The Interview: Steve Burke of GamersNexus

In this week’s episode of Better Offline, Ed flies out to North Carolina for a deep interview with Steve Burke of Gamersnexus about the state of PC hardware, AI, Linux gaming, their extremely scientific hardware testing, and building a channel watched by 2.5 million people. https://www.youtube.com/gamersnexus Get $10 off a year’s subscription to my premium newsletter: https://edzitronswheresyouredatghostio.outpost.pub/public/promo-subscription/w08jbm4jwg YOU CAN NOW BUY BETTER OFFLINE MERCH! Go to https://cottonbureau.com/people/better-offline and use code FREE99 for free shipping on orders of $99 or more. --- LINKS: https://www.tinyurl.com/betterofflinelinks Newsletter: https://www.wheresyoured.at/ Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/BetterOffline/ Discord: chat.wheresyoured.at https://discord.com/invite/QUUQUP9szv Ed's Socials: https://twitter.com/edzitron https://www.instagram.com/edzitron See omnystudio.com/listener https://omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 1:08Ed Zitron?

  Call Zone Media.

• 1:11Ed Zitron?

  Hello and welcome to this week's Better Offline. I'm of course your host Ed Zitron. And for this week's episode, I flew out to North Carolina to do a longer-form interview, the first of its kind on the show, a little slower, a little more fun. And I did it with Steve Burke, founder and host of Gamers Nexus, an incredible hardware YouTube channel that's been going since 2008 and has over two and a half million subscribers. We talked about the history of Gamers Nexus, the state of the hardware industry, tech journalism, Gamers Nexus's incredibly scientific approach to hardware testing, and of course, a little bit about AI. I think you're gonna really like it. Enjoy.

• 1:55Ed Zitron?

  So how long has the channel been running? How long have you been doing this now?

• 1:59Speaker 04

  About 17 years and five months.

• 2:02Ed Zitron?

  And... You started off just doing gaming content. Look, I did go back in the files and found like a Modern Warfare trailer, I think. And then the Office Space parody, which was awesome.

• 2:12Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah. So it started as game reviews and trailer analysis videos, which was the Modern Warfare one. And Battlefield trailer analysis. That was like a whole subgenre back then. You got the trailer. You kind of picked apart what's going to be in this game. And yeah, then I did gaming reviews. We spotlighted a bunch of indie games through Steam's greenlight program. And and kind of slowly got into hardware.

• 2:37Ed Zitron?

  What was greenlight? Is that like a, is that kind of the early, early access?

• 2:41Speaker 04

  Yeah, that was Steam's thing where they gave indie developers who are unestablished kind of a way to try and get onto Steam. And so we did a lot of early coverage of games. Yeah.

• 2:51Ed Zitron?

  And you, I saw you doing a lot of convention interviews. How did you grow from there to where you are today? Which is a huge studio and massive testing facilities and such.

• 3:00Speaker 04

  The interviews and the stuff at the conventions was kind of the turning point for me because I was up until maybe 2012 or something like that, plus or minus a year. I was still technically in college and then I went to, I went to PAX, Penny Arcade Expo. I think I went to the 2010 one and after I got home from that, I decided this is kind of the only thing I want to do.

• 3:24Ed Zitron?

  Right.

• 3:24Speaker 04

  Go to stuff like this. And so it took me two years, but you know, eventually just dropped out and then, um, yeah, then just started doing more of those. And it was the, it was the best way. First of all, they're just fun. But then secondly, it was sort of how I started actually meeting the people we would end up working with in the hardware industry.

• 3:42Ed Zitron?

  Right. And did, how'd you get into testing? Because I, I found one of you, I think your first viral clips, which was the testing a power supply with a paper clip, I believe?

• 3:51Speaker 04

  Oh, that was the, um, that was to jumpstart a power supply to test it. You had to make sure it works.

• 3:57Ed Zitron?

  So how did you move into that? Because it, it seemed like it took a minute to get there.

• 4:02Speaker 04

  Yeah. So I think around, so I started the site in 2008, I think officially. And then got into publishing PC build guides in around 2010 or so.

• 4:16Speaker 04

  So that's when the hardware really started and I'd already been building computers, but hadn't actually really published much about it. So started publishing build guides. I think it was just as simple as those were the first thing that had any kind of like readership, because it was all articles back then.

• 4:31Ed Zitron?

  Right.

• 4:32Speaker 04

  And so they were-

• 4:33Ed Zitron?

  Oh, so you started out writing?

• 4:34Speaker 04

  Yeah, exclusively. And then the channel got added in 2009, but it wasn't treat, you know, YouTuber was not, that's not a job in 2009.

• 4:44Ed Zitron?

  Yeah.

• 4:45Speaker 04

  It's a little before, you're like, you had maybe Casey Neistat was at the front edge of that.

• 4:49Ed Zitron?

  Yeah, I think, I think it was like maybe Vine was, was-

• 4:52Speaker 04

  It was still around.

• 4:52Ed Zitron?

  When did Vine pop up, Christ?

• 4:54Speaker 04

  It was still around.

• 4:55Ed Zitron?

  A hundred years old. But no, back then, so you were just on the fringe of this new content?

• 4:59Speaker 04

  Yeah, and it was, I did not start a YouTube channel with the intent of making it a job, because I don't, I, if you go on Internet Archive, I didn't actually even remember this until recently, and you look at the Gamers Xs website and you go to the about page from like 2008 or 9 or 10, you'll see that somewhere in those really early years, I had said that we were running it without any form of like banner ads, which is actually true today, too. We got rid of the ads when we reintroduced the website recently.

• 5:30Ed Zitron?

  Right.

• 5:30Speaker 04

  And, but like, point being, you don't do that having no revenue, unless you aren't really thinking about trying to make it a sustainable thing, right? It was purely for fun.

• 5:43Ed Zitron?

  And how did it become a sustainable, how did it become your main job?

• 5:47Speaker 04

  Yeah, I think as YouTube grew, basically, so we were kind of in the early, we weren't the first sort of, I'll call it, generation of YouTubers who were able to successfully make it a job, but I would say we were maybe in the next generation right after that. And so yeah, I started publishing more videos alongside the articles. So it really was with case reviews, computer case reviews, where we would originally just focus on only writing a case review. At some point, I'm saying we a lot, for a while it was just me, and then every now and then it'd be someone to help, but-

• 6:27Speaker 04

  But we'd do case reviews and then I realized this would do well with video because there's depth to it and there's like just a lot of mechanical stuff. And and those videos started doing pretty okay.

• 6:40Ed Zitron?

  And did you move, when did you move away from the website? Cause I know you've come back to it.

• 6:44Speaker 04

  Yeah, we probably around 20, I think around 2018, maybe is when I kind of like mothballed it basically for a couple of years. And that was just because at that point, we, we had just moved out of the house and into an office. And then into the first office.

• 7:07Speaker 04

  And there was just too much content flow on the video side. And up until that point, I was the only one who was capable of maintaining the site and publishing to it, not because it was a special skill, but because the, the website was so completely fucked up and cobbled together.

• 7:22Ed Zitron?

  Did it not have a CMS or anything?

• 7:24Speaker 04

  It did, but I built it like, so.

• 7:26Ed Zitron?

  Right, okay, yes.

• 7:28Speaker 04

  So I had a CMS, but I had stuff bolted on to it over 12 years.

• 7:32Ed Zitron?

  Classic CMS shit.

• 7:33Speaker 04

  Yeah, and I'm not a professional web developer and.

• 7:37Ed Zitron?

  Don't worry, most CMS developers aren't either.

• 7:39Speaker 04

  Yes, that was something I came to realize. And so anyway, it just more and more, you know, all the pieces were falling off the car while I was driving it. And eventually I was like, I, I can't, I can't, like, I have to just do one thing and YouTube is not a platform I need to maintain, which is good and bad.

