play the bass and i was like i was just
01:08:13
doing a a search the other day and i was like oh dang that could like i don't have to go get a t-shirt it's all right yeah i know yeah you know
01:08:20
you could buy a book but you could just watch youtube videos watch it for for like 24 hours at least
01:08:25
you know play something yeah do you have a prediction for like the future of what
01:08:30
the next media category is like the big next big media category
01:08:36
like we have we have podcasts and video and movies do you think there's going to be
01:08:41
like a whole whole new way that we experience things
01:08:46
well this is i'm not going to blow anyone's mind by saying this but like i think
01:08:53
my prediction or this is more my hope is
01:08:58
like i think vr is amazing but kind of stupid and that plays the worst of humanity but i do think ar is
01:09:04
fascinating you know and i do feel like um i hope podcasting discovers ar
01:09:10
um because it's such a natural marriage um
01:09:15
what does that look like like listening to a podcast while you have an augmented experience yeah
01:09:22
or uh so much there's so many ways in which
01:09:27
like we say stories are these vehicles for empathy right um there's so many ways in which
01:09:34
all that you want in a story is to force someone to walk in in someone else's shoes right
01:09:40
and it's amazing to think that you can create not just stories and narratives but actually environments and spaces
01:09:46
that people can walk in or you could you know tell a story about history
01:09:52
like i don't know have you ever watched that walk down uh wall street in manhattan
01:09:57
and all of these like like thai wearing bros or walking around but you're thinking man like alexander
01:10:04
hamilton walk down the street and then you take a right on whatever street it is and there's like big there's a corner off of
01:10:11
wall street where there's like a big chunk that's been taken out of the uh out of the concrete
01:10:17
and uh if you just do a little search you realize that in 1920 something there was a vomit bombing by anarchists
01:10:23
and they just like blew up the building there's a big chunk missing from the building but no one knows like it would be interesting to tell
01:10:29
stories about these places and to see those ghosts of the past walk with us you know and to see the people who did
01:10:36
those things who walked these streets uh suddenly appear before us but not appear in a vr sense where you're
01:10:42
removed from your reality but they appear and stand next to you in your world yeah right yeah that's super
01:10:48
interesting to me yeah i've always thought that that's probably where vr air is gonna go because like forcing
01:10:54
someone to put a headset on like every level of friction that you have when getting into an environment the less
01:11:00
likely someone is to use that that method or environment yeah i mean it
01:11:05
doesn't feel long before warby parker just has ar implants in all their classes yeah you know that just feels
01:11:10
like three ten five years away yeah yeah so my big prediction would be that
01:11:16
storytelling will find its way into that universe very quickly and i mean like just like workaday
01:11:21
storytellers will start to i mean the big companies are already doing big exhibits and yes
01:11:28
but like you and i will be doing stories for that for for that yeah i hope yeah
01:11:33
yeah you said um like when you're just walking down the street and you see a chunk and you look it up is that like how you find stories like
01:11:40
how do you usually go about finding the best stories what is your method for that yeah you read a lot and you i mean
01:11:46
my best method probably is um i get overwhelmed with like
01:11:52
reading stuff online and i lose my bearings as to what's interesting but uh i have a lot of people that i over
01:11:58
the years i just like i have breakfast with them you know and people that you really like the way
01:12:03
they think and you're just interested to know what they're reading so i would have this habit of just like
01:12:10
every week having two or three breakfasts with various people i know and um
01:12:15
just kind of ask them what what they're paying attention to and most of my ideas start with those
01:12:21
breakfasts you know like oh that so-and-so is just read a galley of x and y book and thinks this is interesting
01:12:29
let me call them and call that person and then just follow the leads a little bit and see where that goes um
01:12:35
that's kind of what i that's kind of the path i take um someone like latif who who works with me
01:12:41
uh at radio lab and who sort of is the successor host one of the two successor hosts
01:12:47
he's he he will just like he gets so many of his ideas like they begin his tiny twitter threads and then he'll
