Speaker 1: Alz Media.
Speaker 2: Hell and welcome to this week's Better Offline. I'm, of
Speaker 2: course your host ed Zittron and for this week's episode,
Speaker 2: I flew out to North Carolina to do a longer
Speaker 2: form interview, the first of it's kind on the show,
Speaker 2: a little slower, a little more fun, and I did
Speaker 2: it with Steve Burke, founder and host of gamers Nexus,
Speaker 2: an incredible hardware YouTube channel that's been going since two
Speaker 2: thousand and eight and has over two and a half
Speaker 2: million subscribers. We talked about the history of gamers Nexus,
Speaker 2: the state of the hardware industry, tech journalism, gamers Nexus
Speaker 2: is incredibly scientific approach to hardware testing, and of course
Speaker 2: a little bit about AI. I think you're going to
Speaker 2: really like it enjoy. So how long has the channel
Speaker 2: been running? How long have you been doing this? Now?
Speaker 1: About seventeen years and five months.
Speaker 2: And we started off just doing gaming content. I did
Speaker 2: go back in the files and found like a Modern
Speaker 2: Warfare trailer I think, and then the Office Space parody,
Speaker 2: which is awesome.
Speaker 1: Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 3: So it started as game reviews and trailer analysis videos,
Speaker 3: which was the Modern Warfare one and battlefield trailer analysis
Speaker 3: that was like a whole subgenre. Back then you got
Speaker 3: the trailer, you kind of picked apart what's going to
Speaker 3: be in this game? And you know, then I did
Speaker 3: game interviews. We spotlighted a bunch of indie games through
Speaker 3: Steam's green Light program, and it kind of slowly got
Speaker 3: into hardware.
Speaker 2: What was Greenlight? Is that? Like? Is that kind of
Speaker 2: the early early access.
Speaker 3: Yeah, that was Steam's thing where they gave indie developers
Speaker 3: who are unestablished kind of a way to try and
Speaker 3: get onto Steam.
Speaker 1: And so we did a lot of early coverage of games.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I saw you doing a lot of convention interviews.
Speaker 2: How did you grow from there to where you are today?
Speaker 2: Which is said huge studio and massive testing facilities and such.
Speaker 3: The interviews and the stuff at the conventions was kind
Speaker 3: of the turning point for me because I was up
Speaker 3: until maybe twenty twelve or something like that plus and
Speaker 3: minus year, I was still technically in college. And then
Speaker 3: I went to I went to pas Penny Arcade XPO.
Speaker 3: I think I went to the twenty ten to one,
Speaker 3: and after I got home from that, I decided, this
Speaker 3: is kind of the only thing I want to do
Speaker 3: go to stuff like this, And so it took me
Speaker 3: two years but you know, eventually just dropped out and
Speaker 3: then yeah, then just started doing more of those, and
Speaker 3: it was it was the best way. First of all,
Speaker 3: they're just fun, but then secondly it was sort of
Speaker 3: how I started actually meeting the people we would end
Speaker 3: up working with in the hardware industry.
Speaker 2: Right, and did Well, how'd you get into testing? Because
Speaker 2: I found one of you, I think your first viral clips,
Speaker 2: which was the testing a power supply with a paper clip,
Speaker 2: I believe.
Speaker 3: Oh that was the that was to jumpstart a power
Speaker 3: supply to yeah, test it, yeah, to make sure it works.
Speaker 2: So how did you move into that? Because it it
Speaker 2: seemed like it took a minute to get there.
Speaker 3: Yeah, so I think around So I started the site
Speaker 3: in two thousand and eight, I think officially, and then
Speaker 3: got into publishing PC build guides in around twenty ten
Speaker 3: or so. So that's when the hardware really started. And
Speaker 3: I'd already been building computers but hadn't actually really published
Speaker 3: much about it, So start publishing build guides. I think
Speaker 3: it was just as simple as those were the first
Speaker 3: thing that had any kind of like readership because it
Speaker 3: was all articles back then, right, and so they were
Speaker 3: so you started out writing yeah, exclusively, and then the
Speaker 3: channel got added in two thousand and nine, but it
Speaker 3: wasn't treating you know, YouTuber was not that's not a
Speaker 3: job in two thousand and nine like that. Yeah, it's
Speaker 3: a little before you like you had maybe Casey Nystadt
Speaker 3: was at the front edge of that.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I think I think it was like maybe Vine
Speaker 2: was it was, it was still around when did Vine
Speaker 2: pop up? Christ it was still asl but no back then,
Speaker 2: so you were just on the fringe of this new content.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and it was.
Speaker 3: I did not start a YouTube channel with the intent
Speaker 3: of making it a job, because I don't. If you
Speaker 3: go on Internet archive, I didn't actually even remember this
Speaker 3: until recently. And you look at the gamers Excess website
Speaker 3: and you go to the about page from like two
Speaker 3: thousand and eight or nine or ten, you'll see that
Speaker 3: somewhere in those really early years, I had said that
Speaker 3: we were running it without any form of banner ads,
Speaker 3: which is actually true today too. We got rid of
Speaker 3: the ads when we reintroduced the website recently. Right, But
Speaker 3: like point being, you don't do that having no revenue
Speaker 3: unless you aren't really thinking about trying to make it
Speaker 3: a sustainable thing.
Speaker 1: Right, it was purely for fun.
Speaker 2: And how did it become a sustainable How did it
Speaker 2: become your main job?
Speaker 1: Yeah?
Speaker 3: I think as YouTube grew basically, so we were kind
Speaker 3: of in the early We weren't the first sort of
Speaker 3: i'll call it generation of YouTubers who were able to
Speaker 3: successfully make it a job, but I would say we were
Speaker 3: maybe in the next generation right after that. And so yeah,
Speaker 3: I started publishing more videos alongside the articles. So it
Speaker 3: really was with case reviews computer case reviews, where we
Speaker 3: would originally just focus on only writing a case review.
Speaker 3: At some point, I'm saying we a lot. For a
Speaker 3: while it was just me and then every now and
Speaker 3: then it'd be soone to.
Speaker 1: Help, but we would do case reviews.
Speaker 3: And then I realized this would do well with video
Speaker 3: because there's depth to it and there's like just a
Speaker 3: lot of mechanical stuff, and those videos started doing pretty okay.
Speaker 2: And did you move away? When did you move away
Speaker 2: from the website, because I know you've come back to it.
Speaker 3: Yeah, we probably around twenty I think around twenty eighteen
Speaker 3: maybe is when I kind of like mothballed it basically
Speaker 3: for a couple of years. And that was just because
Speaker 3: at that point, we had just moved out of the
Speaker 3: house and into an office and then into the first office,
Speaker 3: and there was just too much content flow on the
Speaker 3: video side. And up until that point, I was the
Speaker 3: only one who was capable of maintaining the site and
Speaker 3: publishing to it, not because it was a special skill,
Speaker 3: but because the website was so completely fucked up and
Speaker 3: cobbled together because.
Speaker 2: I didn't have a CMS or anything it did, but
Speaker 2: I built it like, oh so right, okay, yes.
Speaker 3: So I had a CMS, but I had stuff bolted
Speaker 3: onto it over twelve.
Speaker 2: Years classic CMS. Shit.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and I'm not a professional web developer.
Speaker 2: And don't worry, most CMS developers on either.
Speaker 1: Yes, that was something I came to realize. And so anyway,
Speaker 1: it's just more and more, you know.
Speaker 3: All the pieces were falling off the car while I
Speaker 3: was driving it, and eventually I was like, I can't,
Speaker 3: I can't, Like I have to just do one thing
Speaker 3: and YouTube is not a platform I need to maintain,
Speaker 3: which is good and bad. Yes, but yeah, we kind
Speaker 3: of put the website on ice for a while and
Speaker 3: then it wasn't until Wendell for Level one Text eventually
Speaker 3: approached me and he was like, hey, I'm a web
Speaker 3: developer actually, and he really wanted us to get our article,
Speaker 3: our content script preserved in article form again, right, because
Speaker 3: he's worried about just the loss of information you know
Speaker 3: through video, right, And so he set us up to
Speaker 3: where now people on the team like Jimmy are able
Speaker 3: to maintain the site.
Speaker 2: That's really cool. Yeah, and you've brought it back though
Speaker 2: you're somewhat more fun Like is it do you ever
Speaker 2: see the website growing into more of a media outlet
Speaker 2: or is it just and is it just you writing
Speaker 2: it as well?
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's just us, you know, it's the same team.
Speaker 3: It's the it's basically the video scripts that the team
Speaker 3: rights converted into an article and so sometimes like it's not.
Speaker 1: Going to read as naturally as a pure article.
Speaker 3: Might, but we try to adapt it and if there's
Speaker 3: any right now to me, it's like sort of a
Speaker 3: community resource where I know for us, at least internally,
Speaker 3: it's way more useful to have words, right, you.
Speaker 1: Know, just skin through and control app than a video.
Speaker 3: But also just like preservation wise, it's easier to preserve
Speaker 3: articles and videos.
Speaker 2: Are you how is YouTube as a platform though, is it?
Speaker 2: Are you a slave to the algorithm so much do
Speaker 2: you try and appeal to it? Do you just make content?
Speaker 3: I think their YouTube has a platform. There's a lot
Speaker 3: of ways to feel about it. For me, it's it's
Speaker 3: almost like asking me how I feel about water at
Speaker 3: this point, right, you know, it's like, how do you
Speaker 3: feel about water?
Speaker 1: It's like, well, I mean, if I don't drink it,
Speaker 1: I die.
Speaker 3: But like YouTube, it's it's not something I try to
Speaker 3: game or play to.
Speaker 1: It's basically just a fact of life, right, you know.
Speaker 3: It's like it's it's there, and I have to think
Speaker 3: about it, and every now and then I'll probably complain
Speaker 3: about it. But realistically, I personally, I think it's kind
Speaker 3: of a fool's errand to chase quote unquote the algorithm
Speaker 3: too much because it kind of stifles and takes focus
Speaker 3: away from the thing that actually matters, which is the content,
Speaker 3: you know, and so like, yeah, there's things you can do,
Speaker 3: like you can play with the thumbnail or the title,
Speaker 3: but what I really wouldn't want to do is change
Speaker 3: the actual type of content that's been produced just for
Speaker 3: algorithmic purposes, because I think that that also creates kind
Speaker 3: of like a almost like a black hole of creativity
Speaker 3: where you stop producing the content for the purpose it
Speaker 3: was intended and you start producing the content to be
Speaker 3: a farm. To use your phrase, at that point, become
Speaker 3: basically a slave to the algorithm where you can't escape it.
Speaker 1: Once you start doing that, I think.
Speaker 2: Yeah, at that point, you'll coverage is just dancing for
Speaker 2: somebody else who changes their mind constantly.
Speaker 3: Right exactly, because it's you no longer know who the
Speaker 3: viewer is. And it's impossible to know what YouTube wants
Speaker 3: because YouTube doesn't know what it wants. You could probably
Speaker 3: ask a YouTube bene near a pointed specific question right
Speaker 3: about the algorithm and they would probably tell you they
Speaker 3: don't know.
Speaker 2: So and has that has your experience with them being
Speaker 2: chaotic or is it?
Speaker 4: Uh?
Speaker 1: No, because believe it or not, they don't talk to us.
Speaker 2: So, I mean, I've heard content creators who do argue
Speaker 2: with them. I've heard ones that don't talk to them
Speaker 2: at all. It's interesting to hear, especially your your two
Speaker 2: point six million this I think so yeah, that they
Speaker 2: don't interact.
Speaker 3: Yeah, So there was a period where they would assign
Speaker 3: basically a channel rep to you, and so I would
Speaker 3: get on a call, I don't know, somewhere around maybe
Speaker 3: it wasn't the high hundreds of thousands of subs, And
Speaker 3: that was kind of cool because like, Okay, if something
Speaker 3: catastrophic happens, like let's just say, I don't know whatever,
Speaker 3: I get locked out of my account because I fudge
Speaker 3: the password too many times, something stupid like that, Right,
Speaker 3: like I at least have someone I can talk to.
Speaker 1: Those people were rotated through.
Speaker 3: Revolving door basically every three or four months, so right
Speaker 3: when you start to know the person and they can
Speaker 3: help you, they're gone. And that was by design, I think,
Speaker 3: as far as I understood it, that program got killed.
Speaker 3: We don't have a REP now, which is normal, and
Speaker 3: and the best I have is a a liaison. He's
Speaker 3: called and he's a great guy. He's very nice. It's
Speaker 3: not really his job, you know, to help us, but
Speaker 3: he does it because he's a nice guy, and so
Speaker 3: he's like the guy for like dozens of creators.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's just so bizoved to me that there isn't
Speaker 2: a specific rep with with other people. But like a
Speaker 2: rep whose job it is to kate, you would think
Speaker 2: that your entertainment talent on some level, you'd.
Speaker 3: Think they'd want to be available to help, and I'm
Speaker 3: sure if you asked Google they would say that they
Speaker 3: do want to be available to help, and they are
Speaker 3: and you can tweet at them, you know.
Speaker 2: Yeah, great. Yeah, but that's the weird thing about these platforms.
Speaker 2: It does feel like they're like they benefit as much
Speaker 2: as possible while providing.
Speaker 3: So the revenue share is public, you know, for ad
Speaker 3: Sense YouTube ad Sense, so tho's the ads before after,
Speaker 3: in the middle of videos whatever. I think it's forty
Speaker 3: five fifty five, with them getting forty five percent.