• 7:58Ed Zitron?

  Yes.

• 7:59Speaker 04

  But, uh, yeah, we, we kind of put the website on ice for a while. And then it wasn't until Wendell from Level One Techs eventually approached me and he was like, hey, I'm a web developer actually. And he really wanted us to get our, our content scripts preserved in article form again.

• 8:19Ed Zitron?

  Right.

• 8:19Speaker 04

  Cause he's worried about just the loss of information, you know, through video.

• 8:23Ed Zitron?

  Right.

• 8:24Speaker 04

  And so he, he set us up to where now people on the team like Jimmy are able to maintain the site.

• 8:29Ed Zitron?

  That's really cool.

• 8:29Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 8:30Ed Zitron?

  And you've brought it back though, you're somewhat more like, is it, do you ever see the website growing into more of a media outlet? Or is it just, and is it just you writing it as well?

• 8:41Speaker 04

  Yeah, it's just us, you know, it's the same team. It's the, it's basically the video scripts that the team writes converted into an article.

• 8:47Ed Zitron?

  Right.

• 8:48Speaker 04

  And so sometimes it like, it's not going to read. As naturally as a pure article might, but we try to adapt it. And if there's any, right now, to me, it's like sort of a community resource. Where I know for us at least internally, it's way more useful to have words.

• 9:09Ed Zitron?

  Right.

• 9:09Speaker 04

  You know, skim through and control F than a video. But also just like preservation wise, it's easier to preserve articles and videos.

• 9:18Ed Zitron?

  Are you, how is YouTube as a platform though? Is it, are you a slave to the algorithm so much? Do you try and appeal to it or do you just make content?

• 9:28Speaker 04

  I think the YouTube as a platform, there's a lot of ways to like feel about it. For me, it's, it's almost like asking me how I feel about water at this point.

• 9:40Ed Zitron?

  Right.

• 9:41Speaker 04

  You know, it's like, how do you feel about water? It's like, well, I mean, if I don't drink it, I die. So, but like YouTube, it's, it's not something I try to game or play to. It's basically just a fact of life for me. You know, it's like, it's, it's there and I have to think about it. And every now and then I'll probably complain about it, but realistically, I personally, I think it's kind of a fool's errand to chase quote unquote, the algorithm too much. Cause it, it kind of stifles and takes focus away from the thing that actually matters, which is the content.

• 10:18Ed Zitron?

  Right.

• 10:18Speaker 04

  You know, and, and so like, yeah, there's things you could do, like you can play with a thumbnail or the title, but what I really wouldn't want to do is change the actual type of content that's been produced just for algorithmic purposes. Cause I think that, that also creates kind of like a, almost like a black hole of creativity where you stop producing the content for the purpose it was intended. And you start producing the content to be a farm to, to use your phrase at that point, become basically a slave to the algorithm where you can't escape it. Once you start doing that, I think.

• 10:51Ed Zitron?

  Yeah, at that point, your coverage is just dancing for somebody else who changes their mind constantly.

• 10:56Speaker 04

  Right, exactly. Cause it's, you no longer know who the viewer is and it's impossible to know what YouTube wants because YouTube doesn't know what it wants.

• 11:04Ed Zitron?

  Right.

• 11:05Speaker 04

  You could probably ask a YouTube engineer a pointed, specific question, right? About the algorithm and they would probably tell you they don't know, so.

• 11:12Ed Zitron?

  And has that, has your experience with them been chaotic or is it?

• 11:16Speaker 04

  Uh, no, because believe it or not, they don't talk to us.

• 11:23Ed Zitron?

  I mean, I've heard content creators who do argue with them. I've heard ones that don't talk to them at all. It's interesting to hear, especially you're 2.6 million at this point.

• 11:31Speaker 04

  I think so, yeah.

• 11:32Ed Zitron?

  That they don't interact.

• 11:33Speaker 04

  Yeah, so there was a period where they would assign basically a channel rep to you. And um, so I would get on a call, I don't know, somewhere around maybe, it was in the high hundreds of thousands of subs. And that was kind of cool. It's like, okay, if something catastrophic happens, like, let's just say, um, I don't know, whatever. I get locked out of my account because I fudge the password too many times, something stupid like that, right? Like, I at least have someone I can talk to. Uh, those people were rotated through a revolving door basically every three or four months. So right when you start to know the person and they can help you, they're gone. And that was by design, I think, as far as I understood it. Uh, that program got killed.

• 12:16Speaker 04

  We don't have a rep now, which is normal. Um, and

• 12:20Ed Zitron?

  That's so strange.

• 12:21Speaker 04

  And the best I have is a liaison, he's called, and he's a great guy. He's very nice. It's not really his job, you know, to help us, but he does it because he's a nice guy. Uh, and so he's like the guy for like dozens of creators.

• 12:35Ed Zitron?

  Yeah, it's just so bizarre to me that there isn't a specific rep with with other people, but like a rep whose job it is to cater.

• 12:44Speaker 04

  You would think that, yeah.

• 12:46Ed Zitron?

  Your entertainment talent on some level.

• 12:48Speaker 04

  You'd think they'd want to be available to help. Um, and I'm sure if you asked Google, they would say that they do want to be available to help and they are. And you can tweet at them if you need help.

• 12:58Ed Zitron?

  Oh, great, yeah. But that's the weird thing about these platforms. It does feel like they're they're like they benefit as much as possible while providing very little.

• 13:06Speaker 04

  Well, the revenue share is public, you know, for AdSense, YouTube AdSense. So those are the ads before, after, in the middle of videos, whatever. Uh, I think it's 45, 55 with them getting 45%.

• 13:20Speaker 04

  For perspective, something like Steam, I'm not an expert on this, but the last number I saw was something like 30% for Steam. I think it's variable depending.

• 13:27Ed Zitron?

  And thirty percent for them, they take.

• 13:29Speaker 04

  For them, yeah, for them. So YouTube certainly benefits. They, to argue in their favor, hosting videos is unbelievably expensive. So I get it.

• 13:40Ed Zitron?

  I didn't know that.

• 13:41Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah, well, the split's pretty high. I'm OK with it. Like, I actually, I'm fine with it. Um, with them getting forty-five percent or whatever it is of AdSense. Because they don't impose restrictions on things like us selling our own ads.

• 13:55Ed Zitron?

  Right.

• 13:55Speaker 04

  So it's like, I don't really care, you know? Um, and I don't care if people block ads on our channel or whatever. I don't give a shit. But like the, I think it's, it's only if, if they ever overstep and they start restricting what you're allowed to put in your content in a way that, uh, beyond like, I don't know, whatever, they, they have their own rules about, uh, like hate speech and stuff like that, right?

• 14:16Ed Zitron?

  Which is fair.

• 14:18Speaker 04

  Yeah, but like in terms of if they start restricting, let's just say they decide, yeah, you're not allowed to sell merch without giving us a cut.

• 14:25Ed Zitron?

  Done.

• 14:26Speaker 04

  Then, then I'd have a big problem.

• 14:27Ed Zitron?

  Apple style.

• 14:29Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 14:29Ed Zitron?

  Is YouTube where you make most of the revenue?

• 14:31Speaker 04

  Uh, in one way or another, yeah. I mean, YouTube is the reason it's possible to do any of this because I was doing it as articles only. And YouTube didn't really become a focus until I said like twenty eighteen or so as a primary source. Um, and, uh, so yeah, through, uh, mostly merchandise sales on our store, uh, through Patreon support, which is, you know, the monthly donations from viewers. And then sort of after that, it's, um, like ads we sell and then AdSense.

• 15:03Ed Zitron?

  Right. And, but wait, so you spent like a decade mostly just writing?

