(upbeat music)
- Hey, what's up, guys?
I'm MKBHD here, coming at you from the basement studio.
We're back.
This is clearly not your regularly scheduled programming.
Unfortunately, I'm cooped up here
because I finally caught COVID,
two years, or I should say,
COVID finally caught me two years in.
Don't worry, not to worry, I'm fine.
I've actually long recovered.
I'm just waiting to test negative a few times
right 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 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 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 tech hot takes,
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, we'll see,
if y'all agree with me or not on any of this stuff,
but 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 supposed to be the tech person.
I'm very optimistic typically about technology,
and so I'm always trying to see the potential future
of Web 3 and NFTs and the blockchain
and Bitcoin and Ethereum and all this stuff.
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.
- [Dr Mike] Wow.
- I have to like keep an eye on it,
but I have so much skepticism in like.
- [Dr Mike] Me too.
- Every time something gets pitched
in the inbox or in-person,
or I see anything. - I love.
- It always just defaults to how much money you can make.
And I need to know some other benefits.
- Yes, yes, yes. - Something.
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 skeptic.
- I'm 1,000% with you. - Yeah.
And that is still, for me, 100% true.
Do I own some crypto still? Yeah, I do.
How much?
Doesn't really matter 'cause 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 of this stuff,
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 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,
if there's nothing else to it,
then it's as good as gambling to me.
So okay, number two, my number two hot take is actually just
that TikTok and YouTube can and will coexist.
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 TikTok,
one of the biggest questions I hear a lot is like,
should YouTube be worried?
You know, the massive, massive rise of TikTok
over the past few years, especially with the pandemic,
has been gargantuan.
You feel like it's unavoidable that this overlap,
that TikTok just comes up
and just starts eating YouTube's lunch.
But I think the key thing still for YouTube and TikTok 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 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 TikTok 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 wanna watch it.
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 TikTok is 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
in also offering a competing product to TikTok
'cause, you know, it is related.
And they also managed to beat's TikTok's monetization model
like right off the bat, very quickly.
They offer revenue sharing
as of either right now where they're about to start,
where TikTok is still stuck on the creator, you know, pool
that everybody draws money from.
So bottom line, they're gonna be fine.
They're separate pies, and you can stop asking me that.
That's not that hot of a take actually.
Okay, number three.
(laughs) 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 reviews a lot, is it's, "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, is 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, 100+ 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 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 765 LT.
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.
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.
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 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'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 drive trains,
on supercharging 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, 'cause I think in the meantime,
they're just gonna 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,
will I point out the panel gaps?
Sure, but I don't think most people are there to see that.
All right, here's my last hot take.
Last one is that 5G sucks.
5G sucks right now.
5G is actually worse than 4G.
Like do you remember the promise of 5G?
5G was suppose, it was gonna be this amazing thing
with this world-changing future.
We were gonna have blazing fast internet
in the palms of our hands everywhere we go,
and there's gonna be no latency anywhere.
There's gonna be doctors doing robot surgery
halfway around the world
with these magic gloves that connect via 5G.
Like all this crazy stuff was gonna 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, yeah, 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 gonna require billions and trillions of dollars.
So, yeah, we're not there yet. Okay, we get it.
But 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 'em, 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+,
5G, 5GE, 5G+, 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.
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
'cause 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 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.
Hopefully that changes.
I wanna be an optimist.
I hope a lot of these things change, to be honest.
But, yeah, 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.mkbhd.com,
as I wear the Madeon shirt right over it.
No, 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.
Peace.
(upbeat music)