Speaker 1: For perspective something like Steam.
Speaker 3: I'm not an expert on this, but the last nieber
Speaker 3: I saw was something like thirty percent for Steam, and
Speaker 3: I think it's very able dependent on them for them, yeah,
Speaker 3: for them, So you know, YouTube certainly benefits.
Speaker 1: They to argue in their favor, Hosting videos is unbelievably expensive,
Speaker 1: so I get it.
Speaker 2: I didn't know that.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, well the split's pretty high.
Speaker 3: I'm okay with it, Like I actually, I'm fine with
Speaker 3: it with them getting forty five percent or whatever. It
Speaker 3: is a bad sense because they don't impose restrictions on
Speaker 3: things like us selling our own ads, right, So it's
Speaker 3: like I don't really care, you know, and I don't
Speaker 3: care if people block ads on our channel or whatever.
Speaker 1: I don't give a shit.
Speaker 3: But like the I think it's it's only if if
Speaker 3: they ever overstep and they start restricting what you're allowed
Speaker 3: to put in your content in a way that beyond
Speaker 3: like I don't know, whatever they have their own rules
Speaker 3: about like hate.
Speaker 1: Speech and stuff like that.
Speaker 3: Right, it is fam Yeah, but like in terms of
Speaker 3: if they start restricting, let's just say they decide, yeah,
Speaker 3: you're not allowed to sell merch without giving us a cut.
Speaker 1: No, then I'd have a big.
Speaker 2: Propool style is the YouTube way you make most of the.
Speaker 3: Revenue in one way or another. Yeah, I mean YouTube
Speaker 3: is the reason it's possible to do any of this
Speaker 3: because I was doing it as articles only, and YouTube
Speaker 3: didn't really become a focus until I said, like twenty
Speaker 3: eighteen or so as a primary source.
Speaker 1: And so yeah, through.
Speaker 3: Mostly merchandise sales on our store, through Patreon support, which is,
Speaker 3: you know, the monthly donations from viewers, and then sort
Speaker 3: of after that it's like ads we sell.
Speaker 2: And then ad sense right and wait, so you spent
Speaker 2: like a decade mostly just writing pretty much.
Speaker 3: Yeah, probably probably till I would say, like till twenty fifteen,
Speaker 3: very seriously focused, not only writing.
Speaker 2: Yeah, so was that your full time thing? Did you
Speaker 2: have other jobs as well?
Speaker 3: I did several side quests? Yes, I would collect side
Speaker 3: quests from local business owners, you know, like Greeting's adventure.
Speaker 1: I need a local website. Can you build that for me?
Speaker 2: It's a living, as they say in the Flintstones, it's
Speaker 2: and let's actually get really not necessarily super specific. But
Speaker 2: what's your history, like, without getting to biographical, like how
Speaker 2: did you come in to do? Are you? Were you
Speaker 2: just naturally interested in this? Was this just a childhood thing?
Speaker 1: I guess depends how far back we go.
Speaker 3: But gaming was always an interest and continues to be
Speaker 3: an interest, of course, I don't know. I mean the
Speaker 3: first game I played was probably Lemmons.
Speaker 2: Hell yes, yeah, hell yes Humans for me? Yeah yeah,
Speaker 2: like first Lemmings game, yeah yeah, hell yes. Now I'm
Speaker 2: so you were primarily a PC gamer though, yeah.
Speaker 1: For sure?
Speaker 3: Yeah so Lemmons, and then there are some other ones
Speaker 3: back then, and uh I played a lot of nes
Speaker 3: S nes N sixty four game, keep all that stuff,
Speaker 3: a lot of Nintendo eventually.
Speaker 1: Got a PS two as well.
Speaker 3: But but after the N sixty four era, so like
Speaker 3: early two.
Speaker 1: Thousands was when I built my first computer.
Speaker 3: Right before that, I was playing games like Command and Conquer,
Speaker 3: Red Alert, yeah, and things things of that nature on
Speaker 3: what you know. This was back when every family had
Speaker 3: a quote unquote computer room, right, yeah, like there was
Speaker 3: a room for the computer.
Speaker 2: Or a nook in Mike England's so small.
Speaker 3: Right yeah, but like point being where it's just like
Speaker 3: this is the this is the dedicated computer area for
Speaker 3: the computer, this household chair.
Speaker 2: Yes.
Speaker 3: So I played games on that built computer, you know,
Speaker 3: early twenty penny and four and remained interested, and I
Speaker 3: guess I started really getting more interested in the coverage
Speaker 3: when we don't feel free to ask a file up
Speaker 3: if you're interested in this.
Speaker 1: But basically I was running like a gaming guild like
Speaker 1: group of friends, you.
Speaker 2: Know, nice So well, what were you gaming together? Is that? Yeah?
Speaker 3: Counter Strike, Source Age, Evampires three ever, request, things like
Speaker 3: that you played?
Speaker 2: Request?
Speaker 1: Yeah?
Speaker 2: Whatsoever?
Speaker 3: I think I was on Kurana, I was on the Raith,
Speaker 3: I was moving. I think Karana merged into the race.
Speaker 2: I went on storm Hammer as well. I paid the
Speaker 2: extra It was not worth it, man, oh, good to know. Yeah,
Speaker 2: same scars.
Speaker 1: Then I interviewed Brad McQuaid.
Speaker 2: I have a long and storied history of being a
Speaker 2: problem for Sony online. Statement asking like the one British
Speaker 2: journalist who asked any questions about this game, I got
Speaker 2: in lots of trouble.
Speaker 1: Ever, ever quest I remember buying it.
Speaker 3: When I bought it was when it was sort of
Speaker 3: demonized in some media as yeah, and also though specifically
Speaker 3: as like the don't there was like some kind of
Speaker 3: devil worshiping, like whatever, kind of like D and D. Right, Yeah,
Speaker 3: D and D got the same treatment.
Speaker 2: They didn't, but they didn't seem to have a problem
Speaker 2: with the fact that getting to level fifty was a job.
Speaker 2: Right you had to work eight hours a day. Yeah,
Speaker 2: Oh god, so you had this guilt?
Speaker 1: Sorry?
Speaker 3: Yeah, And long story short. The website I had built
Speaker 3: for that group of friends with a forum that had
Speaker 3: all these gaming guides on it, we worked.
Speaker 1: Very hard on. As you know, we were pretty at
Speaker 1: that point.
Speaker 3: We were mostly high school early college age at the
Speaker 3: at the highest end, and everyone put a lot of
Speaker 3: effort into making these guides. And then at one point
Speaker 3: the website was hacked by just some common CMS breach, right,
Speaker 3: and I didn't know how to to restore from backup
Speaker 3: and didn't really know what I was doing, so I
Speaker 3: lost all the data. And so you could imagine for
Speaker 3: a group of like teenagers, losing gaming guides is like devastating.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's like here, like my life's work. A guy
Speaker 1: for how to rush and Asian Vampires.
Speaker 2: Yeah, oh my, well, I mean that was game e
Speaker 2: fa ques there, I guess, but yeah, if you were
Speaker 2: making your own, they can't have been that good on
Speaker 2: game efic hues.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 2: So the Library of Alexandria that yeah, sorry.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, so we lost that and that's when I
Speaker 3: made a new website and that was the Gamer's next
Speaker 3: to site.
Speaker 2: So so you're all self taught then pretty much?
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 3: I mean self taught in the sense that there's not
Speaker 3: a lot of formal education, not self taught in the
Speaker 3: sense that the people I've worked with over the years,
Speaker 3: especially engineers in the industry, are the ones who actually
Speaker 3: taught me a lot. Yeah, right, but nothing formal, I guess.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 2: And it seems that something I've noticed with your coverage
Speaker 2: and actually the surrounding channels is it seems like people
Speaker 2: in hodware are relatively generous with that time, like there
Speaker 2: are some people who want but like a lot of
Speaker 2: the scientific people seem very key to it and want
Speaker 2: to help and make sure there's understanding.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I think so.
Speaker 3: I think people like the person who comes to mind
Speaker 3: immediately is Tom Peterson, who currently works at Intel, used
Speaker 3: to working on video.
Speaker 1: But he's the type of guy where.
Speaker 3: When you talk to him you can tell he's not
Speaker 3: in it because he's trying to sell Intel's or previously
Speaker 3: on videos product. He's in it because he likes the technology, right,
Speaker 3: And so people like that, I think they tend to
Speaker 3: be happy to just share yeah.
Speaker 2: Which is really cool. And other YouTube channels as well
Speaker 2: seem like Lewis Rossman around Box, they seem like very
Speaker 2: they want to collaborate, which is really cool.
Speaker 1: Yeah. Yeah Rossman and Steve from hard run Box. I've
Speaker 1: done a lot of videos with Yeah.
Speaker 2: You're having fun, yes, because there's a lot of cynicism
Speaker 2: and kind of depression in media because of the job environment,
Speaker 2: but there's also even above that seems like just a
Speaker 2: depression around the work, but it doesn't. It seems more
Speaker 2: fun what you're doing, and they indeed throughout the hogware people.
Speaker 3: I think it's one of the things I kind of
Speaker 3: really actively spend a lot of time managing, is trying
Speaker 3: to make sure there's a cadence to the content where
Speaker 3: we actually just did this recently. I kind of look
Speaker 3: at it and it's like, all right, this is We've
Speaker 3: had a lot of heavy stuff recently. We had tariffs
Speaker 3: into black Market, into Bloomberg, you know whatever, and so
Speaker 3: then we switched to publishing more folks on reviews methodology.
Speaker 1: I ran a review of a toy story.
Speaker 2: Computer which I've seen and it's insanely cool. Yeah, I
Speaker 2: actually kind of I don't know how good it is inside,
Speaker 2: but I love the look of it.
Speaker 1: Fine, I had problems with shipping.
Speaker 3: But but the point being, you know, we we do
Speaker 3: try to, like I try to manage what the tone
Speaker 3: of the content is and for how long, because you
Speaker 3: just you don't want to lose the fun of it,
Speaker 3: you know, And so yeah, I would say I would
Speaker 3: say also, even when it is a story that might
Speaker 3: be more maybe categorized as depressing, so like if you're
Speaker 3: covering some kind of corruption or something in the industry,
Speaker 3: there is still.
Speaker 1: Fun to the job.
Speaker 3: Of covering that thing where like the fun part is
Speaker 3: not necessarily the topic. It's the trying to piece together
Speaker 3: something that's like really complex and figure out how to
Speaker 3: explain it to anybody.
Speaker 2: I mean, the GPU tariffs, the tarrist one and the
Speaker 2: GPU black market stuff was very seemed like it probably
Speaker 2: sucked a little of your soul out, but that looked
Speaker 2: like fun. It looked like a fun ben.
Speaker 3: Is I mean, the tarist one, you know, it was
Speaker 3: It's a story that there were people we spoke to
Speaker 3: who are very negatively affected, and you feel for those people.
Speaker 3: And that part is sad if you, you know, put
Speaker 3: yourself in that position. But then on the the kind
Speaker 3: of keeping it fun for yourself covering it side, if
Speaker 3: you really just kind of step back and look at
Speaker 3: it's like how fortunate can you be to for your
Speaker 3: job be like I'm going to get on a plane
Speaker 3: in twelve hours, you know, and fly and then I'm
Speaker 3: not going to know where I'm going next until I
Speaker 3: get there. Like that on its own is pretty fun. Yeah,
Speaker 3: And that's it's very privileged to be able to do
Speaker 3: that and know that at the end of it it's
Speaker 3: going to be fine, you know.
Speaker 2: Right, And so those and those trips were kind of
Speaker 2: semi chaotic.
Speaker 1: Then they're very chaotic. But that's like, that's why it's
Speaker 1: fun because you.
Speaker 2: Got to was it Hong Kong and you immediately like
Speaker 2: got a price sheet for GPU.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 3: Yeah, we were speaking with some suppliers and so we
Speaker 3: had a price sheet. Yeah, we went to we went
Speaker 3: to China for that trip. We met a guy we
Speaker 3: weren't planning to meet. He was mister five in the
Speaker 3: video and he was awesome.
Speaker 2: And where do you find these? Is it people come
Speaker 2: to you? Are they connections? I realized YOUNI laterally you
Speaker 2: probably can't onnset.
Speaker 3: But normally I normally I have a source for kind
Speaker 3: of the first link in the chain, right, and then
Speaker 3: it just kind of develops. You meet a person, you
Speaker 3: hopefully leave a good impression with them, and then they
Speaker 3: might say, you know, hey, I know someone who might
Speaker 3: be interested in talking to you, and you kind of
Speaker 3: go from there. And I think the biggest thing is like,
Speaker 3: and this is kind of challenging sometimes, but learning to
Speaker 3: to kind of roll with it where I operate at
Speaker 3: a relatively high level of anxiety in terms of preparedness, yeah,
Speaker 3: you know, and so to have a wrench thrown in
Speaker 3: where it's like, hey, you might be interested in meeting
Speaker 3: this guy. I'm like, well, like my schedule is really
Speaker 3: I have figured it out. You have to be willing
Speaker 3: to deviate from it.
Speaker 2: Yes, that's the only way to there's kind of any
Speaker 2: good broadcast work.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and you pulled it off.
Speaker 2: It's good. So you've got quite an operation here as
Speaker 2: well around how many people work.
Speaker 1: With you day to day.
Speaker 3: It's five to five to ten total day to day,
Speaker 3: so it just depends you know who's doing what each.
