Marques Brownlee
Appearances
What Now? with Trevor Noah
Is Marques Brownlee the Most Powerful Man in Tech? [VIDEO]
I've loved the little knickknacks, little camera stuff, a little accessory to my phone that I'm plugging in. Gadgets have always been... They've always been tech, but that's a part of tech. Another part of tech is social networks, right?
What Now? with Trevor Noah
Is Marques Brownlee the Most Powerful Man in Tech? [VIDEO]
So we remember the MySpace days, and then suddenly Facebook comes along, and now, oh, wait, you can have both a Facebook and an Instagram and a Snapchat, oh, and a YouTube channel. It's this sudden massive thing, and social networks is a part of tech, but they've grown independently.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
Is Marques Brownlee the Most Powerful Man in Tech? [VIDEO]
Then there's also there's just production, too. Like when I started with just that laptop on YouTube, that was a good enough video for people to click subscribe. Believe it or not, 15 years ago, I upload that video today and people are like, what happened to you? What went wrong? Because the barrier for entry is so much higher or not the barrier for entry, but the expectations are so much higher.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
Is Marques Brownlee the Most Powerful Man in Tech? [VIDEO]
in production and cameras and on YouTube as well. And I love that too. I'm a video nerd, so I'm about that. But yeah, I guess I divide tech into a bunch of different buckets and then I have feelings about each of the buckets. Does that make sense?
What Now? with Trevor Noah
Is Marques Brownlee the Most Powerful Man in Tech? [VIDEO]
Yeah. So it's interesting what you said. It was like social media is one of those things that's just simple and everyone understands it. But I actually do think there's a lot of nuance to it that people don't understand. I think something I learned about YouTube recently, and I literally learned that this year, is
What Now? with Trevor Noah
Is Marques Brownlee the Most Powerful Man in Tech? [VIDEO]
is I think as a creator, I'm always like trying to make videos that YouTube will push out. And when I ask YouTube about things that I can do in a video to get them to push it more out, they said to me, no, no, no, no, no. That's not actually how this works. YouTube doesn't take videos and push them out.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
Is Marques Brownlee the Most Powerful Man in Tech? [VIDEO]
YouTube treats every individual account logging in and goes and searches for the things that they're most likely to watch and brings it in for them.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
Is Marques Brownlee the Most Powerful Man in Tech? [VIDEO]
So YouTube isn't pushing my video out to as many people randomly as possible. YouTube is for each individual that logs in pulling videos that they think are good for them and relevant for them.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
Is Marques Brownlee the Most Powerful Man in Tech? [VIDEO]
So when you publish a video and it goes really viral and you feel like YouTube's pushing it out for you, what's really happening is you've made a video that the first few people who engage with it really liked it. And then subsequent people who logged in that were similar, YouTube thought... I've seen this type of person before. They're going to like this video.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
Is Marques Brownlee the Most Powerful Man in Tech? [VIDEO]
And then it shared it with that type of person. So you're creating a thing that people have engaged with and YouTube is what feels like rewarding you by hopefully other people finding those people. So... It does feel like YouTube does bear some responsibility for all of this because they wrote those algorithms. They're responsible for this behavior inside of that sort of microcosm.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
Is Marques Brownlee the Most Powerful Man in Tech? [VIDEO]
But it's not exactly YouTube like someone at the control is going, all right, push this video, don't push this video, push this video. So it's complicated.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
Is Marques Brownlee the Most Powerful Man in Tech? [VIDEO]
I've never, no, because I started from 2009. Okay, you got grandfathered in. Yeah, but I've seen what you're talking about, which is like someone shows up. What really happens is like someone will show up and they'll immediately have like videos with a bunch of celebrities and you're like, how did all these people end up getting on this channel so fast? And that feels like a plant.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
Is Marques Brownlee the Most Powerful Man in Tech? [VIDEO]
But there are also channels, I saw a stat this year, the top three channels on YouTube for growth this year Each of them gained independently more than 60 million subscribers each. So their videos were so successful and were engaged with so much that of the people who watched them, 60 million people subscribed in a year. So what are those videos?