• 15:08Speaker 04

  Pretty much, yeah. Probably, probably till, I would say like,

• 15:12Speaker 04

  till twenty fifteen, very seriously focused on only writing, yeah.

• 15:15Ed Zitron?

  So was that your full-time thing? Did you have other jobs as well?

• 15:19Speaker 04

  I did, uh, several side quests. So, yes, I would, I would collect side quests from local business owners. Uh, you know, like greetings adventure, I need a local website. Can you build that for me?

• 15:32Ed Zitron?

  It's a living, as they say in the Flintstones.

• 15:34Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 15:35Ed Zitron?

  It's, and.

• 15:38Ed Zitron?

  Let's actually get really, not necessarily super specific, but what's your history? Like, without getting too biographical, like, how did you come into do it? Are you, were you just naturally interested in this? Was this just a childhood thing?

• 15:50Speaker 04

  I guess depends how far back we go, but uh, gaming was always an interest and continues to be an interest, of course.

• 16:00Speaker 04

  I don't know, I mean, the first game I played was probably Lemmings.

• 16:03Ed Zitron?

  Hell, yes.

• 16:04Speaker 04

  Played that, yeah.

• 16:05Ed Zitron?

  Hell, yes, that, humans for me.

• 16:06Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah.

• 16:09Ed Zitron?

  First Lemmings game?

• 16:10Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 16:11Ed Zitron?

  Yeah, hell, yes. No, I'm, so you were primarily a PC gamer, though?

• 16:14Speaker 04

  Yeah, for sure, yeah. Cause so Lemmings and then there are some other ones back then and uh, I played a lot of NES, SNES, N64, GameCube, all that stuff, a lot of Nintendo. Eventually got a PS2 as well, but, but after the N64 era, so like early 2000s, was when I built my first computer.

• 16:34Ed Zitron?

  Right.

• 16:35Speaker 04

  Um, before that, uh, I was playing games like Command and Conquer Red Alert. Yeah, and uh, things, things of that nature. Um, what, you know, this was back when every family had a, a quote unquote, computer room.

• 16:51Ed Zitron?

  Oh, yeah.

• 16:52Speaker 04

  Like, there was a room for the computer.

• 16:54Ed Zitron?

  Or a nook, in my case, it'd be, England's so small.

• 16:56Speaker 04

  Right, yeah, but like, point being where it's just like, this is the, this is the dedicated computer area for the computer this household shares.

• 17:04Ed Zitron?

  Yes.

• 17:04Speaker 04

  So I played games on that, built a computer, you know, early 2000s, the Pentium 4, and um, remained interested, uh, and I guess I started really getting more interested in the coverage when we don't, feel free to ask a follow-up if you're interested in this, but basically I was running like a, a gaming guild, like group of friends, you know?

• 17:27Ed Zitron?

  Nice.

• 17:27Speaker 04

  So I built a web-

• 17:28Ed Zitron?

  Were you gaming together, or is that?

• 17:30Speaker 04

  Yeah, Counter-Strike Source, Age of Empires 3, uh, EverQuest, things like that.

• 17:36Ed Zitron?

  You played EverQuest?

• 17:37Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 17:37Ed Zitron?

  What server?

• 17:38Speaker 04

  I think I was on Korana?

• 17:41Ed Zitron?

  I was on the Wraith.

• 17:43Speaker 04

  The Wraith? I was mov- I think Korana merged into the Wraith.

• 17:46Ed Zitron?

  I went on Stormhammer as well, I paid the extra to go on it, it was not worth it, man. Oh, good to know, yeah, same scars then.

• 17:53Speaker 04

  I interviewed Brad McQuaid once.

• 17:55Ed Zitron?

  I have a long and storied history of being a problem for Sony Online Entertainment, like the one British journalist who asked any questions about this game. Yeah, I got in a lot of trouble over and over questions.

• 18:07Speaker 04

  Well, I remember buying it, when I bought it was when it was sort of demonized in some media.

• 18:13Ed Zitron?

  Oh, Aircrack?

• 18:14Speaker 04

  Yeah, and also though, specifically as like, I don't, there was like some kind of devil worshiping, like whatever. Kind of like D and D, right? D and D got the same treatment.

• 18:26Ed Zitron?

  They didn't, but they didn't seem to have a problem with the fact that getting to level 50 was a job.

• 18:30Speaker 04

  Right.

• 18:31Ed Zitron?

  You had to work eight to nine hours a day.

• 18:33Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 18:34Ed Zitron?

  Oh god, oh.

• 18:35Speaker 04

  So anyway.

• 18:36Ed Zitron?

  So you had this guilt, sorry.

• 18:37Speaker 04

  Yeah, and a long story short, um, the website I had built for that group of friends with a forum that had all these gaming guides on it, we worked very hard on. As, you know, we were pretty, at that point, we were mostly high school, early college age at the highest end. And everyone put a lot of effort into making these guides. Uh, and then at one point, the website was hacked by just some common CMS breach.

• 19:04Ed Zitron?

  Right.

• 19:04Speaker 04

  And I didn't know how to restore from backup and didn't really know what I was doing, so I lost all the data. And so you could imagine for a group of like teenagers, losing gaming guides is like devastating. It's like, you're like, my life's work, a guide for how to rush in Age of Empires.

• 19:21Ed Zitron?

  Yeah, oh my, oh my, well, I mean, that was game FAQ's era, I guess, but

• 19:25Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 19:26Ed Zitron?

  If you were making your own, they can't have been that good on game FAQ's.

• 19:29Speaker 04

  Yeah, so.

• 19:30Ed Zitron?

  The Library of Alexandria there, yeah, sorry.

• 19:32Speaker 04

  Yeah, and uh, yeah, so we, we lost that and that's when I made a new website and that was the game where it's next to site, so.

• 19:38Ed Zitron?

  So you're all self-taught then?

• 19:41Speaker 04

  Uh, pretty much, yeah, I mean. Self-taught in the sense that there's not a lot of formal education. Not self-taught in the sense that the people I've worked with over the years, especially engineers in the industry, are the ones who've actually taught me a lot.

• 19:57Ed Zitron?

  Yeah.

• 19:58Speaker 04

  Right, but nothing formal, I guess, yeah.

• 20:00Ed Zitron?

  And it seems that, something I've noticed with your coverage and actually the surrounding channels is, seems like people in hardware are relatively generous with their time. Like, there are some people who aren't, but like, a lot of the scientific people seem very keyed in, like, wanna help and make sure there's understanding.

• 20:15Speaker 04

  Yeah, I think so. I think people like, the person who comes to mind immediately is Tom Peterson, who currently works at Intel, used to work at Nvidia. But he's the type of guy where, when you talk to him, you can tell he's not in it because he's trying to sell Intel's or previously Nvidia's product. He's in it because he likes the technology.

• 20:37Ed Zitron?

  Right.

• 20:37Speaker 04

  And so people like that, I think they tend to be happy to just share, yeah.

• 20:41Ed Zitron?

  Which is really cool. And the other YouTube channels as well seem like Lewis Rossman and Hardware Unboxed, they seem like very, they wanna collaborate, which is really cool.

• 20:48Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah, Rossman and Steve from Hardware Unboxed, I've done a lot of videos with, yeah.

• 20:52Ed Zitron?

  You having fun?

• 20:53Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 20:55Ed Zitron?

  Cause there's a, there's a lot of cynicism and kind of depression in media because of the job environment. There's also, even above that, it seems like just a depression around the work, but it doesn't, it seems more fun what you're doing and indeed throughout the hardware people.

• 21:08Speaker 04

  I think it's, we, one of the things I kind of really actively spent a lot of time managing is trying to make sure there's a cadence to the content. Where, we actually just did this recently, I kinda looked at it and was like, right, this is, we've had a lot of heavy stuff recently. We had tariffs into black market, into Bloomberg, you know, whatever. And so then we switched to publishing more focused on reviews, methodology, I ran a review of a Toy Story computer.