Speaker 2: Day, right, And then mostly around editing the videos and stuff.
Speaker 1: A couple editors slash camera operators.
Speaker 3: We have a couple of writers slash testers, so kind
Speaker 3: of like if you're testing the product, you're probably the
Speaker 3: one who's going to write the review that often makes
Speaker 3: the most sense, not always, but and then editors often
Speaker 3: will shoot the b roll they need because they kind
Speaker 3: of they hit a clip, they realize they need something.
Speaker 1: Yeah. And then we've got.
Speaker 3: A remote researcher as well who's been contributing to some
Speaker 3: of the new stories coming up.
Speaker 2: Very cool. Yeah, and how long does the video take?
Speaker 2: Putting aside the obvious ones like the tarist one, which
Speaker 2: I think a little bit different. How long does it
Speaker 2: take to get a review together, or like any particular video.
Speaker 3: A review of I can give you actual numbers. A
Speaker 3: CPU cooler requires forty hours of testing work where there's
Speaker 3: some kind of manual involvement from the technician, so that
Speaker 3: if we have one cooler, that's going to be someone's
Speaker 3: job for one week basically, right and so right now,
Speaker 3: that'll be Mike typically running those tests, and then the
Speaker 3: actual So if I write that review, it probably takes
Speaker 3: me two hours to write it, you know, it takes
Speaker 3: me the runtime plus ten or twenty minutes to film it,
Speaker 3: and then because you obviously have whatever mistakes that you know,
Speaker 3: you do retakes right, so runtime plus hundred twenty minutes,
Speaker 3: and then the editors I would say they typically take
Speaker 3: about eight hours to complete a relatively simple review edit
Speaker 3: plus some camera work.
Speaker 1: So a cooler review you might be.
Speaker 3: Somewhere in the range of fifty to max maybe sixty hours.
Speaker 1: And then something.
Speaker 3: Like like the black Market video. If you don't count
Speaker 3: my time, so if my time is zero, I don't
Speaker 3: remember exactly how many hours we had in it.
Speaker 1: It was.
Speaker 3: I know if you count my time it was over
Speaker 3: three hundred hours. Jesus, it might have been more like
Speaker 3: four hundred. But and then the ASRock motherboard video we
Speaker 3: just did yeah on CPU failures and Azrok boards. That
Speaker 3: one was like with editing and filming time, I think
Speaker 3: that was two hundred and forty hours. So like, that's
Speaker 3: an example of a content piece that we will lose
Speaker 3: money on, but it's like it's subsidized. First of all,
Speaker 3: I don't care because I want to do it. Secondly,
Speaker 3: you do have to pay for it somehow, and so
Speaker 3: for us, we basically we raised so much money from
Speaker 3: the black market video, I'm able to go, Okay, that's paid.
Speaker 2: For, you know, moove me through that situation.
Speaker 1: Yeah, which the Azrok thing.
Speaker 3: So the Azrok thing is they have some kind of
Speaker 3: yet unknown issue that is resulting in the death of
Speaker 3: CPUs expensive ones, and people don't know exactly what it is.
Speaker 3: They haven't been entirely forthcoming about it. It seems like they
Speaker 3: don't know what the fuck's going on. And so we
Speaker 3: got a viewer's motherboard that had killed the CPU and
Speaker 3: did a bunch of diagnostics. This was one of the
Speaker 3: instances where we couldn't come to a conclusion, and we
Speaker 3: decided let's just like, let's just publish everything and maybe
Speaker 3: someone can use it.
Speaker 2: As the company being communicative of they been trying to
Speaker 2: fix things.
Speaker 3: They appear to be trying to fix things, just not
Speaker 3: very successfully. I would not say they've been communicative like
Speaker 3: they haven't. I don't think they've done a good job
Speaker 3: at telling their customers what's going on.
Speaker 2: Right. So, how is your relationship in general with the
Speaker 2: hardware manufacturers you mentioned the Intel. It sounds like you
Speaker 2: have some people who are friendly and yeah, others.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it depends, you know.
Speaker 3: I'm sure you've worked with enough people where the people
Speaker 3: are often different from the company in terms of the stance,
Speaker 3: and it really depends person to person. But generally speaking,
Speaker 3: the companies are able to maintain a fairly open line
Speaker 3: of communication and be relatively mature about even criticisms because
Speaker 3: normally the people actually in between us and their bosses
Speaker 3: are pretty good at their job, right, you know, And
Speaker 3: so like there's a guy at who he's incredible at
Speaker 3: what he does because and I really don't think consumers,
Speaker 3: I think a lot of people don't know this job
Speaker 3: role exists, but it's really important and the role is
Speaker 3: effectively to be like the translator between outside criticism and
Speaker 3: internal action.
Speaker 2: Right right, So not quite a PR role, but like
Speaker 2: a developer. Not quite developer really.
Speaker 3: It's almost like like tech marketing maybe yeah, but like
Speaker 3: they're not really marketing in the traditional sense. But so
Speaker 3: the guy at AMD, he does a really good job
Speaker 3: because he's told me how if we have a criticism.
Speaker 3: I asked me to what happens internally, and he said, well, normally,
Speaker 3: like marketing might go to him and kind of be like,
Speaker 3: what the fuck, Like why did Steve say this? Or
Speaker 3: hardburn boxed or whoever, which is covered by Steve, I guess,
Speaker 3: but they might ask why did the Steve say this?
Speaker 3: And it's his job to figure that out. And he
Speaker 3: was telling me he normally just asked them, well is
Speaker 3: it true? Right, And if they say it's true, then
Speaker 3: he says, well, then make it not true by fixing it.
Speaker 2: See, this is the thing I've run a p off of.
Speaker 2: And it's like when clients come to White they say that,
Speaker 2: I'm like, and many times said why did you do that?
Speaker 1: Right?
Speaker 2: And they say, well, it's not a fair I'm like,
Speaker 2: how is it unfair? Because if you can explain to me,
Speaker 2: I can go and get this fixed, right, you have
Speaker 2: to explain to me for and it is interesting that
Speaker 2: that role has to exist.
Speaker 3: But yeah, I mean, if it's just a communication problem, right,
Speaker 3: if they're like, well, it's it's true, but we didn't
Speaker 3: we don't like it. Yeah, right, so it's got to
Speaker 3: be a real reason. But yeah, most of the companies,
Speaker 3: the relationship is fine.
Speaker 2: When they generally take criticism.
Speaker 3: Well, the people who interface with us take the criticism well,
Speaker 3: because it's just a job. The companies don't always.
Speaker 2: Do you have any executive exposure? Do you know if
Speaker 2: any executives watch?
Speaker 3: I know that Johnson Juan once watched at least part
Speaker 3: of one of our videos, at least because it was
Speaker 3: communicated to me by someone it works.
Speaker 2: With him, all bold, all caps.
Speaker 1: Ye, I was told that he was not thrilled.
Speaker 2: Oh that doesn't that doesn't sound like Jensen. He's usually
Speaker 2: such a cool head. But do you do you know
Speaker 2: if I don't even need names, but do you know
Speaker 2: if there's like a good amount.
Speaker 1: Of them, Uh?
Speaker 3: Sometimes, yeah, I mean we AMD we had a video
Speaker 3: where we were basically like begging them to not fuck
Speaker 3: up the launch of their nine thousand series GPS because
Speaker 3: their competition like no one had showed up for the
Speaker 3: consumer Intel. They were kind of there, but they're like
Speaker 3: not super viable yet. And anyway, I know after that
Speaker 3: video they had emailed us and this wasn't a thread
Speaker 3: I told them was on record, but they'd emailed us
Speaker 3: and said, uh, you know, basically their sort of executive
Speaker 3: marketing team had watched it and they did talk about
Speaker 3: the problems we raised, and that's cool. It seemed like
Speaker 3: they addressed some of them.
Speaker 2: Yeah, do you ever try and get interviews with them?
Speaker 3: Yeah, occasionally, I mean, especially if there's like the Asus
Speaker 3: situation with their warranty as context for people has had
Speaker 3: an ongoing problem with customer support, where people who need
Speaker 3: a warranty field often end up posting online saying they
Speaker 3: got screwed.
Speaker 2: Is this across the board or with specific things?
Speaker 1: Definitely Motherboard. I'm not sure about other categories because I
Speaker 1: really liked the.
Speaker 2: Rock Gangs ally, but have had a few listeners say yeah,
Speaker 2: we've got some warranty issues and it's actually I kind
Speaker 2: of wanted to address that with you in the know.
Speaker 1: Well that one.
Speaker 3: I know a lot about the ally specifically yeah, So
Speaker 3: to like close the loop on the executive question, the
Speaker 3: Asus thing, I we published a series about the warranty problems.
Speaker 3: We proposed a number of fixes, and eventually I really
Speaker 3: pushed them to let us speak to an executive and
Speaker 3: customer support. They put a director of marketing in front
Speaker 3: of us, very very nice guy, yeah, but by his
Speaker 3: job right, And so I kept pushing back in him
Speaker 3: where I was like, look, man, nothing against you. You know,
Speaker 3: you're not the guy. And so they eventually got us
Speaker 3: to the to the right guy, which is something I
Speaker 3: try to remember too.
Speaker 1: We really try.
Speaker 3: To go to executive levels if possible, because if it's
Speaker 3: just some dude who was told to do with in,
Speaker 3: I can't really press him on the decision.
Speaker 2: You can't punish him. It's not really his decision making.
Speaker 3: It's company, yeah, and he's not paid enough to like
Speaker 3: deal with it, you know. So so we try to
Speaker 3: go above that person. And we did the same with
Speaker 3: New Egg. They sat a room.
Speaker 1: Full of like four, I think through four executives with
Speaker 1: us a couple of years ago.
Speaker 3: Yeah, so they a lot of times they'll play ball,
Speaker 3: which like credit to them, you know. But the asues
Speaker 3: ally thing, the long story short on that is, we
Speaker 3: had a defect. I want to say it was like
Speaker 3: the joystick or something. We had some kind of defect.
Speaker 3: We sent it in for actual repair on our unit
Speaker 3: anonymously or you know, as a pseudonym, and they sent
Speaker 3: us a photo of the xtue of the chassis where
Speaker 3: there was a tiny nick, like a tiny tiny crater
Speaker 3: that's basically the size of a pinpoint in the end
Speaker 3: the edge of the chassis that is purely cosmetic. And
Speaker 3: this is something that like we literally put it under
Speaker 3: a microscope to see what they were talking about.
Speaker 2: And they said it wasn't covered.
Speaker 3: And they said that they would have to charge us.
Speaker 3: I forget how much it was. It was like ninety
Speaker 3: or one hundred and eighty or something dollars goodness to
Speaker 3: repair a problem that was unrelated to this cosmetic thing
Speaker 3: and was their fault, and they were trying to use
Speaker 3: it to charge us for the repair. Yeah, so we
Speaker 3: ran that as a story, and you know, I mean
Speaker 3: eventually it was handled, but I don't count it as
Speaker 3: being done correctly if they find out who we are
Speaker 3: and then they fixed it.
Speaker 2: That was the thing. Because you said it was anonymous,
Speaker 2: like a dummy thing, right, and I assume you it
Speaker 2: with a different card with it, Like.
Speaker 3: I think I bought it from like a retail physical story, right,
Speaker 3: so there's no.
Speaker 2: Trace because I like that thing. But now I'm like regretting.
Speaker 1: That's a good device.
Speaker 2: But it's like, hopefully it doesn't break.
Speaker 4: Yeah, it's a great device as long as it never
Speaker 4: has a problem.
Speaker 2: So okay, let's change. Let's change tag to the industry
Speaker 2: at large. And I want to talk to you about
Speaker 2: electronic arts because I know you just did a video.
Speaker 2: My whole thing was, how does he get worse? Because
Speaker 2: there's a company they've been dog shit for a while.
Speaker 2: And that's a personal opinion.
Speaker 1: I think that's an objective.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean, look at the Maden franchise.
Speaker 1: I think I don't know. EA is like bizarre to me.
Speaker 1: I don't get it.
Speaker 3: I know you can look at their financial reports and whatever,
Speaker 3: but the powers at play and the EA acquisition, it's
Speaker 3: multiple governments through one connection or another. And I think
Speaker 3: for a lot of people, regardless of what they think
Speaker 3: about social issues, it is just, if you really think
Speaker 3: about it, weird for government or government connected entities to
Speaker 3: start acquiring video game companies and I personally, like, I'm
Speaker 3: very skeptical of it because the US government in particular
Speaker 3: has dragged video games at every opportunity they get for decades.
Speaker 3: It's always like the video games cause violence, you know,
Speaker 3: and it's from people who've probably never played an actual
Speaker 3: game in their lives.
Speaker 2: And from one instead of this deal, it's mostly it's
Speaker 2: like Saudi money and PE money.
Speaker 3: Yes, So it's yes, So there's private equity. As he said,
Speaker 3: there's Saudi money through the PAF and then on the
Speaker 3: US side Affinity Partners, which is helmed by Jared Kushner
Speaker 3: right to former senior advisor to the President, and I
Speaker 3: think who he just sent over to some kind of
Speaker 3: peace discussion or something, so he's still involved somehow. But anyway,
Speaker 3: so that's the US side where you've got PE money.
Speaker 3: You have somehow indirectly the US government but through a
Speaker 3: former US government official and then his firm, the Affinity Partners,
Speaker 3: has received somewhere around two billion dollars of initial investment
Speaker 3: from the Saudi pif that was a New York Times
Speaker 3: report previous.