What Now? with Trevor Noah
Is Marques Brownlee the Most Powerful Man in Tech? [VIDEO]
Oh, there's a lot of shorts. So the number one channel is MrBeast. He gained like 110 million subscribers this year. There's another channel that does a lot of shorts. Again, they've got billions of new views this year from the stuff that they made. And actually the third one was Cristiano Ronaldo joined YouTube this year. 68 million subscribers.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
Is Marques Brownlee the Most Powerful Man in Tech? [VIDEO]
Yeah, well, I mean, he's literally one of the top five most famous humans alive. But it is always fascinating to me to see people who are famous outside of the internet attempting to sort of own their own personal image by running their own YouTube channel. And that's what it's for, I think. And a lot of people view it the other way around.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
Is Marques Brownlee the Most Powerful Man in Tech? [VIDEO]
If you're building up something on YouTube, a lot of people's goal is to use that to jump off and graduate to something bigger. I want my own show. I want my own whatever it is. But you have people like Will Smith who have been a movie star for decades starting a YouTube channel and showing their own personality, for example.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
Is Marques Brownlee the Most Powerful Man in Tech? [VIDEO]
Thanks for having me.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
Is Marques Brownlee the Most Powerful Man in Tech? [VIDEO]
It's for people really actually willing to put in the time to share their actual personality with people.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
Is Marques Brownlee the Most Powerful Man in Tech? [VIDEO]
There is a type of – I guess it's access to the person that this sort of social media grants you that would maybe ruin the illusion for a lot of people who are curating their image. You think of someone like some – I'm just using examples. I don't know these people. But like Beyonce, Taylor Swift, like I don't know anything about their personality. But –
What Now? with Trevor Noah
Is Marques Brownlee the Most Powerful Man in Tech? [VIDEO]
I think a lot of people have this really, really pristine image of them because of what's been curated and shared that might be ruined if they started to share way more of their real personality. The only reason they appeal to 500 million people is because they have this really nice, bright, shiny thing that they've created. And
What Now? with Trevor Noah
Is Marques Brownlee the Most Powerful Man in Tech? [VIDEO]
I think for YouTubers, for Twitch streamers, for social media personalities, you may inherently have a lower ceiling because it's just you, but it is a way stronger depth of connection, I think. This is what people say about going on the Joe Rogan podcast. For four hours, you can't fake a four-hour conversation. It's you after a while.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
Is Marques Brownlee the Most Powerful Man in Tech? [VIDEO]
Yeah, so there is a depth of connection there that really makes it different.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
Is Marques Brownlee the Most Powerful Man in Tech? [VIDEO]
A thousand percent. So here's the way I've described it. It was when I started in 2009, I was one of a few tech channels and that was enough to stand out, which was I log in and I'm interested in tech videos. So I'll find like a dozen channels that do it. Fast forward a couple of years and a bunch more people are starting to do it. So now you have some software tutorial channels.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
Is Marques Brownlee the Most Powerful Man in Tech? [VIDEO]
You have some hardware channels, some people who just do unboxings. You might have seen those.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
Is Marques Brownlee the Most Powerful Man in Tech? [VIDEO]
They're fun. People like unboxings. Now there's a couple of different types of tech channels, which is cool. Fast forward again, it's 2024. And I promise you there's a channel for every single niche. There's the Apple channel. There's the anti-Apple channel. There's the anti-Apple nerd channel. There's the anti-Apple unboxings channel.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
Is Marques Brownlee the Most Powerful Man in Tech? [VIDEO]
There's the unboxing hardware for accessories for cameras channel. Like every single niche is taken and saturated. And so what we kind of figure out now is, The only way to differentiate your content is to just be you. Like every niche is fully filled up and taken. And if you stand out at all, it's because it's you that people like.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
Is Marques Brownlee the Most Powerful Man in Tech? [VIDEO]
Look, I make a video on the new iPhone when it comes out in September. And there is about... 5,000 other people who are going to unbox the same phone in the same exact way that I unbox it. So why would anybody watch mine? Hopefully, I can give you a little bit of entertainment value, a little bit of my personality, and that's enough for you to stick around and watch it.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
Is Marques Brownlee the Most Powerful Man in Tech? [VIDEO]
Otherwise, you're gonna get the same information everywhere.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
Is Marques Brownlee the Most Powerful Man in Tech? [VIDEO]
Yeah, okay, two main things come to mind. One, the first thing you were talking about, the audience of one. I'm sure you've heard this filter before, but if you fast forward enough in this nichification, every single person's, did you see that last night, is different. It's a whole bunch of things with one view. Like nobody has seen the same stuff.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
Is Marques Brownlee the Most Powerful Man in Tech? [VIDEO]