• 21:38Ed Zitron?

  Which I have seen and it's insanely cool.

• 21:40Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 21:40Ed Zitron?

  I actually kind of, I don't know how good it is inside, but I love the look of it.

• 21:43Speaker 04

  It's fine, it had problems with shipping, but, but the point being, you know, we, we do try to, like, I, I try to manage what the tone of the content is and for how long because,

• 21:59Speaker 04

  You just, you don't want to lose the fun of it, you know? And so, yeah, I would say, I would say also, even when it is a story that might be more maybe categorized as depressing, so like if you're covering some kind of corruption or something in the industry, there is still fun to the job of covering that thing where, like, the fun part is not necessarily the topic, it's the trying to piece together something that's like really complex and figure out how to explain it to anybody.

• 22:30Ed Zitron?

  I mean, the GPU tariffs, the tariffs one and the GPU black market stuff was very, it seemed like it probably sucked a little of your soul out, but that looked like fun. It looked like a fun adventure.

• 22:41Speaker 04

  It is. I mean, the terrorist one, you know, it was, it's a story that there were people we spoke to who were very negatively affected, and you feel for those people, and that part is sad if you, you know, put yourself in that position. But then on the, the kind of keeping it fun for yourself, covering it side, if you really just kind of step back and look at it, it's like, how fortunate can you be to, for your job, be like, I'm gonna get on a plane in 12 hours, you know, and fly, and then I'm not gonna know where I'm going next until I get there. Like, that on its own is pretty fun.

• 23:17Ed Zitron?

  Yeah.

• 23:17Speaker 04

  And that's, it's very privileged to be able to do that and know that at the end of it, it's gonna be fine, you know?

• 23:23Ed Zitron?

  Right. And so those, and those trips were kind of semi chaotic then?

• 23:28Speaker 04

  They're very chaotic, but that's like, that's why it's fun.

• 23:31Ed Zitron?

  You got to, was it Hong Kong, and you immediately like got a, a price sheet for GPU?

• 23:36Speaker 04

  We had, yeah, we were speaking with some suppliers, and so we had a price sheet. Yeah, we went to, we went to China for that trip. We met a guy we weren't planning to meet, he was known as Mr. Five in the video, and he was awesome.

• 23:52Ed Zitron?

  And where do you find these, is it, people come to you, are there connections? I realize unilaterally you probably can't answer, but...

• 23:58Speaker 04

  Normally, I, normally I, I have a source for kind of the first link in the chain.

• 24:03Ed Zitron?

  Right.

• 24:04Speaker 04

  And then it just kind of develops. So you, you meet a person, you hopefully leave a good impression with them, and then they might say, you know, hey, I know someone who might be interested in talking to you, and you kind of go from there. And I think the biggest thing is like...

• 24:19Speaker 04

  And this is kind of challenging sometimes, but learning to um to kind of roll with it where I operate at a relatively high level of anxiety in terms of preparedness.

• 24:31Ed Zitron?

  Yeah.

• 24:31Speaker 04

  You know, and and so to have a wrench thrown in where it's like, hey, you might be interested in meeting this guy. I'm like, well, like my schedule is really, I had figured it out. You have to be willing to deviate from it.

• 24:42Ed Zitron?

  Yes, that's the only way to do kind of any good broadcast work.

• 24:46Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 24:46Ed Zitron?

  And you pulled it off. It was good.

• 24:47Speaker 04

  Thanks.

• 24:48Ed Zitron?

  So you've got quite an operation here as well. Around how many people work with you?

• 24:53Speaker 04

  Uh, day to day, it's five to five to 10 total day to day. So it just depends, you know, who's doing what each day.

• 25:03Ed Zitron?

  Right. And they're mostly around editing the videos and stuff.

• 25:06Speaker 04

  Yeah, a couple editors slash camera operators. We have a couple writers slash testers. So kind of like if if you're testing a product, you're probably the one who's going to write the review. That often makes the most sense, not always, but and then editors often will shoot the B roll they need because they kind of they hit a clip. They realize they need something.

• 25:28Ed Zitron?

  Right.

• 25:29Speaker 04

  Yeah. And then we've got um a remote researcher as well, who's been contributing to some of the news stories coming up.

• 25:36Ed Zitron?

  Very cool. Uh, and how long does a video take? I putting aside the obvious ones like the terrorist one, which I think little bit different. How long does it take to get a review together or like any particular video?

• 25:48Speaker 04

  A review of I can give you the actual numbers. A CPU cooler requires 40 hours of testing work where there's some kind of manual involvement from the technician. So that if we have one cooler, that's going to be someone's job for one week, basically.

• 26:04Ed Zitron?

  Right.

• 26:05Speaker 04

  And so right now that'll be Mike typically running those tests. Uh, and then the the actual, so if I write that review, it probably takes me two hours to write it, you know, it takes me. The the runtime plus 10 or 20 minutes to film it. And then because you you obviously have whatever mistakes that you you know, you do retakes, right? So runtime plus 10 or 20 minutes. And then the editors, I would say they typically take about eight hours to complete a relatively simple review edit, uh, plus some camera work. So so a cooler review, you might be somewhere in the range of 50 to max, maybe 60 hours. And then something like, uh, like the black market video.

• 26:48Speaker 04

  If you don't count my time, so if my time is zero, um, I don't remember exactly how many hours we had in it. It was, I know if you count my time, it was over 300 hours.

• 26:59Ed Zitron?

  Jesus, so cool.

• 27:00Speaker 04

  It might have been more like 400, but and then, uh, the Asrock motherboard video we just did on, yeah, on CPU failures and Asrock boards. That one was like, I with editing and filming time, I think that was 240 hours. So like, that's an example of a content piece that we will lose money on, but it's like it's subsidized. First of all, I don't care because I want to do it. Secondly, you do have to pay for it somehow.

• 27:26Ed Zitron?

  Right.

• 27:27Speaker 04

  And so for us, we basically, we raised so much money from the black market video. I'm able to go, okay, that's paid for, you know?

• 27:34Ed Zitron?

  Walk me through that situation.

• 27:35Speaker 04

  Yeah, which the

• 27:36Ed Zitron?

  The Asrock.

• 27:37Speaker 04

  The Asrock thing, so the Asrock thing is, um, they have some kind of yet unknown issue that is resulting in the death of CPUs.

• 27:45Ed Zitron?

  Right.

• 27:46Speaker 04

  Expensive ones. And people don't know exactly what it is. They haven't been entirely forthcoming about it. It seems like they don't know what the fuck's going on.

• 27:53Ed Zitron?

  Oh.

• 27:54Speaker 04

  And, uh, and so we we got a viewer's motherboard that had killed the CPU and did a bunch of diagnostics. This was one of the the instances where we couldn't come to a conclusion and we decided let's just like, let's just publish everything and maybe someone can use it.

• 28:08Ed Zitron?

  Has the company been communicative? Have they been trying to fix things?

• 28:12Speaker 04

  They, uh, appear to be trying to fix things, just not very successfully.

• 28:16Ed Zitron?

  Right.

• 28:17Speaker 04

  I would not say they've been communicative, like they haven't, I don't think they've done a good job at. Telling their customers what's going on.

• 28:24Ed Zitron?

  Right. So how is your relationship in general with the hardware manufacturers? You mentioned the Intel, you have, it sounds like you have some people who are friendly and then others.

• 28:32Speaker 04

  Yeah, it depends. You know, I'm sure you've worked with enough people where the people are often different from the company in terms of the stance and it really depends person to person. But generally speaking, the companies are able to maintain a fairly open line of communication and be relatively mature about even criticisms because normally the people actually in between us and their bosses are pretty good at their job.