Speaker 2: So is funded by the other people invested.
Speaker 3: Yeah, And I think if I remember the numbers correct,
Speaker 3: it was close to ninety million dollars out of there,
Speaker 3: one hundred and sixty or so million in management fees
Speaker 3: for the last filing was from managing Saudi money. And
Speaker 3: then you've got the PIF from Saudi Arabia working with
Speaker 3: this firm to buy EA Games. One of the things
Speaker 3: we didn't talk about in the video that I just
Speaker 3: I hadn't really thought too much about it, and I
Speaker 3: saw some excellent comments that made me think more about it,
Speaker 3: But is that companies like EA Games control a huge
Speaker 3: amount of data that seems inconsequential on the surface.
Speaker 1: It's video game data, Like, right, what is okay?
Speaker 3: So what Let's just pretend there's a clean path for
Speaker 3: the data to exit EA Games and go to the
Speaker 3: US government or go to the Chinese or the Saudi
Speaker 3: rating whatever. Right, Let's just pretend there's a path there.
Speaker 3: They can't really do anything useful with your save game file.
Speaker 3: But one of the things that does interest me, and
Speaker 3: I just want to maybe caution here that this isn't.
Speaker 1: I don't think there's anything going on here right now, but.
Speaker 3: I think there is the opportunity to abuse anti cheat systems,
Speaker 3: which are like kernel level software in most cases that
Speaker 3: run on the computer. So if you wanted to deploy
Speaker 3: like some kind of root kit with very low level
Speaker 3: access to computers, you could do it through anti cheat solutions.
Speaker 1: Now, I don't think this is.
Speaker 3: Happening right, right, and so I want to make sure
Speaker 3: people know that because you don't want it sound like
Speaker 3: it's some crazy, wild conspiracy theory.
Speaker 1: I'm just saying it's possible for it to happen.
Speaker 2: But I mean there's probably a trophy of dated with
Speaker 2: the EA play or whatever horrible cloud service.
Speaker 3: For sure.
Speaker 1: Maybe they have chat logs that could be useful to elements. Right.
Speaker 3: The US government has talked about wanting to bring Gabe
Speaker 3: Newell in for a testimony of some kind to talk
Speaker 3: about radicalization of teens who play video games.
Speaker 2: Right, and they're doing that with the Discord CEO. I
Speaker 2: think or they are already did that.
Speaker 3: Yeah, And I mean, if you want to go way back, right,
Speaker 3: this has been the circus has been had before.
Speaker 1: It was just last time was with rock music.
Speaker 2: Right, So god, I just as just said, it's like,
Speaker 2: I don't know how EA gets worse though, because you
Speaker 2: were sports I don't know if you're a sports fan
Speaker 2: or anything.
Speaker 1: I'm aware of sports.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I said, this is the one of the pigs
Speaker 2: that buys Madden every year. It has got worse while
Speaker 2: also staying the same. And I don't know, I mean,
Speaker 2: the only way for them to make it worse is
Speaker 2: to just have it steal your money at this point,
Speaker 2: just actually go through your Walter. I just don't have
Speaker 2: they spoken of their plans for the company other than using.
Speaker 3: AI Yeah, great, this is why you should film to expression.
Speaker 1: Yeah, just the the revulsions like you melt it. Yeah.
Speaker 2: And that most of the debt, it looks like he's
Speaker 2: going to it's sort of most of the revenue is
Speaker 2: going into the debt as well.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I think it's I think it was like a
Speaker 3: twenty billion dollar debt or something that they have to
Speaker 3: pay down relatively fast. I don't remember how much pre
Speaker 3: you're off the top of my head, but it's it's
Speaker 3: enough where not sure exactly what the game plan is.
Speaker 3: But the current CEO, who's remaining in the CEO at
Speaker 3: least right now, I think his name is Andrew Wilson,
Speaker 3: I want to say, has stated that they have plans
Speaker 3: for use of AI EEA, and I think the as
Speaker 3: a whole have stated use plans for agents AI agents.
Speaker 2: The very real thing that exists, great stuff fucking EA.
Speaker 2: So that's how they do it. They become a AI
Speaker 2: and it sucks even harder. But let's change topics to
Speaker 2: another weird acquisition investment. Intel, how do you feel about
Speaker 2: this in Nvidia Intel situation?
Speaker 3: I think the Nvidia Intel US government situation, Yes, it's
Speaker 3: really weird. I am not I mean I don't like it.
Speaker 3: I think I understand the US government's interest. I'm sure
Speaker 3: they look at it as absolutely a national security asset.
Speaker 3: It's our only way we can even dream of making
Speaker 3: relevant competitive chips in America. And so if for some
Speaker 3: reason you needed a local resource to do that, Intel
Speaker 3: is it. So I get it, But at the same time,
Speaker 3: the way it came about is kind of bizarre to me.
Speaker 3: Where the timeline of events was. Trump says Intel CEO
Speaker 3: lip Putin is quote highly conflicted, and that the only
Speaker 3: resolution to this problem of being highly conflicted would be
Speaker 3: for him to resign. The reasoning it seemed for that
Speaker 3: belief of being highly conflicted is pasted or current investments
Speaker 3: by Intel's current CEO in Chinese companies, including some which
Speaker 3: I have Chinese military ties. So that's my understanding of
Speaker 3: that event. Immediately following that, within days, well within one day,
Speaker 3: Intel respond publicly. Intel CEO within days gets on a plane,
Speaker 3: meets Trump. Now they're friends. Trump says it, calls him
Speaker 3: a success. And then shortly after this, you know, you're
Speaker 3: on this this roller coaster, Intel stock the whole time
Speaker 3: plunges when he says he needs to resign.
Speaker 1: It's skyrockets, you know.
Speaker 3: And then shortly after all that, the US government is
Speaker 3: effectively acquiring ten percent of Intel, right and yeah, I mean,
Speaker 3: and on then video side, after a couple of weeks
Speaker 3: after this, Stop and Video is acquiring five billion dollars
Speaker 3: worth of Intel, which I think is around four percent
Speaker 3: or something according to Reuters.
Speaker 1: So I just I don't really know.
Speaker 3: I guess my answer is, ed, I don't know what's
Speaker 3: happening anymore.
Speaker 2: And that's kind of where I've come down in this whoop,
Speaker 2: because it's not clear what happens next. They're going to
Speaker 2: do something together. Do you think they're going to keep
Speaker 2: making the elk GPUs or is that because they haven't
Speaker 2: said they're going to stop making them.
Speaker 1: I think they're at risk. I that was a that
Speaker 1: was an unintentional pun.
Speaker 3: Very few people will get no, I loved it nice. Yeah,
Speaker 3: I think there is some risk there. So, like the
Speaker 3: stated plan is that they're going to work together on
Speaker 3: X eighty six, which is an ISA and instruction you know,
Speaker 3: architecture that is used in CPUs, and they want to
Speaker 3: work together on x eighty six solutions, which there's not
Speaker 3: a ton OF's. There's a lot of ARM there's Intel,
Speaker 3: and there's AMD for x eighty six for the most part,
Speaker 3: some via but and they also are planning to work
Speaker 3: together on envy Link integration, which was Nvidia's actually effective
Speaker 3: solution was that.
Speaker 2: They go through Mellano's acquisition.
Speaker 3: Mellanox is their networking infrastructure, right and envy Link is
Speaker 3: there sort of on board, although now it's expanded, but
Speaker 3: basically PCIe alternatives. Oh okay, so so PCI Express wasn't
Speaker 3: doing it, friend VideA. This is actually one of the
Speaker 3: areas where it's not just all marketing bullshit, Like envy
Speaker 3: Link serves a real purpose. It does a real thing
Speaker 3: and and they need it. And so they're going to
Speaker 3: work with Intel to integrate this protocol into other products
Speaker 3: which will make end videos. GPUs more lolliable on CPUs
Speaker 3: like x eighty six CPUs.
Speaker 2: Right, do you think there could be a good thing
Speaker 2: about this? Could that actually be a positive?
Speaker 3: It'll definitely be better for Nvidia's solutions. I mean, if
Speaker 3: you want to look at it purely in a vacuum
Speaker 3: of ignore literally all business and all competition aspects and
Speaker 3: look at only the product level, their product should be
Speaker 3: better as a result of it. In theory, I think
Speaker 3: there's risk to both and the end to Intel here.
Speaker 3: So in particular, something that's interesting that a lot of
Speaker 3: people don't know is the mobile the laptop side of
Speaker 3: the business where this is another stated goal of NVIDI
Speaker 3: and Intel is they want to make laptop hardware, so
Speaker 3: they want to make silicon with RTX chiplets, which is
Speaker 3: a tiny piece of silicon for the the sc or
Speaker 3: the CPU. And on the laptop side of the business,
Speaker 3: the entire industry aligns to end Video's schedule. So if
Speaker 3: Nvidia and Intel previous we're both launching a CPU and
Speaker 3: this just happened at about the same time they launched
Speaker 3: a cp in a GPU between the two of them,
Speaker 3: the vendors will align to Nvidia's GPU, meaning all of
Speaker 3: the marketing effort, the money, the sampling, the review guidance
Speaker 3: where you know they will get in touch.
Speaker 1: With reviewers and educate them on the new architecture.
Speaker 3: All of that basically happens around Nvidia's timing because Nvidia
Speaker 3: sells units, right and so because of that, if Nvidia
Speaker 3: is suddenly, you know, if they launch a new GPU
Speaker 3: for mobile right now, Intel and A, it doesn't matter
Speaker 3: which CPU is in it, MSI or Asus or hpuor
Speaker 3: the Nobo or Dell. They' launch their notebook with whatever
Speaker 3: CPU doesn't matter. The Nvidio GPUs the part that matters
Speaker 3: to them. If Nvidia is working with Intel, then suddenly
Speaker 3: it would seem that there's motive for them to leverage
Speaker 3: allocation of GPU Silicon with the intent being to get
Speaker 3: more Intel Nvidia co branded.
Speaker 1: CPUs deployed in notebooks. You see where I'm going with this.
Speaker 2: Yeah, because this is kind of a long tail thing.
Speaker 2: But it's like the old ms DOS situation, Yeah, where
Speaker 2: OEMs just ultimately went with dot because could Nvidia push
Speaker 2: down prices?
Speaker 1: I su moor, Well, I mean they they historically have
Speaker 1: been I don't know.
Speaker 3: I guess you'd say maybe revolted against an EVJ situation.
Speaker 3: But we've covered plenty of vendors in the past. I'll
Speaker 3: just name them now because it's been long enough. But
Speaker 3: like a sus, MSI, Gigabyte, and EVJ have all told
Speaker 3: us about times where allocation, which is the it's the
Speaker 3: pot of gold, right, it's it's how many chips they get,
Speaker 3: is withheld or is modulated based on their willingness to
Speaker 3: comply with whatever the current sort of requirements are.
Speaker 2: And what would those requirements be.
Speaker 3: In the past, it's been stuff like well, I mean,
Speaker 3: on an EVGA side of things, they had always told
Speaker 3: us about being restricted in their ability to design certain
Speaker 3: high end boards that might have like overclocking solutions, engineering solutions,
Speaker 3: and so there was there was kind of like a
Speaker 3: trade behind.
Speaker 2: The those restrictions happened. They do they need something of
Speaker 2: an nvidious.
Speaker 3: Side or well sometimes yeah, but it can be like
Speaker 3: we need you to not do that, or we need
Speaker 3: you to sell a certain amount of this priced class
Speaker 3: of card. So as an example, there was a time
Speaker 3: where we'd reported when multiple sources at EVGA informed us
Speaker 3: that the MSRP cards were not actually real, like they
Speaker 3: were going to exist for a short period for launch
Speaker 3: to comply with Nvideo's requirement, and as soon as it
Speaker 3: was no longer a hard requirement to get the allocation,
Speaker 3: they were going to kill the product because they didn't
Speaker 3: have margin.
Speaker 2: And so they effectively had to release something that made
Speaker 2: the money.
Speaker 1: Yeah, basically.
Speaker 3: Yeah, there was one I think we reported on where
Speaker 3: they were making like four box or something, and that's
Speaker 3: on a that was I think that was like a
Speaker 3: three hundred dollars something Boar Christ Yeah.
Speaker 2: Yeah, so this is fairly typical for nvidio.
Speaker 3: This kind of allocation is is their leverage. Yeah, it's
Speaker 3: also how they create internal competition between the board partners.
Speaker 3: Now AMD does this too, and so does Intel. I
Speaker 3: think with Intel the differences they don't really have anything that.
Speaker 2: A ton of leverage at the moment, not really.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and AMD, you know, they they also play games
Speaker 3: with allocation. I think the difference is nvideo is just
Speaker 3: the difference is if you make nvideo products and you
Speaker 3: make am D products like GPUs, you can lose the
Speaker 3: AMD ones or ten percent of the supply or whatever
Speaker 3: and still be in business. But if you lose the
Speaker 3: nvideo ones, you're fucked, right Like business is over.
Speaker 2: So they could use this with CPUs. There could be
Speaker 2: a scenario.
Speaker 1: That is my concern.
Speaker 3: Yeah, my concern is if they're in mobile with CPU
Speaker 3: and GPU. Now it's not just they're aligning to Nvidya's GPUs.
