Foreign coming at you from the basement Studio We're back. Uh, this is clearly not your regularly scheduled programming. Um, fortunately I'm cooped up here because I finally caught Covid two years or I should say Kovid finally caught me two years in. Uh, don't worry, not to worry I'm fine I've actually long recovered I'm just waiting to test negative a few times in a row before I go back into the studio trying to be smart and safe about it.

But while I am cooped up down here I'm just kind of like there's not much around. so I can't do much with the typical Studio stuff. what can I do? And my idea that I had was I'm gonna share some uh, some opinions that I have that could be considered hot takes some spicy hot takes for you real things that I actually believe at the end of 2022. So I haven't done this before? this might this might ruffle some feathers obviously I think we've sort of done a little bit of this on the waveform podcast.

probably a little more actually on the studio Channel I Remember, we had a segment where we all gave our our Tech hot takes. Uh, but you know, forgive the production quality. this is me and a camera and a Yeti mic which is not even meant to be held like this I just happen to have this mic here while I'm home. So anyway, uh, we'll see if y'all agree with me or not on any of this stuff, but let's uh, let's just jump right into it.

So number one for me: Crypto investing is basically all just gambling. So look, look I know I'm the I'm supposed to be the tech person I'm very optimistic typically about technology and so I'm always trying to see uh, the potential future of web3 and Nfts and the blockchain and and Bitcoin and Ethereum and all this stuff. Uh, but I'd still consider myself a skeptic because it's so hard to see through all of the noise is what I think is a charitable way of calling it. So much noise.

I actually got asked recently on Dr Mike's podcast and it was funny. That's like one of the first times I've actually been asked publicly about crypto in a while, but he asked me about what I think about it. and here's what I said: how involved or interested are you in the Nft space or Crypto space? as close to zero as you can be without being zero I have to like keep an eye on it. but I have so much skepticism in like me too.

every time something gets pitched in the inbox or in person or I see anything, it always just defaults to how much money you can make and I need to know some other benefits. Yes, yes, anything tangible like how useful it'll be I've seen a little bit some whisperings here and there about like maybe the deed of your house will be an Nft one day. Maybe I don't know I have a safe with a deed in it I feel like an old person when I say this but like I'm skeptic I'm a thousand percent with you? Yeah and that is still for me, a hundred percent true. Do I own some crypto? Still? Yeah.

I Do? How much? doesn't really matter because I can't use it for anything I mean you do see the headlines once in a while, right? Every once in a while a couple months you'll see a headline about a new business that's like starting to accept Bitcoin or Ethereum or some crypto or something like that I Remember Tesla did this briefly and then they stopped and I was like that headline surfaces every couple months and I notice it and I wait for the Fallout and the continuation. but it just never happens. And so basically what's happened is all of this promise of like this decentralized world of the future of crypto and Nfts and all this stuff. it's it's just promise for me and it's all been reduced to like when I open my inbox and I see a new crypto pitch every single time.

It's just about how much money you can make if you invest. If you buy the price goes up and then you make money but what else? What other reasons I need other reasons so I'll continue to hold the the Bitcoin that I have. It's fine, it's not even that much. but I think for me if I can't explain why something is more valuable other than lots of people are interested in it right now.

So it's kind of hot so the value is up. There's nothing else to it then. uh, it's as good as gambling to me. So okay, number two, my number two hot take um, is actually just that Tick Tock and YouTube can and will co-exist They'll both be completely fine now.

Maybe this is just a little less spicy than the others, but I mean every time I get asked about Tick Tock One of the biggest questions I hear a lot is like should YouTube be worried? You know the massive massive rise of Tick Tock over the past few years, especially with the pandemic, has been gargantuan. You feel like it's unavoidable that this overlap that that Tick Tock just comes up and just starts eating YouTube's lunch. But I think the key thing still for YouTube and and Tick Tock is they are such different use cases that they don't overlap at all. I mean a tiny bit, maybe of your time, but almost not at all on YouTube What's this a YouTube video right? You go to YouTube to sit down and actually spend some time watching a video that you either searched for or was recommended to you on the homepage and you chose it to watch it.

You spend more time per her video on YouTube It's got a whole search engine attached to it so you'll find videos based on what you're interested in and and Tick Tock is like I'll sit down and I'll have like two minutes or something and you'll just open it up and scroll a few times and then close it and that's it. You just get that quick dopamine burst, that quick adrenaline boost, that instant gratification, and you never actually choose the videos you want to watch. It just gets sort of served to you so it kind of reminds me of like YouTube and Netflix YouTube is the world's online video library. but Netflix while it is technically also an online video library, is different and you expect different things in different places and so they can coexist.

and that's totally fine. That's why I think Tick Tock's also just going to have a huge separate pie. It's not taking a slice of YouTube's pie, it's just a new pie. and I think with YouTube Shorts YouTube responded pretty correctly and also offering a competing product to Tick Tock because you know it is related and I also managed to beat Tick Tock's monetization model.

Like, right off the bat very quickly. they offer Revenue sharing as of either right now or they're about to start where Tick Tock is still stuck on the Creator you know pool that everyone draws money from. So bottom line, they're going to be fine. They're separate pies and you can stop asking me that.

that's not, that's not that hot of a take actually. Okay. Number three, Number three. Regular people don't care about panel gaps.

They just don't care. And that's I'm talking about Tesla right now, of course. So one of the biggest things you always hear in car reviews when people talk about Tesla and compare it to other cars. Especially, You hear this in the Enthusiast community and in in reviews a lot is oh my.

God The panel gaps. The panel gaps. The build quality in this car is terrible. The gap between the panel here on the hood and on the door is bigger than this gap between these panels.