• 29:03Ed Zitron?

  Right.

• 29:04Speaker 04

  You know, and so like, there's a guy at AMD who he's incredible at what he does because, and I really don't think consumers, I think a lot of people don't know this job role exists, but it's really important. And the role is effectively to be like the translator between outside criticism and internal action.

• 29:23Ed Zitron?

  Right. So not quite a PR role, but like a developer, not quite developer.

• 29:28Speaker 04

  It's almost like, like tech marketing, maybe.

• 29:31Ed Zitron?

  Yeah.

• 29:32Speaker 04

  But like, they're not really marketing in the traditional sense. But so a guy at AMD, he does a really good job because he's told me how if we have a criticism, I asked him, what happens internally?

• 29:43Ed Zitron?

  Yeah.

• 29:43Speaker 04

  And he said, well, normally like marketing might go to him and kind of be like, what the fuck? Like, why did Steve say this or hard run boxed or whoever?

• 29:51Ed Zitron?

  Right.

• 29:51Speaker 04

  Which is covered by Steve, I guess. But they might ask, why did the Steve say this? And it's his job to figure that out. And he was telling me, he normally just asks them, well, is it true?

• 30:02Ed Zitron?

  Right.

• 30:03Speaker 04

  And if they say it's true, then he says, well, then make it not true by fixing it.

• 30:07Ed Zitron?

  See, this is the thing. I've run a PR phone and it's like, when clients come to, why'd they say that? I'm like, and many times said, why did you do that?

• 30:14Speaker 04

  Right.

• 30:15Ed Zitron?

  And they say, well, it's not a fair, I'm like, how is it unfair? Because if you can explain to me, I can go and get this fixed.

• 30:20Speaker 04

  Right.

• 30:20Ed Zitron?

  But you have to explain to me. And it is interesting that that role has to exist, but.

• 30:25Speaker 04

  Yeah. I mean, if it's just a communication problem, right? If they're like, well. It's it's true, but we didn't.

• 30:31Ed Zitron?

  We don't like it?

• 30:31Speaker 04

  Yeah, right. So there's got to be a real reason. But yeah, most of the companies, the relationship is is fine.

• 30:39Ed Zitron?

  And they generally take criticism well?

• 30:41Speaker 04

  Uh, the people who interface with us take the criticism well because it's just a job. The companies don't always.

• 30:48Ed Zitron?

  Do you have any executive exposure? Do you know if any executives watch?

• 30:52Speaker 04

  I know that Jensen Huang once watched at least part of one of our videos.

• 30:58Ed Zitron?

  How did you?

• 30:58Speaker 04

  At least, uh, because it was communicated to me by someone who works with him.

• 31:03Ed Zitron?

  All bold, all caps.

• 31:05Speaker 04

  Yeah, I was told that he was not thrilled.

• 31:08Ed Zitron?

  Oh, that doesn't that doesn't sound like Jensen. He's usually such a cool head. But do you do you know if you I don't even need names, but do you know if there's like a good amount of them?

• 31:17Speaker 04

  Uh, sometimes, yeah, I mean, we AMD, we had a a video where we were basically like begging them to not fuck up the launch of their 9000 series GPUs. Because their competition, like, no one had showed up for the consumer. Uh, Intel, they were kind of there, but they're like not super viable yet. And anyway, um, I know after that video, they'd emailed us, and this wasn't a threat I told them was on record, but they'd emailed us and said, uh, you know, basically their sort of executive marketing team had watched it. And they did talk about the problems we raised and

• 31:55Ed Zitron?

  That's cool.

• 31:56Speaker 04

  It seemed like they addressed some of them. Yeah.

• 31:58Ed Zitron?

  Do you ever try and get interviews with them?

• 32:00Speaker 04

  Yeah, occasionally. I mean, especially if there's like the ASUS situation with their warranty, ASUS, uh, context for people has had a an ongoing problem with customer support where people who need a warranty filled often end up posting online saying they got screwed.

• 32:18Ed Zitron?

  Is this across the board or with specific things?

• 32:21Speaker 04

  Definitely motherboard. I'm not sure about other categories.

• 32:24Ed Zitron?

  Because I really like the Rogues ally, but I've had a few listeners say, yeah, we've got some warranty issues. And it's actually, I kind of wanted to address that with you in the know.

• 32:32Speaker 04

  Well, that one I know a lot about, the ally specifically. Yeah. So to like close the loop on the executive question, the ASUS thing, I we published a series about the warranty problems. We proposed a number of fixes and eventually. I really pushed them to let us speak to an executive in customer support. Uh, they put a director of marketing in front of us, very, very nice guy.

• 32:58Ed Zitron?

  Yeah.

• 32:59Speaker 04

  Not his job, right? And so I, I kept pushing back at him where I was like, look, man, nothing against you, you know? You're not the guy.

• 33:06Ed Zitron?

  Yeah.

• 33:07Speaker 04

  And so they eventually got us to the, to the right guy. Uh, which is something I try to remember to. Uh, we really try to go to executive levels if possible. Cause if it's just some dude who was told to do a thing, I can't really press him on the decision.

• 33:24Ed Zitron?

  You can't punish him. It's not really his decision making.

• 33:26Speaker 04

  It's not his company.

• 33:27Ed Zitron?

  He doesn't know.

• 33:28Speaker 04

  Yeah. And he's not paid enough to like, deal with it.

• 33:31Ed Zitron?

  Yeah.

• 33:32Speaker 04

  So, so we tried to go above that person. And, um, we did the same with New Ag. They sat a room full of like four, I think through four executives with us.

• 33:42Ed Zitron?

  That's great.

• 33:42Speaker 04

  Couple of years ago. Yeah. Um, so they, they, a lot of times they'll play ball, which like credit to them.

• 33:47Ed Zitron?

  Yeah.

• 33:47Speaker 04

  You know? But the Asus Ally thing, the long story short on that is we had a defect. Uh, I want to say it was like the joystick or something. We had some kind of defect. We sent it in for actual repair on our unit anonymously, or you know, as a, as a pseudonym. And they, um, sent us a photo of the exterior of the chassis where there was a tiny nick, like a tiny, tiny crater. That's basically the size of a pinpoint.

• 34:17Ed Zitron?

  Mm hmm.

• 34:18Speaker 04

  Uh, in the end, the edge of the chassis that is purely cosmetic. And this is something that like, we literally put it under a microscope to see what they were talking about.

• 34:29Ed Zitron?

  And they said it wasn't covered?

• 34:30Speaker 04

  And they said that they would have to charge us, I forget how much it was. It was like 90 or a hundred and 80 or something dollars.

• 34:36Ed Zitron?

  Goodness.

• 34:37Speaker 04

  To repair a problem that was unrelated to this cosmetic thing and was their fault. And they were trying to use it to charge us for the repair.

• 34:45Ed Zitron?

  Very silly.

• 34:46Speaker 04

  Yeah. So we ran that as a story. And, uh, you know, I mean, eventually it was handled, but.

• 34:55Speaker 04

  I don't count it as being done correctly if they find out who we are and then they fix it.

• 35:01Ed Zitron?

  That was the thing, because you said it was anonymous, like a dummy thing.

• 35:04Speaker 04

  Right.

• 35:05Ed Zitron?

  And I assume you bought it with a different card with it like.

• 35:08Speaker 04

  I think I bought it from like a retail physical store.

• 35:10Ed Zitron?

  Right.

• 35:11Speaker 04

  So there's no trace.

• 35:12Ed Zitron?

  Because I like that thing, but now I'm like regretting.

• 35:15Speaker 04

  That's a good device.

• 35:16Ed Zitron?

  But it's like, hopefully it doesn't break.