Speaker 3: There's again a there's no evidence they're planning to do this,
Speaker 3: but I think I've seen enough historical context to be
Speaker 3: concerned about a possibility where they say, Hey, we'd really
Speaker 3: love it if you would put more of the Intel
Speaker 3: RTX CPUs in your notebooks so that you can get
Speaker 3: enough fifty ninety GPUs.
Speaker 2: Oh so they will, They'll use one, So okay, now
Speaker 2: I understand. So it's the leverage with other cards that
Speaker 2: they'll use the force of this. Yes, potentially potentially. I
Speaker 2: know that this is and this they've done this for years, like.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, allocation is a is a big lever.
Speaker 2: Do you think they do similar things with the AI GPUs.
Speaker 1: Uh, I don't know.
Speaker 3: I don't really talk to because that would be probably
Speaker 3: more like Dell HP like those big enterprise deployers. I
Speaker 3: don't really talk to people there. I mean to me,
Speaker 3: it just seems like this is kind of a company
Speaker 3: culture thing, and this is all this is all me
Speaker 3: speaking from what we've reported on. You know, we have
Speaker 3: some facts for some of the stuff where we've we've
Speaker 3: covered it, like with the EVJ situation, but yeah, enterprise,
Speaker 3: I'm not sure how exactly that side works.
Speaker 2: So when it comes to AIGPUS, is there is it
Speaker 2: a limitation of your testing as the way you don't
Speaker 2: look into them because it felt like it's the one
Speaker 2: thing I'm like surprised that you haven't dug into more
Speaker 2: with like a one hundreds h one hundreds, Like.
Speaker 3: Yeah, So there's sort of there's like two sides to it.
Speaker 3: There's testing and then there's just reporting on whatever the
Speaker 3: news is. And so the reporting part we did that
Speaker 3: with the black market video. The testing side, I guess
Speaker 3: there's there's like a couple of things that are nested
Speaker 3: with in testing. So we've done a little bit of
Speaker 3: quote unquote AI testing and that was on the RTX
Speaker 3: or six thousand Blackwell GPU. This is something that is
Speaker 3: still new. It's not one hundred percent clear to me
Speaker 3: what is a reproducible reliable test, right It's part of
Speaker 3: the problem is if you're testing LLLMS or generative AI
Speaker 3: or whatever, something that makes images by nature of the application,
Speaker 3: it's almost semi it's different every time.
Speaker 2: We would also need a massive cluster to really emulate
Speaker 2: what it is because one A one hundred or eight
Speaker 2: one hundred isn't really gonna happen.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and that's kind of like you can run those tests.
Speaker 3: But and this would be a valid request from the audience.
Speaker 3: I think an audience that really cares about it would
Speaker 3: be like okay, cool, So like what about if you
Speaker 3: have you know, ten of them or whatever.
Speaker 2: And even then, how do you even practically?
Speaker 4: Yeah?
Speaker 3: And I just I think we can do it, and
Speaker 3: I do think we'll probably integrate some kind of long
Speaker 3: term testing for single GPU boards or dual GP single boards.
Speaker 3: But it's right now, it's so new that to test
Speaker 3: it properly requires a lot of research and a lot
Speaker 3: of sort of trial and error.
Speaker 2: Well, so how would you even because with something like
Speaker 2: GB two hundreds or GB three hundred, they've got their
Speaker 2: own distinct cooling. You're not going to get a giant
Speaker 2: racking wherever you want.
Speaker 1: Yeah, there's there's definitely a limit.
Speaker 2: And what are you testing for? It's just I've I
Speaker 2: have spoke spoke to a few listeners and like, oh
Speaker 2: what about AIJ why's you know, and it's kind of
Speaker 2: on some level, what would you even be testing?
Speaker 3: Yeah, I think that's a big question for us, And
Speaker 3: I think that's where like the most immediate thing that
Speaker 3: would maybe make sense for us would be some kind
Speaker 3: of consumer level I really hate to call things AI,
Speaker 3: but like AI application. So maybe that's someone wants to
Speaker 3: just buy a fifty ninety or whatever, use it for gaming,
Speaker 3: and then at night they're training something on it, or
Speaker 3: they're running some kind of system. That's the I think
Speaker 3: that's the most sensible thing we could test anything where
Speaker 3: you're getting into like actual data center workloads. I it
Speaker 3: seems like the only real source for that stuff is
Speaker 3: basically first party at this point.
Speaker 2: And semi analysis to an extent.
Speaker 1: Yeah, you spoke with them at all. They've reached out,
Speaker 1: not some analysis, but I know the work.
Speaker 2: Yeah. I mean it's a good news Letterum just cure surprise.
Speaker 2: They haven't the depth they go into. But let's talk
Speaker 2: about AI. Actually, how do you feel about AI? Like
Speaker 2: you you don't do a ton about it? Yeah, which
Speaker 2: is fine, it's just how do you feel about it?
Speaker 2: And what? Why haven't you done more?
Speaker 5: That?
Speaker 2: Not as a negative.
Speaker 3: Yeah, most of the coverage we've done has been news based,
Speaker 3: so it might be reports, you know, it might be
Speaker 3: like an investigation or whatever, but but not a lot
Speaker 3: of I don't know, like testing, like we're talking about
Speaker 3: the biggest problems I have with it right now are
Speaker 3: First of all, I think if we go like really
Speaker 3: big picture, I don't know to qualify everything. I think
Speaker 3: there are use cases for things like LMS. The best
Speaker 3: use case I have that I've actually used is translation
Speaker 3: where I speak other languages, and I use Google Translate
Speaker 3: for most of that. Because Google Translate is a dumb translator.
Speaker 3: It translates the words you type into it. Sometimes that
Speaker 3: doesn't work for a colloquial phrase, right right, So if
Speaker 3: you take any idiom, it's not really going to do
Speaker 3: that well through Google Translate. Something like chat GPT makes
Speaker 3: it a little easier sometimes to search for like really
Speaker 3: specific colloquial or idiomatic ways to express something. So I
Speaker 3: would say that's like a real use case. You can
Speaker 3: also be deep down there, Yeah, but it is like
Speaker 3: the specific thing that they're kind of built around, so
Speaker 3: they do it well.
Speaker 1: I think the.
Speaker 3: With that qualifier out of the way, the big picture
Speaker 3: concerns I have with AI are weaponization of things like
Speaker 3: LMS to propagandas and so this could be for companies
Speaker 3: to market products, it could be for governments, it could
Speaker 3: be for unknown entities whatever.
Speaker 1: But having seen the bot comments on.
Speaker 3: Videos you know every day, is that the problem? It
Speaker 3: is a very consistent problem, and they're getting better.
Speaker 2: So what are they doing?
Speaker 3: So originally it started as the really obvious ones. There
Speaker 3: were kind of two kinds. There's the bots that do
Speaker 3: financial scam scams where they basically.
Speaker 1: Post something about like some cryptocurrency, right, some scam coin.
Speaker 3: The other one would be the bots that have a
Speaker 3: photo of someone's ass, you know, and then three emojis
Speaker 3: and some text about whatever. And that's the more like
Speaker 3: traditional trying to scam. Some went into interacting with a
Speaker 3: fake user that presents themselves as an attractive person.
Speaker 1: So those are the two common types of bots.
Speaker 3: Historically, those have been really easy for a savvy user
Speaker 3: to identify because yeah, it's like it's always the same language.
Speaker 3: It's like the old old you know, Nigerian prints email
Speaker 3: scam right right, you can read it and you're like,
Speaker 3: I know this is a scam. But where it's going
Speaker 3: now kind of concerns me because there have been times
Speaker 3: where I'm not sure if it's a bot or a
Speaker 3: real person, right, And there was one recently I just
Speaker 3: banned from the channel that originally I thought it was
Speaker 3: a user because I forget what the message was. But
Speaker 3: it was like, I wonder what Steve and Wendell think
Speaker 3: about blah blah blah, And it was clearly polling stuff
Speaker 3: from the title and or the transcript of the video
Speaker 3: and then create an account.
Speaker 1: And I left it alone for a minute to see
Speaker 1: where it would go.
Speaker 3: And there's like replies under the thread where it's a
Speaker 3: bot replying to itself through different accounts I guess, uh,
Speaker 3: and eventually just tries to you off site to go
Speaker 3: you know, get scammed. So I banned all those accounts.
Speaker 3: But the thing that was concerning was was that it's
Speaker 3: pulling context from the video transcript and forming a sentence
Speaker 3: that makes sense, right, and then creating the appearance of
Speaker 3: a real dialogue between the appearance of real users about
Speaker 3: this subject that.
Speaker 1: Made sense to then scam someone.
Speaker 2: I've seen these people in blue sky for sure. Yeah, sorry,
Speaker 2: seeing these boots in blue sky where it's just someone
Speaker 2: appearing to have a guy. It's like, wow, I read
Speaker 2: that from the thing. Well do you think about this?
Speaker 1: Right?
Speaker 2: I've never seen them get to sending me to a website,
Speaker 2: but I imagine that's that's a few down the change.
Speaker 1: The way it normally happens.
Speaker 3: If you go to like CNBC or any finance channel,
Speaker 3: and you'll see these on any new video they post.
Speaker 3: They all talk so like CNBC is my favorite one
Speaker 3: to look at for this because okay, you'll see and
Speaker 3: it's not their fault, they're just the target of it.
Speaker 3: But you'll see a bot comment that'll say something like
Speaker 3: I have hundreds of thousands of dollars and I don't
Speaker 3: know how to invest it right, right, And it's always
Speaker 3: some ridiculous number.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and then there's a reply to it.
Speaker 3: It's like I had excellent luck with John Smith, and
Speaker 3: John Smith is the comments like, yeah, they're comments.
Speaker 2: I've seen these in Korra. Okay, it's like, how do
Speaker 2: I invest one hundred and fifty thousand dollars? It's like, well,
Speaker 2: I did it on right oscoin or whatever.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 3: But these they'll talk about like the name of a
Speaker 3: person and have this fake conversation about some financial advisor
Speaker 3: who doesn't exist, and then you google that name, which
Speaker 3: is fairly unique, right, so that's the only thing that
Speaker 3: comes up. And then it's a website that's a scam,
Speaker 3: and they you know, these.
Speaker 2: Point new ones compared to the original one.
Speaker 1: It's it's less obvious than.
Speaker 3: By questionable cryptocurrency or nft on website.
Speaker 2: Yeah. I don't know how you even deal with this.
Speaker 2: I don't know what the solution is other than just
Speaker 2: chutting them all down.
Speaker 1: Yeah, the channel owners have to ban them, but there's
Speaker 1: too many.
Speaker 2: You get a lot reddit to them, seeing I don't
Speaker 2: know if you're active on your subreddit much. I haven't checked.
Speaker 1: Not too much.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I'm in mind too much. But I do catch
Speaker 2: someone occasionally who is just an obvious bar sick host, disgusting. Yeah,
Speaker 2: but I just I ignorantly just assumed that they were
Speaker 2: being annoying and they were there to sow discord rather
Speaker 2: than send me to something to buy.
Speaker 1: Right. I think that's the thing too. I forget who
Speaker 1: the report was from.
Speaker 3: There was a recent report about something close actually, I
Speaker 3: think I saw it re reported and fact checked by
Speaker 3: Kurtzkazak to the channel where it was close to like
Speaker 3: fifty percent of Internet traffic is bought.
Speaker 2: Yes, yeah, and that's gonna fuck the ad industry.
Speaker 3: It's gonna be bad for everything because like, fuck the
Speaker 3: ad industry. It's gonna be bad for humanity.
Speaker 1: Well.
Speaker 2: Oh, to be clear, I don't care about the idea.
Speaker 2: I'm saying that that's how everything's paid for online.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it'll screw that all screw it's this is like
Speaker 1: Library of Alexandria is on fire. Yeah. Problem like this
Speaker 1: is this is like loss.
Speaker 3: Of of knowledge issues. And I think it's because, uh,
Speaker 3: you know, there's there's been a consolidation of sites into
Speaker 3: media forms of media or media for presentation like videos,
Speaker 3: discord things where it's not well preserved.
Speaker 1: And as those.
Speaker 3: Things collapse, because like you said, the ad industry collapses
Speaker 3: or whatever, there's gonna be a loss of information and knowledge.
Speaker 3: The death of the internet. Uh, you know, it's gonna
Speaker 3: happen from the the fact that you can no longer
Speaker 3: tell if you're the only real human in the threat
Speaker 3: or not for the conversation, right, and so you're gonna
Speaker 3: stop interacting at all because you don't know if they're.
Speaker 1: Bots or not.
Speaker 2: You think that this is gonna happen.
Speaker 1: I think it's happening.
Speaker 3: What I don't know is are the companies that can
Speaker 3: control the large platforms incentivized to stop it.
Speaker 2: I wonder because there is a level of, like any engagement,
Speaker 2: it's good engagement, but if people don't engage what they're
Speaker 2: going to.
Speaker 3: Do, there might be a tipping point. Maybe right now
Speaker 3: it's something they don't really touch. Like, you know, it
Speaker 3: took YouTube and awfully long time to start effectively addressing
Speaker 3: the bot problem, right and they still haven't really done it,
Speaker 3: and so.
Speaker 2: And that was just bot commenters or so views.
Speaker 1: Yeah, well there's that too.
Speaker 3: Yeah, there's I don't know too much about the view side,
Speaker 3: but the bot commentser's side. They it's hard to know.
Speaker 3: Are they dragging their feet on this as a counterintelligence operation?