And it's smaller than the gap between these panels. It's so inconsistent it's jarring. It's a poor build, and that's actually true. That's actually true about Tesla's cars.

They're much less consistent than the manufacturers who have been established and who have learned to refine their processes over the past 50 hundred plus years. But this, to me reminds me of I'm sure there's an equivalent in the smartphone world where, like reviewers notice this. Maybe it's like refresh rate on screens I Don't know. Reviewers notice this and really care about it and harp on it a lot.

But guess what? at the end of the day, people are still buying Teslas And it's just because the the panel gaps are so low on the list of things that you think about when you're buying a car that it happens to still be fine. Like this is similar with McLaren McLaren is notorious for obviously other electrical issues and build quality issues. but McLarens are all these beautiful hand-built sports cars and you often will see sizable gaps sizable differences in panel gaps on McLarens But guess what? people still love their McLarens because that is really far down on the list on why someone was looking at and thinking about buying a 765lt. But the thing is I want Tesla to get better at this.

Like having panel gaps is not good in your cars. and they've had all kinds of notorious build quality issues in the past. as they've aged, they got out of building in a tent and they've been working towards improving on their way to the likes of the German manufacturers and the others. Uh, how do you? How do you get around this and I think really? I look at it like this.

This is how I look at it right now if you could buy a model 3, but you had to trade some other feature from the model 3 from a different car that's really well built. like okay Tesla Model 3 versus Mustang Mach e. You could have a Tesla Model 3 with perfect panel gaps. Everything about the build quality of the car looks like it was built by Ford but you have to trade something with the Ford You trade Tesla's supercharger Network and you get Ford's public open access charger.

Network We would you take that? Tesla No, Actually, I wouldn't because obviously the supercharger network is a huge part of why people end up buying a Tesla. So okay, what about you get the perfect Tesla Model 3 But you get the Ford's software and would you take that? no? I Think most people still would probably take the Tesla with the panel gaps and you just keep going down the list. Would you take the Tesla Model 3 with no panel gaps, but trade something else about it. You find performance.

Is it the tires? Is it the paint? something? Something else about it. and I Think what you'll find is that most people will take the Tesla as is with its current set of features. So basically I think Tesla Tesla's done the math and they will continue to focus on the things that they believe are reasons why people do buy their cars so differentiating themselves on the Battery Technology on the drivetrains, on supercharger, Network for that matter, on their software, on all these other things, and the second that panel gaps and Manufacturing issues meaningfully impact their bottom line. Then and only then will they make a large concerted effort towards changing that because I think in the meantime, they're just going to slowly improve in the background and just as they make more cars, they'll get better at it Now when I do get around to reviewing my Tesla while I point out the panel gaps.

Sure, but I don't think most people are there to see. All right, Here's my last hot take. Last one is that 5G sucks 5G sucks right now 5G is actually worse than 4G Do you remember the promise of 5G 5G was supposed? it was going to be this amazing thing? With this world changing future, we're gonna have blazing fast internet in the palms of our hands everywhere we go and it's gonna. There's gonna be no latency anywhere.

There's going to be doctors doing robot surgery halfway around the world with these magic gloves that connect via 5G like all this crazy stuff was going to be promised. Nobody would ever wait for the buffering of a YouTube video ever again and we'd have the Metaverse would finally be real. All these promises of 5G and it's turned out yet. none of that's happened.

None of that's true yet. now not even that is the hot take I Know that You know We understand that it takes time to build the infrastructure and it's just not here yet. Like I did a video a couple years ago now on the state of 5G and what that meant and I would go up to a cell phone tower and I would get actually one gigabit per second down. But then you'd walk around the corner or behind a tree and you'd get fractions of that speed and it's like, okay, clearly you need a ton of those antennas to cover the entire world for that to be a real possibility in the future.

And there's no way that happens quickly that's going to require billions and trillions of dollars. So yeah, we're not there yet. Okay, we get it. What I'm trying to say is 5G right now is worse than 4G.

It's slower, it's less consistent, and it's more expensive. I Think we've seen a lot of carriers, especially here in the US. For example, we've got T-Mobile Verizon at T A Lot of them, especially at T, are using the low band 5G not even mid band and low band 5G can actually feel slower than 4G right now. And on top of that, there's all these weird shenanigans that they play with, like the status bar in your phone I've seen on the iPhone like 4G 4G plus 5G 5ge 5G plus Uwb all these weird titles and none of them are particularly encouraging.

I'll get a 5G logo in the corner of my phone I'll do a speed test. it'll be slower than 4G So 5G at this Point has really just turned into a thing that smartphone manufacturers can point at and be like, look, our phones are new. Is this something that we did that's different from last year? but really, all it's ended up doing is making our phones more expensive because those radios are more expensive, making our battery lives worse. Because now if you don't have 5G it's switching back and forth and 5G is radio and Battery consuming and making our phone plans more expensive all at once while giving us not that much of a good experience.

So 5G sucks right now I think Also, expectations are the thief of joy and 5G really sucks because the expectations and the promises were like way up here and we're nowhere near that yet. 5G is brutally bad. Uh, hopefully that changes I Want to be an optimist? I hope a lot of these things change to be honest, but yeah, those are my. those are my hot takes right now.

here's another hot take. We have the best merch in the entire YouTube game! I'm wearing the parallelogram sweatshirt right now shop.nbhd.com as I wear the Maddian shirt right over it now I uh that's a that's not a hot take. Everyone knows we have the best stuff, but anyway, that's been it. Let me know what you think.

I Promise the next video will be back to your regularly scheduled programming I Hope to be in the studio soon! Fun episode of the podcast just went up. Check that out! but in the meantime I will see you guys in the next one. Bass.