01:12:52
follow them so he uses social media in in that way but i find i just get spun around by all
01:12:59
that stuff and i just i need to talk to somebody yeah so just having conversations with people
01:13:04
yeah yeah well um do you have any burning questions yeah so
01:13:10
one last question how fast can you type the alphabet
01:13:15
should we do this wait is that a thing okay yeah so so on on waveform we
01:13:20
generally have this uh we have this like race that people have to do whenever we have them on i'm a pretty
01:13:27
fast typer but i've never typed the alpha it's harder than you think i would imagine we have a we have like a um
01:13:33
leaderboard and i'm like second to last or something so okay all right i could just start at any
01:13:39
point yes whenever you're ready all right here i go
01:13:50
where did i get to 0.342 6.342 okay that's really good is that good yeah
01:13:56
good that's pretty good i'm gonna look up the this overall score now i feel like i could have done better and i made
01:14:01
him you get three tries you get three tries all right i'm gonna do it and we don't we won't count the first one because you just say a no
01:14:07
count it if it's my best okay 6.342 yeah all right here we go reset
01:14:13
all right
01:14:20
6.321 okay better slightly better where do i rank where does he rank i'm
01:14:26
looking it up wait where is it you have one more run so i'm gonna get six point three two one is
01:14:31
the current one i'm gonna break i'm gonna break the four four seconds oh shoot okay
01:14:36
i'm just gonna throw caution to the wind
01:14:43
5.176 5.176 you are
01:14:51
right after josh schwartle the guy who created homemade wordle oh my god you
01:14:56
beat me by point one second so you are number four wow oh shoot really wait
01:15:01
what's the top time top time is quinn of snazzy labs he's a youtuber he got four point four three
01:15:07
two all right all right yeah well thank you oh man it was like a lot of a lot of
01:15:13
ping-ponging but uh no it was great it was really great um uh it was really cool
01:15:18
all right thank you david and chad for the time we also need to do our trivia answers
01:15:23
now we've had some time to stew on it for those of you driving you did not google the answers and for those of us
01:15:29
posting we also did not google the answers we didn't so remind us the first question adam i do
01:15:35
not think i know the first one so the first question carl pay the ceo of nothing and co-founder of oneplus grew
01:15:42
up in which european country okay i'm guessing
01:15:49
i feel like i should know this but i don't so i'm gonna guess sweden oh
01:15:55
i was gonna go with the uk which is that a country because i'm an
01:16:00
idiot united britain it's sweden no it is i knew okay it's like this like small like thing the back
01:16:06
of my head was like i've known this i don't know that's real but i do know this right now nothing's based in the uk
01:16:12
and they nothing is yeah nothing is sorry something but nothing i'm confused the nothing thing i hate this name yeah
01:16:18
nothing uh okay the other one though i have to do some mental math because it's been a minute
01:16:24
so the next question the headphones that you're wearing right now are the audio technica ath m50xs
01:16:30
what year were they released in now you specified m50x so
01:16:36
there was the m50 and m50s but m50x came out a little bit
01:16:41
later so i reviewed the m50s and i compared them to a bunch of other headphones
01:16:48
are these different than the red colorware ones that were here red remember we had we had a red m50x they
01:16:55
were just red they made red ones that was an m5850x thousand x okay so
01:17:01
i started in 2017 and that was the first pair of headphones i used when i started so they were here in 2017
01:17:09
so it's before that that's about as much information as i can give towards this question
01:17:16
going 20 25
01:17:22
14. i was gonna say 15. 2014. two for two good job not only are you
01:17:28
two for two you got to watch me say the uk as a country so i hope adam edits that part out please don't make me look
01:17:33
anything that was impressive i i did the job on like i i did the comparison with the m50x versus the beats pro in college
01:17:40
which was 2014 and 2015 when i was in that apartment so it was one of those two years yeah so yeah i feel pretty good about
01:17:47
that good job all right are we keeping are we tallying who how many we get right now if i knew that i would have tried harder
01:17:52
let's go all right well that's a good place to end it thanks for sticking up with us this week uh we'll be back next
01:17:58
week with more waveform yeah catch you guys later peace waveform is produced by adam molina we are partnered with vox
01:18:03
media and our intro outro music was created by vayne silk
01:18:22
you