Speaker 3: If the bots are intentionally really stupid, then they could
Speaker 3: be useful for trying to determine what are YouTube's countermeasures
Speaker 3: to get rid of those.
Speaker 2: Bots so that they can still convent them.
Speaker 3: Right, So you maybe if you're playing YouTube side of it,
Speaker 3: you know, the thought is we don't want to just
Speaker 3: ban these because they're going to figure out our mechanisms
Speaker 3: we use for more important one.
Speaker 2: It's exactly you know what, I actually buy that third
Speaker 2: because that's exactly what they did with s E. With
Speaker 2: sh They're just like, well, we couldn't possibly tell you
Speaker 2: how this works because someone would just do it.
Speaker 1: Yeah yeah with Google or Google.
Speaker 2: Yeah, they own YouTube, so it's like Jesus fucking cut.
Speaker 1: And the other thing too. You know.
Speaker 3: There's that, But there's also if you want to take
Speaker 3: the more cynical side, the less YouTube side, it could
Speaker 3: be that they want to report high engagement numbers to shareholders.
Speaker 1: Yes, and bots do that.
Speaker 4: Well.
Speaker 2: I mean they did that with by combining Gemini with
Speaker 2: Google Assistance and they had three hundred million I think
Speaker 2: weekly active views or something, right, Yeah.
Speaker 3: So but then the result is there may be a
Speaker 3: tipping point maybe at some point human engagement that's like
Speaker 3: somehow verified, which is scary for a different reason. But
Speaker 3: human engagement becomes almost artisanal. Like the reason you buy
Speaker 3: something from Etsy instead of Amazon. You know, some guy
Speaker 3: made it in his garage. Yeah, and so.
Speaker 2: Etsy full of bots. Now that's ultimate. Do you subscribe
Speaker 2: to the whole dead Internet theory? Do you think that?
Speaker 3: I think parts of it are starting to look.
Speaker 1: Practical, Like Facebook, I feel.
Speaker 2: That's my one where it's just like this is like
Speaker 2: old people screaming at their TV at this point.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and it's filled with bots that either trick them
Speaker 3: or that and raise them into a response.
Speaker 2: One of my favorite things to do is if you
Speaker 2: go on Facebook and you type in Facebook support into
Speaker 2: the chat bot ah, and you find the groups that
Speaker 2: are people thinking they're posting on Facebook grip and I
Speaker 2: know there's one of them that has like ten thousand
Speaker 2: people on it, and it's people like boomeras. I hate
Speaker 2: to sound out, but it's like people in the seventies
Speaker 2: being like, I don't know how to compute work, and
Speaker 2: three guys from Indonesia responded like, I would love to
Speaker 2: help you. His number from Indonesia, which is Facebook support is.
Speaker 3: I mean, it's kind of it is the the basically
Speaker 3: there's investment comments like on CNBC I was talking about
Speaker 3: where it looks like a real thing, you know, in
Speaker 3: this case, it maybe looks like actual Facebook support, right,
Speaker 3: And the end result is maybe maybe it's someone trying
Speaker 3: to help, Maybe they're enthusiasts, you really know face.
Speaker 2: Oh it's all Indonesian scammers. Okay, I've looked through. I
Speaker 2: may have spent a few hours of what like just
Speaker 2: I could be doing literally anything else just looking at them,
Speaker 2: and it's entirely guys in the Global South just defrauding people.
Speaker 3: Yes, and there's whole channels now that are built around
Speaker 3: scam busting, right, Like I forget the names of some
Speaker 3: of them, but there's like YouTube channels where they'll they'll
Speaker 3: walk through kind of the bot scam link. I think
Speaker 3: the AI stuff, the lms, you know, the core question
Speaker 3: of like what do I think of AI? All of
Speaker 3: those can be tools for good things. I think the
Speaker 3: bad things right now are very profitable. It's the dumbest
Speaker 3: bad thing that's profitable as a scam.
Speaker 2: But even then it's not profitable for the AI companies.
Speaker 2: It's profitable for the scammers. It's like the only people
Speaker 2: making money all Jensen Hwang and scammers.
Speaker 1: Right.
Speaker 3: Yeah, And maybe there's I don't know, there's probably some
Speaker 3: like Fortune five hundred company that thinks they're making money
Speaker 3: on it.
Speaker 1: I don't know that I've found.
Speaker 2: But no, OK, maybe there's one. No, this is like
Speaker 2: my one hyper focus of like anyone who mentions the
Speaker 2: revenue with AI, I know.
Speaker 3: Well there was one, wasn't there some report that said,
Speaker 3: what was it like over ninety.
Speaker 2: No ROI amazing report. Amazing report because you know it
Speaker 2: was good because immediately people said hit piece. The moment
Speaker 2: it says hit piece, you know that it's the true
Speaker 2: just people immediately think it's a hit piece.
Speaker 1: Do you remember who the report was by.
Speaker 2: It was by the Nanda lab mit.
Speaker 1: Oh wow.
Speaker 2: And people got really assy about it because they said, oh,
Speaker 2: it's just a bunch of interviews, that's how they did it.
Speaker 2: How the fuck do you think surveys work?
Speaker 1: Right?
Speaker 2: And so they spoke to no, they spoke to a
Speaker 2: bunch of Fortune one hundred I think CEOs and people
Speaker 2: really miss reddics. They said, oh, it's a learning gap
Speaker 2: between people using this and not understanding AI. No, the
Speaker 2: paper says it's a learning gap because the ais don't learn,
Speaker 2: but no one reads. Okay, but it's it's so strange
Speaker 2: as well, because it's everywhere. But it's also nothing. And
Speaker 2: I mean it feels like there is AI within the hardware.
Speaker 2: Well with like I forget, forget the term the upscaling ones, Yes,
Speaker 2: do those generally work?
Speaker 1: That's actually a really good point. Yeah, so, and.
Speaker 2: That's different to large language books different transform based that's
Speaker 2: that's really good DLSS and such.
Speaker 3: DLSS is like a real thing that works and does
Speaker 3: it's good. Broadly it's effective, I mean.
Speaker 2: And that's when it fills in the frames.
Speaker 1: Right DLS.
Speaker 3: So there's kind of like sub technologies they have, but
Speaker 3: broadly speaking, DLSS originally started as just it stands for
Speaker 3: deep learned super sampling, and it started where they would
Speaker 3: take ground truth images, meaning like basically we're saying this
Speaker 3: is reality, and I think there were sixteen K resolution.
Speaker 3: They're ridiculously high resolution. They would train on all these
Speaker 3: images and then use that data game by game to
Speaker 3: be able to upscale from a lower native render resolution
Speaker 3: to a higher i'll call it projected resolution to the viewer,
Speaker 3: to the user.
Speaker 1: And that was the original implementation and it is pretty
Speaker 1: good now.
Speaker 3: Like it's actually if you need to run at ten
Speaker 3: adp native so that your video card can handle the
Speaker 3: game at a good frame rate but make it look
Speaker 3: higher resolution, a lot of times it works and actually
Speaker 3: two N video's credit, DLSS in some situations can be
Speaker 3: better than native, which shouldn't be possible in theory, but
Speaker 3: because of the way they've actually integrated the deep learning
Speaker 3: on it now, which has been rebranded.
Speaker 1: These days to AI.
Speaker 2: Of course what it was called.
Speaker 3: Deep learning because the way they've integrated it, it can
Speaker 3: sometimes reconstruct details that should be there but are not,
Speaker 3: and we've done some videos on that.
Speaker 1: But yeah, that's a use case of deep learning.
Speaker 2: Then that's completely different to the world of laws of language.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's not an LM.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's like it has a singular purpose, right, make
Speaker 3: the thing look better, or generate frames to insert to
Speaker 3: smooth it over, and that's overall not bad.
Speaker 1: Also, there's places it's really useless.
Speaker 3: Yeah, But I think also though, the difference is when
Speaker 3: that technology is useless, it's not really harmful, whereas when
Speaker 3: an LM is useless, it is harmful because it's it's
Speaker 3: putting bad information.
Speaker 2: Out or just even if it's not being used particularly
Speaker 2: well and someone's just fucking around with it, it's incredibly environmentally damaging.
Speaker 1: That is a great point as well.
Speaker 2: Yes, they a fe your stuff being plagiarized for the models,
Speaker 2: you know.
Speaker 3: For models, Well, I know I did a there was
Speaker 3: a great one where I did a Google search and
Speaker 3: I searched for the release date of a product, and
Speaker 3: you know, Gemini spat out in a.
Speaker 1: Year and it was wrong by two years, and I
Speaker 1: was like, what the fuck? And I clicked to see
Speaker 1: what its sources were, and one of its top source
Speaker 1: was us, and I was like, what the fuck? Did
Speaker 1: we screw that up?
Speaker 2: Yeah? Like what ended up happening?
Speaker 3: So I went to our own article and it was
Speaker 3: a revisit we had published two years after the original
Speaker 3: product came out, and we made that clear in the article.
Speaker 3: But it's just looking at the published date and mapping
Speaker 3: it to the product name, and it decided this is
Speaker 3: the release date two years later, you know.
Speaker 1: And and so like.
Speaker 3: It learned or took from our content, misrepresented it, misrepresented it,
Speaker 3: and then credited the incorrect information to us.
Speaker 1: So now it also makes it look like I got it.
Speaker 2: Wrong, right, So everyone loses, including the customer. Yeah, it's
Speaker 2: a shame though, but I mean I feel like in
Speaker 2: the whole AI generitive world, your stuff is more valuable,
Speaker 2: the very hands on, very specific work and the very
Speaker 2: hardcore testing you though.
Speaker 3: It's also we're fortunate that it's kind of at the
Speaker 3: front end of like, if we're reviewing products, then.
Speaker 1: Someone who's an enthusiast trying.
Speaker 3: To decide on a purchase is still coming to us
Speaker 3: before it's useful in training.
Speaker 2: So I imagine the generative content is kind of antithetical
Speaker 2: to the kind of testing you do as well, because
Speaker 2: you can't really fake because.
Speaker 3: Not really, you can't really like generate a review, you know,
Speaker 3: it would be obvious.
Speaker 2: And also you have these massive machines for testing stuff here, yeah,
Speaker 2: which are insanely cool. And actually that's a good question.
Speaker 2: How do you source this kind of stuff? Do you
Speaker 2: buy from industrial because you have like pressure tested, Well, actually,
Speaker 2: maybe you could speak to some of the machines.
Speaker 1: Run through it.
Speaker 3: Yeah, So yeah, we have a Hemiana Quick chamber, which
Speaker 3: is a sound chamber and acoustic test chamber. We have
Speaker 3: a laser scanner that does three D scans of like
Speaker 3: of products.
Speaker 1: And converted some into three D models.
Speaker 3: We have pressure testers, we have fan testers, cooler testing,
Speaker 3: and then more traditional power supply tester stuff like that,
Speaker 3: and so yeah, generally, the way we go about it
Speaker 3: is we identify a problem. Typically, this is kind of
Speaker 3: the part of the business I work on the most personally,
Speaker 3: is like basically test engineering or design. So we identify
Speaker 3: a shortcoming, which is like this product is claiming this thing.
Speaker 3: We are not able to validate or invalidate their claims
Speaker 3: because we don't have the tool to do it. And
Speaker 3: then either I just do some research online and find
Speaker 3: the tool, or you know, sometimes the real challenge is
Speaker 3: knowing the name of a thing and that it exists.
Speaker 3: And so I went through this with current clamps, which
Speaker 3: is just a clamp you put on a wire to
Speaker 3: read the current going through it. A long time ago,
Speaker 3: when I started this, I didn't know that was a
Speaker 3: tool that existed. And it's like magic because you put
Speaker 3: a wire through a client a plastic looking clamp, and
Speaker 3: then through the magic of electromagnetics, it tells you what
Speaker 3: the amperage is. And when I found that, you know
Speaker 3: early and it's not a new it's been around forever.
Speaker 3: But when it was new to me, I was like,
Speaker 3: holy shit, this is If I only knew the name
Speaker 3: of this thing sooner, I could have bought it.
Speaker 2: And all of your testing is effectively new to you.
Speaker 2: You've had to kind of build it and learn yourself
Speaker 2: with help from right, with.
Speaker 1: A lot of expert help outside.
Speaker 3: And yeah, I would say sourcing it mostly comes from
Speaker 3: either just doing research or we tore a lot of
Speaker 3: factories and engineering facilities and make videos on it, and
Speaker 3: normally when I'm there, I do my best to talk
Speaker 3: to the actual people who use that equipment. And that's
Speaker 3: that's kind of how we learned that it exists, you know,
Speaker 3: Like I did a tour recently of a facility where
Speaker 3: they showed us something that they had built for a
Speaker 3: client for testing cooling products.
Speaker 1: And when they.
Speaker 3: Were done explaining it so I could talk about it
Speaker 3: in a video, I said to them, can I buy.
Speaker 1: One of those?
Speaker 2: You know?
Speaker 1: But the yeah, yeah, yeah, they sell it, so that's
Speaker 1: so cool. Yeah.
Speaker 2: And do they come and train you to use it?
Speaker 1: Sometimes you can.
Speaker 3: You can either pay for training or they'll do it
Speaker 3: for free for up to whatever four.
Speaker 1: Hours or something.
Speaker 2: You know. And do you generally operate these machines or
Speaker 2: do they train the.