• 35:18Speaker 04

  Yeah, it's a great device as long as it never has a problem.

• 35:28Speaker 05

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• 36:33Ed Zitron?

  So, okay, let's change, let's change tag to the industry at large. And I want to talk to you about Electronic Arts and this EA thing, because I know you just did a video. My whole thing was, how does EA get worse? Because as a company, they've been dogshit for a while, and that's a personal opinion.

• 36:50Speaker 04

  I don't know. I think that's an objective fact.

• 36:51Ed Zitron?

  Yeah, I mean, look at the Madden franchise.

• 36:54Speaker 04

  I think, I don't know. EA is like bizarre to me. I don't get it. I know you can look at their financial reports and whatever, but the, the powers at play in the EA acquisition, it's, it's multiple governments through one connection or another. And.

• 37:15Speaker 04

  I think for a lot of people, regardless of what they think about social issues, it is just, if you really think about it, weird for government or government-connected entities to start acquiring video game companies.

• 37:30Ed Zitron?

  Right.

• 37:30Speaker 04

  And I personally, like, am very skeptical of it because the US government in particular has dragged video games at every opportunity they get for decades.

• 37:41Ed Zitron?

  Right.

• 37:41Speaker 04

  It's always like, the video games cause violence, you know, and it's from people who've probably never played an actual game in their lives.

• 37:49Ed Zitron?

  And from what I understand of this deal, it's mostly, it's like Saudi money and PE money.

• 37:53Speaker 04

  Yes, so it's, yes, so there's private equity, as you said, there's Saudi money through the PIF, and then on the US side, Affinity Partners, which is helmed by Jared Kushner, the former senior advisor to the president, and I think who he just sent over to some kind of peace discussion or something, so he's still involved somehow, but anyway, so that's the US side, where you've got PE money, you have somehow indirectly the US government, but through a former US government official.

• 38:23Ed Zitron?

  Right.

• 38:23Speaker 04

  And then his firm, the Affinity Partners, has received somewhere around $2 billion of initial investment from the Saudi PIF, that was a New York Times report previously.

• 38:35Ed Zitron?

  So his fund is funded by the other people invested.

• 38:39Speaker 04

  Yeah, and I think, if I remember the numbers correctly, it was close to $90 million out of their 160 or so million in management fees for the last filing was from managing Saudi money, and then you've got the PIF from Saudi Arabia working with this firm to buy EA Games.

• 38:59Ed Zitron?

  Right.

• 39:00Speaker 04

  And one of the things we didn't talk about in the video that I just, I hadn't really thought too much about it, and I saw some excellent comments that made me think more about it, but is that Companies like EA Games

• 39:14Speaker 04

  control a huge amount of data that seems inconsequential on the surface. It's video game data.

• 39:20Ed Zitron?

  Right.

• 39:20Speaker 04

  What is, okay, so what? Let's just pretend there's a clean path for the data to exit EA Games and go to the US government, or go to the Chinese, or the Saudi Arabian government, whatever, right? Let's just pretend there's a path there. They can't really do anything useful with your save game file.

• 39:36Ed Zitron?

  Right.

• 39:37Speaker 04

  But one of the things that does interest me, and I just want to maybe caution here that this isn't,

• 39:46Speaker 04

  I don't think there's anything going on here right now, but I think there is the opportunity to abuse anti-cheat systems, which are like kernel-level software in most cases that run on the computer. So if you wanted to deploy like some kind of rootkit with very low-level access to computers, you could do it through anti-cheat solutions. Now, I don't think this is happening.

• 40:13Ed Zitron?

  Right.

• 40:14Speaker 04

  Right? And so I want to make sure people know that because you don't want it to sound like some crazy wild conspiracy theory. I'm just saying it's possible for it to happen.

• 40:21Ed Zitron?

  But I mean, there's probably a trove of data with EA Play or whatever horrible cloud services.

• 40:26Speaker 04

  For sure.

• 40:26Ed Zitron?

  They've pulled onto everything.

• 40:27Speaker 04

  Maybe they have chat logs that could be useful to governments, right? The US government has talked about wanting to bring Gabe Newell in for testimony of some kind to talk about radicalization of teens who play video games.

• 40:43Ed Zitron?

  Right. And they're doing that with the Discord CEO, I think.

• 40:45Speaker 04

  They are.

• 40:46Ed Zitron?

  They already did that.

• 40:47Speaker 04

  Yeah, and I mean, if you want to go way back, right? They, this has been, the circus has been had before. It was just last time it was with rock music.

• 40:54Ed Zitron?

  Right.

• 40:55Speaker 04

  So.

• 40:56Ed Zitron?

  God. I just, as I said, it's like, I don't know how EA gets worse, though, because I, you were sport, I don't know if you're a sports fan or anything.

• 41:04Speaker 04

  I'm aware of sports.

• 41:05Ed Zitron?

  Yeah. I say this is the, one of the pay pigs that buys Madden every year.

• 41:09Speaker 04

  Ah.

• 41:10Ed Zitron?

  It has got worse while also staying the same. And I don't know, I mean, the only way for them to make it worse is to just have it steal your money.

• 41:18Speaker 04

  Ah.

• 41:18Ed Zitron?

  At this point, just actually go through your wallet.

• 41:20Speaker 04

  Right.

• 41:20Ed Zitron?

  I just don't, have they spoken of their plans with the company, other than using?

• 41:24Speaker 04

  AI.

• 41:25Ed Zitron?

  Yeah. Great.

• 41:27Speaker 04

  This is why you should film these too, because your expression was.

• 41:31Ed Zitron?

  Yeah, just the fate, the revulsion.

• 41:33Speaker 04

  It was like you melted.

• 41:34Ed Zitron?

  It's just, and that most of the debt, it looks like is going to, sorry, most of the revenue is going into the debt as well.

• 41:41Speaker 04

  Yeah, I think it's, I think it was like a $20 billion debt or something. Um, that they have to pay down relatively fast. I don't remember how much per year off the top of my head, but it's, it's enough where. The, I'm not sure exactly what the game plan is, but the current CEO, who's remaining the CEO, at least right now, I think his name is Andrew Wilson, I want to say. Um, has stated that they have plans for use of AI, EA, uh, and I think the PIF, um, as a whole have stated use. Plans for agents, AI agents.

• 42:13Ed Zitron?

  Oh, the very real thing exists.

• 42:15Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 42:16Ed Zitron?

  Great stuff. Uh, fucking EA. So that's how they do it. They become EAI and it sucks even harder. But let's, let's change topics to another weird acquisition investment. Intel.

• 42:29Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 42:29Ed Zitron?

  How do you feel about this Nvidia Intel situation?

• 42:32Speaker 04

  I think the Nvidia Intel US government situation.

• 42:35Ed Zitron?

  Yes.

• 42:36Speaker 04

  It's really weird. I am not, I mean, I don't like it. Um, I think. I understand the US government's interest. I'm sure they look at it as absolutely a national security asset.

• 42:50Ed Zitron?

  Right.

• 42:51Speaker 04

  It's our only way we can even dream of making relevant competitive chips in America.

• 42:57Ed Zitron?

  Right.

• 42:58Speaker 04

  And so if for some reason you needed a, a local resource to do that, Intel is it. So I get it. Um, but at the same time, it, it, the way it came about is kind of bizarre to me where. The timeline of events was, uh.

• 43:17Speaker 04

  Trump says Intel CEO Liputan is quote highly conflicted.

• 43:22Ed Zitron?

  Right.

• 43:23Speaker 04

  And that the only resolution to this problem of being highly conflicted would be for him to resign. The reasoning, it seems, for that belief of being highly conflicted is past or current investments by Intel's current CEO in Chinese companies, including some which have Chinese military ties.