And that's an interesting dystopian future, but that's a whole nother thing. But the other thing you said is that politics and sports bring people together. I feel like I would expand that to just current events, like things that actually happen in real life. So yes, there is fiction and you might watch that series. You might watch that Netflix thing.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
Is Marques Brownlee the Most Powerful Man in Tech? [VIDEO]
You might, you know, invest in a storyline here or there. But in the real world, things are actually happening. And so that is the thing that sort of brings together humans. That's the defining human experience. The current events of what's actually happening. It's sports. Sometimes it's news. Sometimes it's a tech event and everybody wants to know about the thing that just got unveiled.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
Is Marques Brownlee the Most Powerful Man in Tech? [VIDEO]
Lucky for me, I'm one of the people who is involved with showing you what just happened. So I happen to be one of those faces that a lot of people see instead of just one.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
Is Marques Brownlee the Most Powerful Man in Tech? [VIDEO]
No, I have an exact answer for that. The star of my videos is not me. The star of my videos is the tech. I'm pointing the camera at the tech, at the gadgets, at the thing that just came out, at the Sora announcement, whatever it is. And I'm a face that happens to walk you through it and guide you through it.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
Is Marques Brownlee the Most Powerful Man in Tech? [VIDEO]
But the pressure is on the tech industry to get more and more interesting in advance and advance. And I point the camera at it and that's the subject of the video. For a lot of creators, the subject of the video is them or their life or their family or their stunt. And once you find success with pointing the camera at that thing, the pressure is now on you to one-up the last thing you just did.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
Is Marques Brownlee the Most Powerful Man in Tech? [VIDEO]
And so if you're Jake, if you're Logan, if you're Mr. Beast, if you're pointing the camera at yourself – And I see this a lot with family vlog channels where it's like the kids are in it and now you have to do a crazy thing.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
Is Marques Brownlee the Most Powerful Man in Tech? [VIDEO]
Oh, that's a real thing.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
Is Marques Brownlee the Most Powerful Man in Tech? [VIDEO]
So that's the internal thing that I have. The star of the show is the tech, not me. But if you find yourself making videos where the star of the show is you or your life or your daily vlog or your family, best believe that has a sort of a cap, that has a sort of a ticking time bomb.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
Is Marques Brownlee the Most Powerful Man in Tech? [VIDEO]
I felt lucky, first of all, as like a content creator that the topic of my videos is ever evolving and it's ever interesting. So I don't have to be interesting. It's just the tech that always changes. Yeah. But you're right. The conversations in especially our political atmosphere, like there's way more tech on the tips of people's tongues.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
Is Marques Brownlee the Most Powerful Man in Tech? [VIDEO]
Yeah, you know, so you're right. It's a little bit of a balancing act. I remember maybe five, six years, nay, a little longer ago, there was a little bit of a trend. There was a whole bunch of YouTube channels doing tech videos that never showed their face. And I thought it was fascinating. And I was like, what if I was a faceless tech YouTube channel? And for a couple months, I was.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
Is Marques Brownlee the Most Powerful Man in Tech? [VIDEO]
I stopped showing my face. It was just the voice.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
Is Marques Brownlee the Most Powerful Man in Tech? [VIDEO]
And it was this nice anonymous feeling. And what I sort of learned from that is, people do connect with the character. People start to trust the character that is giving them information, that is telling them how they want to, you know, what you might buy. And my videos, when they were at their best, were sort of just like a conversation.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
Is Marques Brownlee the Most Powerful Man in Tech? [VIDEO]
They were like, it would be like me and you, like, so what phone do you have now? Which one are you trying to get? Because I think my HTC One is about to die, and I think this new one's not that great, so I should be looking at Samsung. And so while the tech is still what we are talking about in our conversation... You're right. There is an element of, are you good at presenting the tech?
What Now? with Trevor Noah
Is Marques Brownlee the Most Powerful Man in Tech? [VIDEO]
Are you good at stealing information and making it digestible to a certain audience? Do you know who your audience is? Can you speak to them? That's a fraction of it for sure. So maybe it's 70% subject, 30% host. Sure. I'll accept the pat on the back that I do have a little bit of a little charm going for me. Sure.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
Is Marques Brownlee the Most Powerful Man in Tech? [VIDEO]
I just made a video about AI and everyone's talking about AI now. It's everywhere. So it is, I think how I describe it is the weight of the publish button is a little heavier, but it's a good place to be.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
Is Marques Brownlee the Most Powerful Man in Tech? [VIDEO]
That is such an interesting question. So I don't have kids, so I'm going to have to come up to this decision at some point where it's like, how young are we going to let them use the internet or a phone or a screen at all?