Speaker 3: Crew generally, either I'm the first one to learn how
Speaker 3: to use it, or someone specific on the team might
Speaker 3: be one of the first ones to learn how to
Speaker 3: use it.
Speaker 1: So like we had.
Speaker 3: For the laser scanner, it was Patrick on the team
Speaker 3: who ultimately in that case I had tasked him with
Speaker 3: learning how to use it, and he went through he
Speaker 3: documented it you know, and now anyone can use the sop.
Speaker 2: And the laser's kind of you describing to me earlier.
Speaker 2: It's used that to see if there's devotes ye, like
Speaker 2: in the in the cooling you explain.
Speaker 1: I'm surface, I'm doing it terrible job. Now you're pretty
Speaker 1: much right on it.
Speaker 3: I mean it's yeah, cooling product has a flat surface
Speaker 3: that needs to contact a piece of silicon. And what
Speaker 3: we're looking for is, Okay, the performance is really good
Speaker 3: or really bad thermally, and we can't look at it
Speaker 3: and figure out why. Maybe if we scan this at
Speaker 3: a microscopic level, it'll reveal something.
Speaker 1: And so sometimes.
Speaker 3: It'll reveal that there's these like deep pits in the
Speaker 3: surface of the metal that you can't necessarily see by
Speaker 3: eye and can really affect the cooling performance. Other times
Speaker 3: you might see a curvature to it where maybe externally
Speaker 3: it's not obvious, but actually when you install it on
Speaker 3: the silicon product, say only two thirds of it or
Speaker 3: contact in the metal. And so this laser scanner scans
Speaker 3: the surface with the laser and then makes a three
Speaker 3: D model, and we can use that to inspect the problems.
Speaker 2: Do you ever get do companies ever reach out for
Speaker 2: any consultancy things.
Speaker 1: They do that all the time. We reject all of it.
Speaker 1: So because it's too much. There's a lot of reasons.
Speaker 3: The core of all of it is it's too much
Speaker 3: conflict of interest, right where let's just like, let's just
Speaker 3: say it's possible to take a testing job, a private
Speaker 3: testing job, and do it with absolutely zero bias towards
Speaker 3: future reviews.
Speaker 1: I just we'll just accept that premise for a second.
Speaker 3: Even under those conditions, I still don't like it because
Speaker 3: now I'm putting a weird spot where when that product launches,
Speaker 3: it's gonna be hard for me to review.
Speaker 2: It because you, oh, because you've already seen it.
Speaker 3: I've seen it, and I might have provided input on
Speaker 3: it that they paid for.
Speaker 1: If I'm involved.
Speaker 3: Right, So, now, like let's say I'm not happy with
Speaker 3: their execution, What am I gonna go say?
Speaker 1: I told them so, right, Like.
Speaker 2: That's not how much can you reveal? And even then
Speaker 2: I mentioned the trade secret so brilliant.
Speaker 1: You probably end up under an NDA.
Speaker 3: The best approach to that would be to recuse yourself
Speaker 3: from reviewing it at all. But then the problem is,
Speaker 3: like now I can't do my job for consumers.
Speaker 2: Yeah, how good is the money on?
Speaker 5: I like?
Speaker 1: Yeah?
Speaker 3: And I also think it just cannibalizes the process where
Speaker 3: you're taking things that would make excellent public videos and
Speaker 3: public data, and you're presenting it privately to never be
Speaker 3: seen by anyone.
Speaker 2: Right And by the nature of these agreements, I imagine they
Speaker 2: could obfiscate your coverage on some level.
Speaker 1: I would think so.
Speaker 3: And also it's just, yeah, you're taking the thing that
Speaker 3: made you desirable to do the testing to begin with.
Speaker 3: You're doing it privately, so it's not public, So the
Speaker 3: desire to have you do the private testing reduces, right, right,
Speaker 3: Like it seems like it's just a sort of self sabotage.
Speaker 2: But how do the hardware companies feel about you having
Speaker 2: such high level testing?
Speaker 3: Most of the people think it's cool, right, you know,
Speaker 3: I think the I'm sure a lot of them don't care.
Speaker 3: I know that some of the company representatives have told
Speaker 3: me how they'll be more careful with how they market
Speaker 3: certain things if they know we're gonna yeah rocks.
Speaker 2: I actually genuinely love that.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 3: So, and that's not just us, you know, there's other
Speaker 3: reviewers who also do an excellent job. And because the
Speaker 3: review community. People kind of specialize in different areas. I
Speaker 3: think it just sort of collectively keeps companies somewhat on
Speaker 3: their toes. But obviously you know the company is going
Speaker 3: to company.
Speaker 2: Yeah, they will shit about regardless. What is a kind
Speaker 2: of testing you can't do right now that you want
Speaker 2: to in the future.
Speaker 3: I would say the probably the the Well, so there's
Speaker 3: one we can do, but it's not really practical, and
Speaker 3: that would be basically more frequent transience testing. So there's
Speaker 3: something with power delivery. I know you've been studying lately
Speaker 3: where where there's transient spikes and so on a GPU
Speaker 3: or a CPU.
Speaker 1: This would be.
Speaker 3: A basically microscopic spike in the current or the power
Speaker 3: consumption right for really like normally like one hundred microseconds
Speaker 3: or something.
Speaker 1: We can test it. We've done in the past.
Speaker 3: But because if you're capturing data for seconds out of time,
Speaker 3: down to scales of thirty microsecond gaps or whatever, the
Speaker 3: amount of data is enormous, it's really hard to process.
Speaker 2: It's like a storage and processing problem.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's a major processing problem.
Speaker 2: And what would you want to be so is that
Speaker 2: if there is, what would those spikes mean?
Speaker 3: It would help us to stay on top of especially
Speaker 3: GPU manufacturers, but also CPU if if there's sudden spikes
Speaker 3: that might take a system offline. So as an example,
Speaker 3: this happened with a previous generation of both Nvidia and mdgpus,
Speaker 3: but where they would have large spikes and power draw
Speaker 3: that deviated from the non old draw. So if you're
Speaker 3: at four hundred and fifty watts and there's a spike
Speaker 3: to eleven hundred watts for one hundred micro seconds or something,
Speaker 3: this might be enough to trip over current protection on
Speaker 3: the power spot and just shut the computer off. And
Speaker 3: then the end user is like, what the fuck? My
Speaker 3: power supply is enough to handle four hundred and fifty.
Speaker 1: Watts right off?
Speaker 2: And this happened that Yeah.
Speaker 3: We saw this with I want to say it was
Speaker 3: the thirty series, the RTX thirty series, and like it
Speaker 3: was a problem that doesn't show up in normal power testing,
Speaker 3: but within a silloscope you can see it.
Speaker 1: And uh again credit to end video for the problems
Speaker 1: we point out.
Speaker 3: On the positive side, they did actually fix this problem
Speaker 3: in the forty series.
Speaker 2: Yeah, so here's here's a weird one, but I know
Speaker 2: it's near detO heart Linux Gaming. Yeah, are you actually,
Speaker 2: do you think this is a viable alternative to Windows
Speaker 2: with Windows ten kind of dying will being killed in
Speaker 2: the bag?
Speaker 1: Yeah, I think. I think Microsoft is the best marketing
Speaker 1: that Linux has ever had.
Speaker 2: I go on, Yeah, My.
Speaker 3: Biggest concern with Windows is not like the death of
Speaker 3: ten ongoing security support. It is the slow intrusion of spyware.
Speaker 1: Well like recall.
Speaker 3: Yes, you know where recall is marketed as this secure,
Speaker 3: locally saved, encrypted reel of your information. But to me,
Speaker 3: like capturing screenshots of your desktop while you use it
Speaker 3: at all is problematic.
Speaker 1: Yes, and we've done some testing.
Speaker 3: It's not published yet, but it'll do some dumb filtering
Speaker 3: so if it sees the word password on the screen,
Speaker 3: it won't take a screen shot, right, But like, you're
Speaker 3: not always going to have one of those words on
Speaker 3: the screen when it shouldn't take a screen shot.
Speaker 2: Right.
Speaker 3: Maybe you have some accounting documents open, you know, and
Speaker 3: it's information that's sensitive, but recall doesn't know it's sensitive.
Speaker 3: And uh, it's stuff like that that concerns me, where
Speaker 3: it's breachable and exploitable because it exists not necessarily because
Speaker 3: there is an exploit, right and uh, and then Windows
Speaker 3: eleven is continuing to add telemetry and user data and
Speaker 3: engagement monitoring tools.
Speaker 2: And that's kind of a big feature of home s,
Speaker 2: like all the horrible s operating systems, the cheap ones.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's yeah, everything that. It's just there's so much
Speaker 3: data harvesting, you know, Microsoft's This is why I think
Speaker 3: Microsoft hasn't really cared too much in recent years.
Speaker 1: If you if you don't license Windows. They used to
Speaker 1: really care.
Speaker 3: About that, yes, because now it's like, yeah, go ahead
Speaker 3: and steal it from us, like we're going to just
Speaker 3: take all your data and that's how we make the
Speaker 3: money anyway.
Speaker 2: Horrifying. But do you think Linux is viable as a
Speaker 2: gaming plot?
Speaker 3: I think it as a gaming platform specifically, I think
Speaker 3: it's becoming a lot more viable. So thanks to Valve
Speaker 3: and the Steam deck ands and it's pushed for Proton
Speaker 3: as a translation layer between the application and.
Speaker 1: The operating system.
Speaker 3: And what is that just for the Yeah, so Proton
Speaker 3: is it's a translation layer, which means it's working to
Speaker 3: effectively interpret the code that is that the game is
Speaker 3: built with to run with better performance or at all
Speaker 3: on a different operating system in this case Linux or
Speaker 3: Stemos specifically, and so because of Valve's work on that
Speaker 3: to make games more compatible, run smoother, you know, deliver
Speaker 3: consistent frame rate and pacing of the frames.
Speaker 1: Because their work there.
Speaker 3: In some instances it actually has better performance than Windows.
Speaker 2: Right.
Speaker 3: The limiting factor is still sometimes it just simply doesn't work,
Speaker 3: but that has become a lot less the case than
Speaker 3: what it was, say, ten years ago.
Speaker 1: It's not a fix for everybody.
Speaker 3: There's still times you're gonna try and run a game
Speaker 3: and it's not gonna work, and that's gonna suck.
Speaker 2: And how's the driver support?
Speaker 1: For example, hit and miss? So we're really early in
Speaker 1: this test in but.
Speaker 3: As an example, I know, Intel recently laid off a
Speaker 3: bunch of their teams that maintains various Linux driversware. Yeah,
Speaker 3: and so it's kind of you know, we don't really
Speaker 3: know what happens there. Maybe the community picks it up,
Speaker 3: I guess, I hope so, but.
Speaker 1: Yeah, he will, Yeah, yeah, it depends.
Speaker 2: Also, it really feels bad to just be like, who's
Speaker 2: gonna take responsibility for this thing we need?
Speaker 3: Yeah, and if it's even an open source driver to
Speaker 3: begin with. So yeah, it's hit and miss, but I
Speaker 3: would say that the biggest limitation of my experience with Linux,
Speaker 3: and I'm not an expert in Linux. There's no new
Speaker 3: people in your audience who.
Speaker 2: Know they email me whenever I say alternative y wes.
Speaker 3: Well, that's why we we better not even get into
Speaker 3: distributions of Linux.
Speaker 2: Or oh no, they will. They will be up my ass.
Speaker 3: Arch by the way, But yeah, I think the.
Speaker 1: I think.
Speaker 3: I think the biggest you know, limiting factors is compatibility
Speaker 3: with things like daily applications. So the tools we use
Speaker 3: for video editing generally just don't work on Linux. We'd
Speaker 3: have to use something else. Yeah, and that's a problem.
Speaker 2: But well, adjacent to this Linux conversation, how are you
Speaker 2: feel about handheld gaming?
Speaker 1: Handhelds are really cool.
Speaker 3: I think there's faster innovation happening and handhelds than most
Speaker 3: other places.
Speaker 2: Are there any really like? Because I know a zeus
Speaker 2: because being on the Naughty List a bit. But I
Speaker 2: like the steam Deck personally, But like, do you have
Speaker 2: at a favorite brand?
Speaker 3: The steam Deck and the Ally are both pretty cool devices,
Speaker 3: despite the Ally's warranty issues, like it actually is a
Speaker 3: cool piece of hardware. I thought the Lenovo Legion Go
Speaker 3: the original was a really unique and innovative gimmick.
Speaker 1: And I don't use that word.
Speaker 2: To like degrade the gimmick.
Speaker 1: The gimmick was the controllers detached. I like the switch. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and then the steam deck is uh.
Speaker 3: It was just kind of the first in the new
Speaker 3: round of handhelds. You know, GPD existed before them and
Speaker 3: Ioneo and those guys.
Speaker 2: I respect GPD. They're weird, but they're trying something.
Speaker 1: Yeah. GPD and Ioneo both are weird but trying something.
Speaker 2: Yeah. I appreciate you don't have American manufacturers do it.
Speaker 2: Actually it's good. Are the American manufacturers trying weird shit
Speaker 2: like that or is it predominantly.
Speaker 3: It depends like how you how you define American here
Speaker 3: because you know design, yes, like who depends on how
Speaker 3: you count Lenovo At this point, I don't know if
Speaker 3: you count them as American or not.
Speaker 2: Right, but they're trying weird shit.
Speaker 1: They are doing.
Speaker 3: Weird stuff, and and they you know, they certainly have
Speaker 3: large US headquarter offices. I don't know where their design happens.