• 43:43Ed Zitron?

  Right.

• 43:44Speaker 04

  So that's my understanding of that event. Immediately following that, within days, well, within one day, Intel responds publicly. Intel CEO within days gets on a plane, meets Trump. Now they're friends. Trump says, calls him a success.

• 43:57Ed Zitron?

  Right.

• 43:58Speaker 04

  And then shortly after this, you know, you're on this, this roller coaster. Intel's stock the whole time plunges when he says he needs to resign, it skyrockets, you know? And then shortly after all that, the US government is effectively acquiring 10% of Intel.

• 44:16Ed Zitron?

  Right.

• 44:17Speaker 04

  And yeah, I mean, and then on the Nvidia side, after, a couple of weeks after this stuff, Nvidia is acquiring $5 billion worth of Intel, which I think is around 4% or something, according to Reuters. So I just, I don't really know. I guess my answer is, Ed, I don't know what's happening anymore.

• 44:38Ed Zitron?

  And that's kind of where I've come down on it as well, because it's not clear what happens next. They're going to do something together. Do you think they're going to keep making the Arch GPUs or is that? Because they haven't said they're going to stop making them.

• 44:49Speaker 04

  I think they're at risk.

• 44:52Speaker 04

  I, that was, that was an unintentional pun. Very few people will get.

• 44:56Ed Zitron?

  There we go. No, I loved it.

• 44:57Speaker 04

  Nice. Thanks. Yeah. I think there is some risk there. So like, the stated plan is that they're going to work together on x86, which is an ISA, an instruction, you know, set of architecture that is used in CPUs. And they want to work together on x86 solutions, which there's not a ton of. There's, there's a lot of ARM, there's Intel, and there's AMD for x86, for the most part, some VIA, but. And they also are planning to work together on NVLink integration, which was Nvidia's.

• 45:29Speaker 04

  Actually effective solution.

• 45:31Ed Zitron?

  Was that they got through Mellanox, that acquisition?

• 45:33Speaker 04

  Mellanox is their networking infrastructure.

• 45:35Ed Zitron?

  Right.

• 45:36Speaker 04

  And NVLink is their sort of onboard, although now it's expanded. But basically PCIe alternative.

• 45:43Ed Zitron?

  Oh, okay.

• 45:44Speaker 04

  So PCI Express wasn't doing it, FriendVideo. This is actually one of the areas where it's not just all marketing bullshit. Like NVLink serves a real purpose. It does a real thing and they need it. And so they were going to work with Intel to integrate this protocol into other products, which will make Nvidia's GPUs more deployable on CPUs like x86 CPUs.

• 46:12Ed Zitron?

  Right. Do you think there could be a good thing about this? Could there actually be a positive?

• 46:16Speaker 04

  It'll definitely be better for Nvidia's solutions. I mean, if you want to look at it purely in a vacuum of ignore literally all business and all competition aspects and look at only the product level. Their product should be better as a result of it, in theory. I think there's risk to both and to Intel here. So in particular, something that's interesting that a lot of people don't know is the mobile, the laptop side of the business, where this is another stated goal of Nvidia and Intel is they want to make laptop hardware. So they want to make silicon with RTX chiplets, which is a tiny piece of silicon for the SoC or the CPU.

• 46:59Speaker 04

  And on the laptop side of the business, the entire industry aligns to Nvidia's schedule. So if Nvidia and Intel previously were both launching a CPU and this just happened at about the same time, they launched a CPU and a GPU between the two of them, the vendors will align to Nvidia's GPU, meaning all of the marketing effort, the money, the sampling, the review guidance where, you know, they will get in touch with reviewers and educate them on the new architecture. All of that basically happens around Nvidia's timing because Nvidia sells units.

• 47:34Ed Zitron?

  Right.

• 47:35Speaker 04

  And so because of that.

• 47:39Speaker 04

  If Nvidia is suddenly, you know, if they launch a new GPU for mobile right now, Intel and AMD, it doesn't matter which CPUs in it, MSI or ASUS or HP or Lenovo or Dell, they'll launch their notebook with whatever CPU, it doesn't matter. The Nvidia GPU is the part that matters to them.

• 47:55Ed Zitron?

  Right.

• 47:56Speaker 04

  If Nvidia is working with Intel, then suddenly it would seem that there's motive for them to leverage allocation of GPU silicon with the intent being to get more Intel-Nvidia co-branded CPUs deployed in notebooks.

• 48:17Ed Zitron?

  Oh.

• 48:18Speaker 04

  You see where I'm going with this?

• 48:18Ed Zitron?

  Yeah, this is kind of a long-tailed thing, but it's like the old MS-DOS situation.

• 48:23Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 48:24Ed Zitron?

  Where OEMs just ultimately went with DOT because could Nvidia push down prices, I assume, or?

• 48:29Speaker 04

  Well, I mean, they, they historically have been, I don't know, I guess you'd say maybe revolted against an EVGA situation, but we've covered plenty of vendors in the past, I'll just name them now because it's been long enough, but like ASUS, MSI, Gigabyte, and EVGA have all told us about times where allocation, which is the, it's the pot of gold, right?

• 48:52Ed Zitron?

  Right.

• 48:52Speaker 04

  It's how many chips they get, is withheld or is modulated based on their willingness to comply with whatever the current sort of requirements are.

• 49:04Ed Zitron?

  And what would those requirements be?

• 49:05Speaker 04

  In the past, it's been stuff like, well, I mean, on an EVGA side of things, they had always told us about being restricted in their ability to design certain high-end boards that might have like overclocking solutions, engineering solutions. And so there was, there was kind of like a trade behind the scenes.

• 49:29Ed Zitron?

  And how do those restrictions happen? Do they need something from Nvidia's side?

• 49:32Speaker 04

  Well, sometimes, yeah, but it can be like... We need you to not do that, or we need you to sell a certain amount of this price class of card. So as an example, there was a time where we'd reported when multiple sources at EVGA informed us that the MSRP cards were not actually real, like they were going to exist for a short period for launch to comply with Nvidia's requirement. And as soon as it was no longer a hard requirement to get the allocation, they were going to kill the product because they didn't have enough margin.

• 50:09Ed Zitron?

  Also, they effectively had to release something that made them no money?

• 50:12Speaker 04

  Yeah, basically. Yeah, there was one, I think we reported on where they were making like four bucks or something.

• 50:16Ed Zitron?

  Jesus. And that's on a, what, 500?

• 50:19Speaker 04

  That was, I think that was like a $300 or something.

• 50:21Ed Zitron?

  Jesus Christ.

• 50:22Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 50:23Ed Zitron?

  So this is fairly typical for Nvidia, this kind of?

• 50:26Speaker 04

  Allocation is, is their leverage. Yeah. It's also how they create internal competition between the board partners. Now AMD does this too, and so does Intel. I think with Intel, the difference is they don't really have anything that...

• 50:40Ed Zitron?

  Not got a ton of leverage at the moment.

• 50:42Speaker 04

  Not really, yeah. And AMD, you know, they also play games with allocation. I think the difference is Nvidia is just, the difference is if you make Nvidia products and you make AMD products, like GPUs, you can lose the AMD ones or 10% of the supplier, whatever, and still be in business. But if you lose the Nvidia ones, you're fucked, right? Like, business is over.

• 51:06Ed Zitron?

  So they could use this with GPUs. They could, that could be a scenario.

• 51:09Speaker 04

  That is my concern. Yeah. My concern is if they're in mobile with CPU and GPU, now it's not just they're aligning to Nvidia's GPUs. There's, again, a, there's no evidence they're planning to do this. But I think I've seen enough historical context to be concerned about a possibility where they say, "Hey, we'd really love it if you would put more of the Intel RTX CPUs in your notebooks so that you can get enough 5090 GPUs."