What Now? with Trevor Noah
Is Marques Brownlee the Most Powerful Man in Tech? [VIDEO]
We've all seen WALL-E. We've all seen the dystopian future where humans are just blobs sitting around in chairs watching screens all the time. That feels like the, if you let it go too far, where we'll end up. I think there's obviously a healthy balance you have to try to strike to not just be constantly on your screen. And everyone's going to draw that line in a different place.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
Is Marques Brownlee the Most Powerful Man in Tech? [VIDEO]
I personally try to put my phone away by a certain hour. I try not to. I try to actually start my day, hopefully, by getting all the way to work without looking at my phone, which is hard. It's really hard. So yeah, the line's going to be a different place for everyone. But I suspect that those people draw the line as conservatively as they possibly can because they've seen the other side.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
Is Marques Brownlee the Most Powerful Man in Tech? [VIDEO]
There's, I think, a bit of a misconception about YouTubers now versus a long time ago. I think a long time ago, YouTuber was one person uploading to their channel and it was just them and that was it. Maybe one or two people. And now everyone... more or less understands that it's a job now and people have teams and they have like PR and they have editors and there's these whole operations.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
Is Marques Brownlee the Most Powerful Man in Tech? [VIDEO]
And I think a lot of people forget that there's still people under there. And so I think when I'm sort of talking to my audience, I just want to talk to them as me, like I always have when it was just me versus when it was my team now. I've always wanted to talk to them as just me.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
Is Marques Brownlee the Most Powerful Man in Tech? [VIDEO]
And then the other thing is, I mentioned this earlier, but the weight of the publish button being heavier than ever is... is actually taking that like really seriously. So a lot of times I'll sort of casually drop a, you know, a clip in my video or drop something in a video where I think, yeah, it'll be cool if some people see this or notice this.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
Is Marques Brownlee the Most Powerful Man in Tech? [VIDEO]
And then the next day the video goes up and there's articles about it. There's like in the news posts about it. And I realized, oh, right, this is way more of a big deal than I originally intended. The weight of that button is so heavy, right? So, you know, panels, the wallpaper app,
What Now? with Trevor Noah
Is Marques Brownlee the Most Powerful Man in Tech? [VIDEO]
To me, that was just like, I figured I would casually drop it in my iPhone review and then people would check it out. And it was like, no, no, no, I really should have explained that way more. And I realized that in public, like failing in public is a thing that we do now and sort of owning that. And the other one was putting a clip from an action cam of Tess driving a Lamborghini.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
Is Marques Brownlee the Most Powerful Man in Tech? [VIDEO]
And it's like – I thought it was a Ferrari. Yeah, a lot of people – again, there's a ton of articles about it and half of them are saying things like it was a school zone even though it was a sign that said one thing that they're kind of just parroting and – There's no context that makes it okay, but I should always know that the weight of the publish button is heavy.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
Is Marques Brownlee the Most Powerful Man in Tech? [VIDEO]
And any one thing that I do can feel very casual, but it's also putting it in front of 20 million people. It can feel like an endorsement of something, even if it's just a casual mention. But at the end of the day, I'm a person.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
Is Marques Brownlee the Most Powerful Man in Tech? [VIDEO]
I'm going to continue to screw up in the future and hopefully continue to talk to my audience as me, as a person that makes mistakes and learns from them and hopefully gets better and evolves over time. Yeah. That's the goal.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
Is Marques Brownlee the Most Powerful Man in Tech? [VIDEO]
It is a privilege to have that sort of pressure. Back in the day, yeah, I was just publishing whatever. I would make a video that was literally one take. I would do a 90-second video, and as soon as I hit stop recording and the file appeared on my desktop, I would upload that video. It was that easy, right?
What Now? with Trevor Noah
Is Marques Brownlee the Most Powerful Man in Tech? [VIDEO]
And that was fun, and that was the good old days, and there was a casualness about it, and it was fun. Um, but a lot of what we're able to do, a lot of like the PGA tour, pulling back the curtain and going, yeah, we would love to show you all of the tech that goes into a broadcast.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
Is Marques Brownlee the Most Powerful Man in Tech? [VIDEO]
And we would love for you to show it with your audience that comes with also the downside of the coin, which is everyone with like binoculars on everything you ever do. So yeah, you know, a part of me does miss the old days of that a little bit, but I do feel like treating it with respect, like, The only reason we get to do these cool things is because a lot of people care a lot about what we say.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
Is Marques Brownlee the Most Powerful Man in Tech? [VIDEO]
So I'm willing to accept that.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
Is Marques Brownlee the Most Powerful Man in Tech? [VIDEO]
Yeah, I think a lot of people have said things like, oh, you know, if you're not really, if you don't make tech, then how do you evaluate tech? Like if you're not coding, then how do you review an app? What I've found is I feel like I'm basically a professional user. I use tech and I'm able to show you my experience using it.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