Speaker 3: It's probably they have a base I think office. It's
Speaker 3: probably there. But Valve is definitely the coolest in terms
Speaker 3: of they set the tempo for this to reignite, Like
Speaker 3: they're the ones who made handheld interesting again, and everyone
Speaker 3: else jumped in and started doing stuff and that's pretty cool.
Speaker 3: And Valve also said, you know, we're gonna make Stemos
Speaker 3: available to other handheld manufacturers if they want to use it.
Speaker 1: I don't know if there's a license or not, but
Speaker 1: like it's available.
Speaker 2: And that's not being picked up. I know you can
Speaker 2: kind of sideload it.
Speaker 1: Yeah, you can definitely sideload it.
Speaker 3: I think officially, I want to say Lenovo might have
Speaker 3: been the first one to actually offer it, right zeither Lenovo.
Speaker 3: I don't think it was asues, but but yeah, someone's
Speaker 3: picked it up.
Speaker 2: How do you feel about the Xbook's Rogue Ally.
Speaker 3: I think there's a lot of confusion around it in
Speaker 3: the more mainstream audience. I've noticed talment threads where people
Speaker 3: think it's going to be required to play what you
Speaker 3: would consider an Xbox game, But it's like basically a PC.
Speaker 2: It's just a rogue x ally with Xbox branding.
Speaker 1: Right basically yeh. And I'm sure there's some software gifts,
Speaker 1: you know.
Speaker 2: But I wonder if it works because that's not being
Speaker 2: I love my rogue ally, but the fucking software that
Speaker 2: pops up really gets in the way of gaming.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 3: I don't really know what Microsoft is doing with Xbox.
Speaker 3: It just seems like they're they're not sure what to
Speaker 3: do with that brand right now.
Speaker 2: I have to I was gonna ask, like, what do
Speaker 2: you think Microsoft's deal with gaming is right now? They
Speaker 2: seem almost like they don't want to do it.
Speaker 3: It's weird because they they were so committed to locking
Speaker 3: people into the Xbox for like a generation or two,
Speaker 3: and then at some point my memory of it is
Speaker 3: they kind of realized, like, wait a minute, you know,
Speaker 3: as we moved to X eighty six architectures for consoles PC,
Speaker 3: gaming kind of works on both these devices, so we
Speaker 3: don't really care if they buy it on PC or
Speaker 3: on Xbox, as long as they use our device.
Speaker 2: And they raise the price on game Pass as well.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and and games oh.
Speaker 2: Of course at the same time, and also the Xbox.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and then you know, surprised the Pikachu face when
Speaker 3: they raised the price on games and then they raised
Speaker 3: the press on games Pass and then everybody cancels.
Speaker 2: Well, they lost so much. I read something they lost
Speaker 2: like one hundred million dollars or something even more because
Speaker 2: they put cool of duty on game Pass.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I'm sure it was genies.
Speaker 2: Fucking move lets it really. It's a shame as well,
Speaker 2: because when you get past all the horrible menus, it
Speaker 2: is kind of cool that you can just plug a game.
Speaker 2: I don't know, I've been playing PC games long enough
Speaker 2: that I was excited when you could just plug controller
Speaker 2: and it wasn't some sort of nightmare.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 2: Yeah, though PS five controllers you still have to do
Speaker 2: the weird duel shock emulate a thing.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's gotten a lot more accessible, but I think
Speaker 3: the handholds are are pretty cool.
Speaker 1: There's a lot of focus there. I'm not sure when
Speaker 1: Valve is going to do it.
Speaker 3: I really want them to bring Stemos to stop properly
Speaker 3: because it's not currently officially released for desktops, but they've
Speaker 3: done so much optimization work there where. Like the coolest
Speaker 3: thing that gets probably the least coverage outside of our
Speaker 3: space is they've really tuned the.
Speaker 1: Pacing of delivery of frames.
Speaker 3: So if you have sixty fps, sixty frames per second
Speaker 3: and it's delivered an inconsistent interval, so you have a
Speaker 3: frame delivered in sixteen milliseconds and then the next frame
Speaker 3: is delivered in one hundred milliseconds and that repeats. That's
Speaker 3: going to feel really bad. Despite being sixty fps averaged
Speaker 3: over the period, you might have some that are four milliseconds,
Speaker 3: some that are sixteen, some that are one hundred.
Speaker 2: We never thought that fps could be a marketing term,
Speaker 2: and now I finally, Oh Jesus, yeah.
Speaker 3: And so like the work they've done to optimize for
Speaker 3: the frame delivery is great where they sometimes have better
Speaker 3: frame time pacing than Windows, and I would like to
Speaker 3: see that come to desktop.
Speaker 2: So as we wrap up, what are you excited about?
Speaker 2: What in teke in hardware and whatever is actually like
Speaker 2: kind of bringing your chair.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I think on the DIY enthusiast side, there's still
Speaker 3: a lot of really cool innovation happening, especially in cases
Speaker 3: right now, believe it or not, like computer cases, you
Speaker 3: would think that it's like a pretty answered I mean
Speaker 3: it's it's all thermodynamics, which is well documented, right, It's
Speaker 3: not like stilicon.
Speaker 1: Engineering, but they're still there. I don't know. There's just
Speaker 1: a lot of improvement in.
Speaker 3: Getting an affordable, like good looking design that actually has
Speaker 3: a lot of function to it. So over the last
Speaker 3: six or seven years they've really switched to focus on
Speaker 3: coin performance and then coin performance that still looks good
Speaker 3: and so that's it's exciting to see that.
Speaker 2: And what does that edit? Does it the cases get smaller?
Speaker 1: Are they just they can?
Speaker 2: Yeah, there's better thermal management.
Speaker 3: Better thermals as a result of that, maybe lower noise.
Speaker 3: The computer just looks cooler. The smaller boxes have gotten
Speaker 3: a lot more viable. So if you want to build
Speaker 3: something that you take from I don't know, like if
Speaker 3: there's a kid who travels between a college dorm and
Speaker 3: home in the summer, you know, having like a small
Speaker 3: a small mini it x box is pretty appealing, and
Speaker 3: those have gotten really good.
Speaker 2: Yeah, the mani atxs are always so interesting to me.
Speaker 2: I love the idea of kind of like an Apple
Speaker 2: TV sized one. That's a pipe dream, but still.
Speaker 1: It's not hard to do.
Speaker 3: It's yeah, I mean, they've gotten easier. But the other thing,
Speaker 3: I think coolers are also pretty exciting right now. A
Speaker 3: lot of really neat technological development on the cool end
Speaker 3: products GPUs I think are probably the biggest hang ups
Speaker 3: for people where the pricing has just gotten kind of
Speaker 3: stupid for consumer market GPUs, and yeah, I think that
Speaker 3: that's the one that's kind of like kind of a bummer.
Speaker 2: I guess, yeah. And I mean, do you see any
Speaker 2: viable competitor to win video and am D at any point?
Speaker 2: Do you think that there's any chance of any smaller competitor.
Speaker 1: The only one is Intel, which I never really answered
Speaker 1: your question on ARC. I think right now ARC is
Speaker 1: going to stick around.
Speaker 3: But yeah, right now it only goes up to like
Speaker 3: two hundred and fifty dollars and after that it's all
Speaker 3: AMD and Nvidia and AMD. You know, part of it's
Speaker 3: their fault. They need to really want it and compete,
Speaker 3: and they just aren't. Like the products are okay, but
Speaker 3: they keep doing the stupidest things with their prices and
Speaker 3: their marketing. And I think part of it is they
Speaker 3: sell every epic CPU they make, so they allocate all
Speaker 3: the way for supply to that, and GPUs are kind
Speaker 3: of back burnered. But you know, the end result is
Speaker 3: we just end up in this stalemate we've been in forever.
Speaker 1: Now, what about.
Speaker 2: Combined GPUs and CPUs, is that is that something you're
Speaker 2: seeing much growth from. Do you think that that's going
Speaker 2: to be a focus or is that kind of just the.
Speaker 3: CPUs basically, yeah, yeah, yeah, I mean the the entire handheld.
Speaker 1: Market is that.
Speaker 3: Yeah, So there's a lot of success there and they're
Speaker 3: clearly good devices. Now for that, they're not good enough
Speaker 3: for like high fidelity, high resolution, high graphics quality gaming
Speaker 3: on a desktop, but yeah, mobile devices, they're great for
Speaker 3: their faults Upscalers like DLSS and FSR do make it
Speaker 3: more viable to run an integrated graphics solution and actually
Speaker 3: have a decent experience. Can't get close to a dedicated GPU,
Speaker 3: but they're good. They're just they're in the same spot
Speaker 3: they've been in for fifteen years where it's you know,
Speaker 3: it's it's not really a replacement for one hundred dollars.
Speaker 1: GPU is going to be better.
Speaker 2: Probably probably doesn't make enough money as well from the
Speaker 2: sink a bunch of R and D into it either.
Speaker 3: Or it becomes a problem of ballooning the die area
Speaker 3: because you have to allocate some amount of your silicon
Speaker 3: to the GPU and the CPU, and so if you
Speaker 3: give more to the GP to make more powerful, you're
Speaker 3: making your CPU weaker. And the only really way to
Speaker 3: solve that is to put more silicon on the products,
Speaker 3: which is expensive.
Speaker 2: So yeah, So a couple questions before we wrap up,
Speaker 2: who are your favorite creators at the moment, because you
Speaker 2: there's a there seems like a good kind of solidarity
Speaker 2: between them. But who do you watch?
Speaker 3: What do you I think historically, like going back, the
Speaker 3: large influences were Tech Report, Scott Wasson specifically, if I
Speaker 3: remember correctly, he was involved in the early days of
Speaker 3: ours Technico also early early days.
Speaker 2: Oh oh sure, I'll have to look out.
Speaker 3: And so Scott Wasson did a lot of excellent like
Speaker 3: test design work. Ryan Shrout was part of his kind
Speaker 3: of era and the two of them with Tom Peterson
Speaker 3: from Intel now worked.
Speaker 1: On frame time testing.
Speaker 3: So so their publications set the framework for modern benchmarking
Speaker 3: with frame times and I that was you know, I
Speaker 3: still reference those content pieces and in tech I think
Speaker 3: as well respected but has been shut down by I
Speaker 3: think it was Future bought them.
Speaker 2: Yeah yeah, I mean anyone who's worked the Future knows
Speaker 2: what happened, which is the Future bought them and then
Speaker 2: just didn't do shit with them.
Speaker 1: Yeah, But who do you watch right now now? For
Speaker 1: I like the work that.
Speaker 3: Jared's Tech does on laptops, So he's an excellent laptop reviewer,
Speaker 3: does really good work there.
Speaker 1: We've helped.
Speaker 3: Just Josh Tech, who's another laptop reviewer, with some of
Speaker 3: his testing methodology, and I think they've been doing good
Speaker 3: things to really try to advance on that. They're still like,
Speaker 3: relatively new to testing, but they're really trying. I think
Speaker 3: Jay's two cents with his recent changes to testing, He's
Speaker 3: really kind of put in a lot of effort to
Speaker 3: overhaul it. And then the hard run box guys are
Speaker 3: also awesome. But yeah, it's there's there's I like, hesitate
Speaker 3: to start naming channels because there's a lot of channels
Speaker 3: you know that I like or we talk to at shows,
Speaker 3: and I hate to leave anyone.
Speaker 2: Oh no, I know, I wasn't trying to single anyone else.
Speaker 2: It's just I think that, especially in my own work,
Speaker 2: I could be quite critical. So it's good to just
Speaker 2: focus on the things you actually like. Yeah, so as
Speaker 2: we wrap, what's next for game is nextus? What do
Speaker 2: you want to do next beyond testing? Is there a
Speaker 2: virtually want to move into? I know you've got the
Speaker 2: other channel.
Speaker 1: Going, yeah, yeah, I have to go to the UK
Speaker 1: for that.
Speaker 2: I'm sorry.
Speaker 3: Recommendations from here leave okay, don't go where the airport is.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, I think that we.
Speaker 3: Have some relatively large focus on that channel, which is
Speaker 3: like looking at some more consumer advocacy topics on the
Speaker 3: test inside.
Speaker 1: Uh.
Speaker 3: The biggest thing we're doing right now is overhauling our
Speaker 3: gaming benchmarks. So we're working to introduce some new types
Speaker 3: of charts and metrics that don't exist right now in reviews,
Speaker 3: cold animation, error, and just trying to basically, we're taking
Speaker 3: a moment right now to try and find Yeah, Okay,
Speaker 3: we've been representing things a certain way in charge forever
Speaker 3: as a review community. Is there anything new here we
Speaker 3: can do? And that's kind of what we're trying to research.
Speaker 3: So that's the immediate focus.
Speaker 2: Well, Steve, it's been such a pleasure to come out here.
Speaker 2: Thank you so much for your time.
Speaker 5: Thanks, thank you for listening to Better Offline.
Speaker 2: The editor and composer of the Better Offline theme song
Speaker 2: is Matasowski. You can check out more of his music
Speaker 2: and audio projects at Matasowski dot com, M A T
Speaker 2: T O, s O W s ki dot com. You
Speaker 2: can email me at easy at Better Offline dot com,
Speaker 2: or visit Better offline dot com to find more podcast
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Speaker 5: Bet off lines check out I'll Reddit. Thank you so
Speaker 5: much for listening Better. Offline is a production of cool
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