Is Marques Brownlee the Most Powerful Man in Tech? [VIDEO]
And so my guiding like North Star for that is I'm just going to show you the truth. I'm going to show you how it actually went. I'm going to tell you what actually happened. I'm going to share with you what I actually saw. And as long as I'm delivering that truth, I don't really worry about too much else. It might be a little harsh in the way I say it.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
Is Marques Brownlee the Most Powerful Man in Tech? [VIDEO]
It might be a little bit light in the way I say it. And you may take issue with one or the other. But, you know, I'll do a shout out to a couple months ago I reviewed the Humane AI pin and the Rabbit R1. And I had a lot of negative things to say about them because they just didn't work. They were bad.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
Is Marques Brownlee the Most Powerful Man in Tech? [VIDEO]
People were much harsher than me saying things like, oh, you know, they're scams or they should be illegal. These companies should go out of business or whatever. I just told, look, this is the worst product I've ever reviewed. I've reviewed a lot of stuff and these are really, truly at the bottom. They're really bad. And I showed all that stuff.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
Is Marques Brownlee the Most Powerful Man in Tech? [VIDEO]
And when I started to get backlash for, oh, you were too harsh on them or you said you were too mean in these ways that you said it, I can accept that. But what I'll always fall back on was, was I wrong? Did I say anything incorrect? I showed you all this stuff, right? So I don't really worry too much about –
What Now? with Trevor Noah
Is Marques Brownlee the Most Powerful Man in Tech? [VIDEO]
trying to make everyone happy or trying to nuance my way into wording things the way that I get invited to the thing. It's like, you know what? If you value the truth, I'm here for that. And all the other stuff is sort of sheds to the side.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
Is Marques Brownlee the Most Powerful Man in Tech? [VIDEO]
Yeah. OK, so every tech has every technology has a bit of a curve to start. It's this really, really steep improvement curve. And then it levels out and then it sort of flatlines at some point. Right. Like what's the difference between the iPhone 15 and 16? Like not that much. So we're kind of. were flattened out with the mature categories, if you will.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
Is Marques Brownlee the Most Powerful Man in Tech? [VIDEO]
Yeah. So all I can say to those is... as long as I'm still telling the truth, which is the anchor of all of this, all I did was accelerate what was already happening. If it was me saying something about the car that took the company from S tier to shutting down, then I was probably lying, no? Like if this company was doing amazing things with an amazing product and everybody loved it,
What Now? with Trevor Noah
Is Marques Brownlee the Most Powerful Man in Tech? [VIDEO]
I would probably find the reasons why people loved it and pretty good chance I would like it too. And if I hated it, there would be some reason why. So me coming along, telling the truth about a product and then people going, bad product. Well, if it was a bad product, it was going to happen sooner or later anyway. By the way, fun fact, I drove the Karma as well years ago.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
Is Marques Brownlee the Most Powerful Man in Tech? [VIDEO]
I never even made a video about it because I didn't have enough things to say about it. So that one kind of slipped by. And so it was this Fisker that happened to get a video. But yeah, there was, you know, what's also funny is you probably saw a lot of the negative comments there. But even in videos like that, I still get it from both sides, which is interesting. Yeah.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
Is Marques Brownlee the Most Powerful Man in Tech? [VIDEO]
I get a lot of you were too harsh. And I also get a lot of this car was, I've never seen a car this bad. You should have been more mean about this car. And I think if you see both sides, if you're probably somewhere in the middle with the truth, you're doing something good.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
Is Marques Brownlee the Most Powerful Man in Tech? [VIDEO]
I just felt Apple convulse as you said that. Marques Brown says not that much. But what's the difference between the first iPhone and the second iPhone? That was like, we've doubled the screen resolution. We've added a camera. Like there's huge, huge differences, right? So every tech does this. EVs are going through this right now. And AI is doing the same thing, right?
What Now? with Trevor Noah
Is Marques Brownlee the Most Powerful Man in Tech? [VIDEO]
No, you know, it's funny. I actually feel like I understand things a little bit better now. You know, sometimes I'll go to a briefing or some sort of meeting where they're showing me a new device and they're doing the presentation and behind the person giving the presentation, there's like eight or nine engineers like, okay, this is it. They're always so enthusiastic.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
Is Marques Brownlee the Most Powerful Man in Tech? [VIDEO]
They've been working on this thing and they're like, try the thing that I worked on. And I've always appreciated that. It takes a lot to put this stuff together and to sort of, again, we say we hate these products when they're bad, but to try to make something that's any good does take a lot of effort. So I've always appreciated that.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
Is Marques Brownlee the Most Powerful Man in Tech? [VIDEO]
And I think, yeah, I maybe have a little bit more sympathy now for any words of like, They didn't seem to try on this at all. It's like, well, I know somebody tried on this, but they might not have gotten it done or they might have run out of time or they might have to improve this with a software update. There's a little, yeah, sure, a little soft spot now for a little bit of the builder side.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
Is Marques Brownlee the Most Powerful Man in Tech? [VIDEO]
So it's going through this really, really steep improvement. And no one knows where the flatline is, which is the concerning part. Is it above human intelligence? Is it right below? Is it way, way higher? Is it going to take over? We don't know. We just know we're in this steep thing and everyone's sort of projecting it to be this amazing future. And it could be an amazing future. Or not.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
Is Marques Brownlee the Most Powerful Man in Tech? [VIDEO]
Totally. Okay. So I think with most reasonable things, there's two sides of every coin, right? And we are both mostly experiencing it on the consumer side. So we are trying to spend our money on something that is hopefully good. And there are lots of things that you can buy that are fine. And you don't really think twice about it. It's like, I just bought these headphones. They're in 90 bucks.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
Is Marques Brownlee the Most Powerful Man in Tech? [VIDEO]
They showed up on Amazon. They were fine. I plugged it in. Whatever. Great. I'm not going to remember that. And then every once in a while, there's a couple that really suck and you have a really strong reaction to that. As a consumer, we feel validated in that. I can't believe you're advertising this thing is going to be good and it doesn't even exist yet. This seems horrible.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
Is Marques Brownlee the Most Powerful Man in Tech? [VIDEO]
Let me just flip that coin real quick. If you work for any of these tech companies, there is an immense pressure to make something that is leading and that is incredible, that stands out. And that is very, very, very, very hard. I mean, once every decade, maybe we get something that kind of feels that good. Like the original iPhone maybe was one of the last ones that we remember in our lifetime.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
Is Marques Brownlee the Most Powerful Man in Tech? [VIDEO]
And a lot of these companies and these people that lead these teams and that work on these projects and that engineer and that do these things, They all feel this pressure and whatever opportunity they feel like they can latch onto to maybe have a shot at making that next big thing, they're gonna try to take it. And if they appear to be lagging, they have failed again.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
Is Marques Brownlee the Most Powerful Man in Tech? [VIDEO]
And so AI comes along, right? Okay, so I'm a startup. I wanna make something. Maybe I can make kind of like the next iPhone, but it's AI in a box. And maybe it's not a phone, but it's a pin. And they try to put this thing together. Oh, but I see that company over there is working on something too. So I gotta rush and put mine out and it's out. And it's out way too early and it's not done yet.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
Is Marques Brownlee the Most Powerful Man in Tech? [VIDEO]
And you see the promises they're making earnestly. They're like, I promise in a year, this will be the greatest product you've ever bought. Just give us more time to work on it. And again, on the consumer side, I'm like, bro, we don't care. I gave you real money today. Why is this thing so bad? I'm returning it. It's too expensive. It's a subscription. I don't want this garbage.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
Is Marques Brownlee the Most Powerful Man in Tech? [VIDEO]
They're not trying to scam you. They're actually trying to make something good. There's just so much pressure to be early and to be amazing. And tech is really, really hard to make early and amazing. It's probably either early or amazing, not both. And I understand that most of it will not be both early and amazing. So stop promising it will be.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
Is Marques Brownlee the Most Powerful Man in Tech? [VIDEO]
I know that you have to get your share price up and whatever. You have to appease. I don't think they're trying to scam us, to be honest.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
Is Marques Brownlee the Most Powerful Man in Tech? [VIDEO]
We don't know. It's just up to the tech. It's up to the people working on it. It's also a little bit up to the people regulating the people working on it. But it is in that exciting, interesting, steep phase where everyone pays attention to it.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
Is Marques Brownlee the Most Powerful Man in Tech? [VIDEO]
You know what I mean? If they're the company that is the iPhone company, y'all are the ones in 2007 that reinvented the phone that everyone carries now. I think when they looked around in 2007, there were phones, but I don't think they looked around and thought, wow, there's a lot of people working on this really, really amazing capacitive touchscreen multi-touch media player.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
Is Marques Brownlee the Most Powerful Man in Tech? [VIDEO]
This was a genuinely new series of things to combine to make the iPhone what it was, which is why it hit so hard. I think this moment was different, which is there is an immense pressure. If you are a tech company... I better see some AI in your products or I don't think you're leading at all. And I think they looked around and they saw everyone else. They saw Google. They saw Meta.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
Is Marques Brownlee the Most Powerful Man in Tech? [VIDEO]
They saw everyone making AI stuff. They saw startups making AI stuff. And they felt like if they don't do anything AI, even if you're like a year behind or two years behind, you're going to look behind. And that's a reputation thing. It's a pride thing. It's a shareholder thing. And they felt pressured to do something now. So they did.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
Is Marques Brownlee the Most Powerful Man in Tech? [VIDEO]
They announced that they'd make Apple Intelligence and that it would show up soon in software updates. And yeah, it slowly started to trickle out. But that did feel like it was very differently inspired than some of their original successes. They were very much pressured.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
Is Marques Brownlee the Most Powerful Man in Tech? [VIDEO]
Yeah, wow. I mean, there's so few things that are truly like value adds in life.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
Is Marques Brownlee the Most Powerful Man in Tech? [VIDEO]
So I could go on the theme of that because like everyone cares about different things. And if you care about the step counter, to me, there's a theme of like I care about the metrics in my life. Like I have the Apple Watch and it tells me all sorts of here's what your heart rate, resting heart rate has been.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
Is Marques Brownlee the Most Powerful Man in Tech? [VIDEO]
Yeah. Yeah. So that's fun. You can get a smart scale. And for me, that's been telling me all sorts of things, trends over time. Oh, so that's that's an interesting one, too.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
Is Marques Brownlee the Most Powerful Man in Tech? [VIDEO]
So Withings is a company that makes smart scales. You step on it, it connects to an app, and yeah, the battery dies every couple months, so you're annoyed that you need to recharge your scale. I started taking creatine a month ago, so I'm tracking how it's affecting my weight. It's actually kind of informative, so that's kind of cool.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
Is Marques Brownlee the Most Powerful Man in Tech? [VIDEO]
Because I have a bunch of teammates who have been taking it for years, and they're like, how have you not started trying it? I'm willing to try it. But you won. Oh, no. See, here's the thing about winning is everyone's at your throat now. You got to get better. Someone else is going to find a way to get better than you.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
Is Marques Brownlee the Most Powerful Man in Tech? [VIDEO]
Ultimate Frisbee, yeah. I'm working on a video. I got to explain it because it's always complicated. Okay, great, great.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
Is Marques Brownlee the Most Powerful Man in Tech? [VIDEO]
You really have to like doing this to be able to put in the number of hours and the amount of work required to actually make it your job. Take basketball. Basketball, you could play in the park. You could play for free. You could play against your friends.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
Is Marques Brownlee the Most Powerful Man in Tech? [VIDEO]
Winner over for me, please. Pitch me. Let me paint you a picture. Let me paint you a picture. So your phone is the most useful tool you have, basically. It knows basically everything about you. If you could, and this is something I would love to do, I would like hire a personal assistant that knows everything about me. But most of us don't have that luxury. Most of us don't want to pay for that.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
Is Marques Brownlee the Most Powerful Man in Tech? [VIDEO]
But if I want to be a professional basketball player, there's some level of, first of all, luck, but dedication, hard work that goes into hopefully getting you over to the next level to actually be able to make it your job. And it's very competitive even while it is your job.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
Is Marques Brownlee the Most Powerful Man in Tech? [VIDEO]
And so think about before you start, if this is something that you actually like doing enough to be able to put those hours in, because people see the final result, but are you willing to put in those hours?
What Now? with Trevor Noah
Is Marques Brownlee the Most Powerful Man in Tech? [VIDEO]
Yeah. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Maybe. So we're working on a smartphone awards video right now, which it's going to be a 30 minute video when it comes out, but it's going to take a week to edit this video. A lot of them take a week to write before they take a week to edit. We just had a call today of a video we're planning that should hopefully come out around May. So four to six months.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
Is Marques Brownlee the Most Powerful Man in Tech? [VIDEO]
So it depends on the video, but they don't take no time.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
Is Marques Brownlee the Most Powerful Man in Tech? [VIDEO]
You should because if you do enjoy playing basketball in the park, you're going to love being a pro baller. So if you enjoy making videos, if you enjoy tech, for example, even though it comes with more pressure, even though it comes with more scrutiny, you're going to enjoy the privilege of being able to share tech with the world. So do it.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
Is Marques Brownlee the Most Powerful Man in Tech? [VIDEO]
For sure. Yeah. Always willing to get in the trenches for you. Let's do it. Thanks for having me.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
Is Marques Brownlee the Most Powerful Man in Tech? [VIDEO]
But picture this. you wake up in the morning and you immediately get a report of where you need to be at what times during the day, of what time you need to leave your house based on traffic, based on your calendar to get to your next appointment. It tells you everything you need to know about your next meeting and who's in that meeting and what you should be bringing to that meeting.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
Is Marques Brownlee the Most Powerful Man in Tech? [VIDEO]
And it's just super helpful for you all the time because it knows everything about you. That to me It's pretty sweet. And it's without me having to have a person know everything about me. It's just the AI has the information in my phone and can give me all this value.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
Is Marques Brownlee the Most Powerful Man in Tech? [VIDEO]
I think when people picture AI, though, just because it's called intelligence, I think people are picturing like this sort of general human intelligence in the form of a robot, which is interesting. Maybe not what we need. I think there's a lot of humanoid robot shaped things walking around with companies trying to make them do interesting things.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
Is Marques Brownlee the Most Powerful Man in Tech? [VIDEO]
And I think when you say you hate AI, you've probably seen some of those too. And I don't think we need that either.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
Is Marques Brownlee the Most Powerful Man in Tech? [VIDEO]
Yeah. I mean... I guess the whole idea is to prevent it from being able to do bad things or, or ever doing anything bad. And up until this point, a lot of the regulation has been in the hands of those making it. Like I, I'll just use my recent example. Um, I made a video about Sora, which is OpenAI's video generation tool.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
Is Marques Brownlee the Most Powerful Man in Tech? [VIDEO]
And they self-impose their own limits of like, this will not represent people's likenesses. This will not generate anything with violent acts. It won't do anything with minors. And I think a lot of those very basic, obvious regulations, which is like, okay, this should not be used to harm people. It should not be used to deliberately misinform people. Some version of that is what we're all after.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
Is Marques Brownlee the Most Powerful Man in Tech? [VIDEO]
I don't know. Again, I'm not a politician. I don't know how that ends up becoming a law, but we're all after that. We just wanted to be safe and not hurt people, but all preserve all the upside of being super useful, super convenient artificial intelligence.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
Is Marques Brownlee the Most Powerful Man in Tech? [VIDEO]
Yeah. Okay. So in a basic level, these models, in order to be as intelligent as possible, need to know as much as possible. So the company is making them in this race to make them as good as possible. They are trying to train them on as much data as they can possibly get their hands on. Kind of just the entire internet, if they can.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
Is Marques Brownlee the Most Powerful Man in Tech? [VIDEO]
So if I ask it for a picture of a silver Porsche Macan, then it knows what silver is, it knows what a Porsche Macan is, and it can make that because it knows everything. And it turns out these enormous data sets with billions and billions of data points... A lot of the pieces of data in them are questionably sourced.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
Is Marques Brownlee the Most Powerful Man in Tech? [VIDEO]
They'll come from publicly available, but also just YouTube videos taken from creators. They'll just start scraping things from websites that journalists have written and they didn't really agree for their work to be scraped, but it's in there too. So I've come across several data sets that have been used to train these models that include hundreds of my videos.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
Is Marques Brownlee the Most Powerful Man in Tech? [VIDEO]
hundreds of my videos and that's concerning because now there is theoretically an ability for someone to ask for a video or a photo in the style of an MKBHD video and it would actually be able to reproduce that so I feel you I actually did a video with Sora where I asked it for a video of a tech reviewer this was amazing by the way and all I really asked for was a tech reviewer sitting at a desk with a phone in his hand and
What Now? with Trevor Noah
Is Marques Brownlee the Most Powerful Man in Tech? [VIDEO]
And it gave me a generated video of that. And without me asking, it put a little fake green plant on the desk in front of him. I didn't ask for that. That was Sora's own creative decision based on me asking for a tech reviewer. And I saw that plant and I went like, I've seen that plant before because that plant has been in many of my videos and many other tech reviewers' videos.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
Is Marques Brownlee the Most Powerful Man in Tech? [VIDEO]
And Sora has seen that plant somehow, meaning it's been trained on some data that for some reason it thought that there should be one of those plants in that video. So, yeah, I kind of have no choice but to believe lots of my work has been taken and is being used to train these models.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
Is Marques Brownlee the Most Powerful Man in Tech? [VIDEO]
Maybe a little bit. I always have to be careful with that because I can never quite fully attribute, like I hear what you're saying. I remember a long time ago, maybe eight, nine, 10 years ago, I went to a conference and there was a little billboard and it was a tech conference and there was a cartoon black character with like this red and black striped shirt.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
Is Marques Brownlee the Most Powerful Man in Tech? [VIDEO]
And I, in my profile picture at the time, It had the same hairstyle as me. It was a cartoon, and I was wearing the same striped shirt, and I was like, I think that's me. I don't really know if I can say it's me. I'm like 93% sure it's me. But yeah, you know, I think, again, these are models that are like using some form of a statistical mean to find what they end up creating.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
Is Marques Brownlee the Most Powerful Man in Tech? [VIDEO]
It's like if the thing that you feed it is common enough, it'll spit it out. Yeah. So if there is enough videos of me in the training data, then you ask for things with keywords that relate to me and it'll probably make something that looks like me. And I guess that's what it's supposed to do. Not great.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
Is Marques Brownlee the Most Powerful Man in Tech? [VIDEO]
It's like when you Google something, you're the first result. You're like, all right, that's good. Exactly.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
Is Marques Brownlee the Most Powerful Man in Tech? [VIDEO]
The word that comes to mind for me was saturated, but I also think there's a bunch of different parts of tech now. So when I was starting, when you saw that old 15-year-old video of me holding a little remote control up to the webcam of the laptop, that to me was gadgets, right? And that's a part of tech, but I've always loved gadgets.