• 51:40Ed Zitron?

  Oh, so they will, they'll use one, so, okay, now I understand. So it's the leverage with other cards that they'll use to force other things to happen?

• 51:47Speaker 04

  Yeah, supply.

• 51:48Ed Zitron?

  Potentially, potentially. I know that this is, and they've done this for years, like?

• 51:52Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah. Allocation is a, is a big lever, yeah.

• 51:55Ed Zitron?

  Do you think they do similar things with the AI GPUs?

• 51:58Speaker 04

  Uh, I don't know. I don't really talk to...

• 52:03Speaker 04

  Because that would be probably more like Dell, HP, like those big enterprise deployers. I don't really talk to people there. I mean, to me, it just seems like this is kind of a company culture thing. And this is all, this is all me speaking from what we've reported on. You know, we have some facts for some of the stuff where we've, we've covered it like with the EVJ situation. Um, but yeah, enterprise, I'm not sure how exactly that side works.

• 52:29Ed Zitron?

  So when it comes to AI GPUs, is there, is it a limitation of your testing as to why you don't look into them? Because it felt like it's the one thing I'm like surprised that you haven't dug into more with like A100s, H100s and like.

• 52:42Speaker 04

  Yeah. So there's sort of, there's like two sides to it. There's testing and then there's just reporting on whatever the news is. And so the reporting part, we did that with the black market video. Um, the testing side, I guess there's, there's like a couple of things that are nested within testing. So we've done a little bit of quote unquote AI testing. And that was on the RTX Pro 6000 Blackwell GPU. Um, this is something that is still new. It's not a hundred percent clear to me what is a reproducible, reliable test.

• 53:17Ed Zitron?

  Right.

• 53:18Speaker 04

  It's part of the problem is if you're testing LLMs or generative AI or whatever, something that makes images. By nature of the application, it's almost semi, it's different every time.

• 53:32Ed Zitron?

  Well, you'd also need a massive cluster to really emulate what it is because one A100 or H100 isn't really gonna.

• 53:38Speaker 04

  Yeah. And that's kind of like, you can run those tests, but, and this would be a valid, um, request from the audience. I think an audience that really cares about it would be like, okay, cool. So like, what about if you have, you know, 10 of them or whatever?

• 53:54Ed Zitron?

  And even then, how do you even practically?

• 53:56Speaker 04

  Yeah. And I just, I think we, we can do it. And I, I do think we'll probably integrate some kind of long-term testing for single GPU boards. Or dual GPU, single boards.

• 54:10Speaker 04

  But it's right now, it's so new that to test it properly requires a lot of research and a lot of sort of trial and error.

• 54:22Ed Zitron?

  Also, how would you even, because with something like GB200s or GB300s, they've got their own distinct cooling, you're not going to get a giant rack in wherever you are.

• 54:32Speaker 04

  Yeah, there's, there's definitely a limit.

• 54:35Ed Zitron?

  And what are you testing for? It's just, I've, I have spoke, spoke to a few listeners and like, oh, what about AI? Why is he not? And it's kind of on some level, what would you even be testing?

• 54:44Speaker 04

  Yeah, I think that's a big question for us. And I think that's where like the most immediate thing that would maybe make sense for us would be some kind of consumer level. I really hate to call things AI, but like AI application. So, so maybe that's someone wants to just buy a 5090 or whatever, use it for gaming and then at night they're training something on it or they're running some kind of system. Uh, that's the, I think that's the most sensible thing we could test. Anything where you're getting into like actual data center workloads. I, it seems like the only real source for that stuff is basically first party at this point.

• 55:23Ed Zitron?

  And semi-analysis to an extent.

• 55:25Speaker 04

  Yeah, right.

• 55:26Ed Zitron?

  Have you spoken with them at all? They've reached out?

• 55:28Speaker 04

  Not semi-analysis, but I know the work.

• 55:30Ed Zitron?

  Yeah, I mean, it's a good newsletter. I'm just curious. Surprised they haven't, the depth they go into. But let's talk about AI actually. How do you feel about AI? Like you, you don't do a ton about it.

• 55:42Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 55:42Ed Zitron?

  Which is fine. It's just, how do you feel about it? And what, why haven't you done more? And I mean that not as a negative.

• 55:48Speaker 04

  Yeah, most of the coverage we've done has been news-based. So it might be reports, you know, it might be like an investigation or whatever, but, but not a lot of, I don't know, like testing, like we were talking about.

• 56:04Speaker 04

  Biggest problems I have with it right now are, um, first of all, I think if we go like really big picture, I don't know, I to qualify everything, I think there are use cases for things like L L Ms. The the best use case I have that I've actually used is uh translation, where I speak other languages and I use Google Translate for most of that because Google Translate is a dumb translator. It translates the words you type into it.

• 56:33Ed Zitron?

  Right.

• 56:33Speaker 04

  Sometimes that doesn't work for a colloquial phrase.

• 56:36Ed Zitron?

  Right.

• 56:37Speaker 04

  So if you take any idiom, it's not really going to do that well through Google Translate. Something like Chat G P T uh makes it a little easier sometimes to search for like really specific uh colloquial or idiomatic ways to express something.

• 56:54Ed Zitron?

  Right.

• 56:54Speaker 04

  So I would say that's like a real use case.

• 56:58Ed Zitron?

  That's pretty down, deep down there.

• 57:00Speaker 04

  Yeah, uh, but it is like the specific thing that they're kind of built around, so they do it well. Um, I think the with that qualifier out of the way, the big picture concerns I have with A I are uh weaponization of things like L L Ms to propagandize. And so this could be for companies to market products. It could be for governments, it could be for unknown entities, whatever. But having seen the bot comments on videos, you know, every day.

• 57:33Ed Zitron?

  Is that a consistent problem?

• 57:34Speaker 04

  It is a very consistent problem and they're getting better.

• 57:37Ed Zitron?

  So what are they doing?

• 57:38Speaker 04

  So originally it started as the really obvious ones, there were kind of two kinds. There's the bots that do financial scams where they basically uh post um something about like some cryptocurrency.

• 57:51Ed Zitron?

  Right.

• 57:52Speaker 04

  Right, some scam coin. Uh, the other one would be the bots that have a photo of someone's ass, you know, and then three emojis and some text about whatever. And that's the more like traditional trying to scam someone into interacting with a fake user that presents themselves as an attractive person. Uh, so those are the two common types of bots. Historically, those have been really easy for a savvy user to identify because yeah, it's like, it's always the same language. It's like the old, old Nigerian prince email scam.

• 58:25Ed Zitron?

  Right.

• 58:25Speaker 04

  Right? You can read it and you're like, I know this is a scam. But where it's going now kind of concerns me because there've been times where I'm not sure if it's a bot or a real person.

• 58:35Ed Zitron?

  Right.

• 58:36Speaker 04

  And there was one recently I just banned from the channel that originally I thought it was a user because I forget what the message was, but it was like, I wonder what Steve and Wendell think about blah, blah, blah. And it was clearly pulling stuff from the title and/or the transcript of the video.

• 58:55Ed Zitron?

  Right.

• 58:55Speaker 04

  And then creating a comment. And I left it alone for a minute to see where it would go. And there's like replies under the thread where it's a bot replying to itself through different accounts, I guess. And eventually just tries to send you offsite to go, you know, get scammed. So I banned all those accounts. But the thing that was concerning was, was that it's pulling context from the video transcript and forming a sentence that makes sense.

• 59:23Ed Zitron?

  Right.

• 59:23Speaker 04

  And then creating the appearance of a real dialogue between the appearance of real users about the subject that made sense to then scam someone.

• 59:35Ed Zitron?

  I've seen these people on Blue Sky for sure.

• 59:37Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 59:37Ed Zitron?

  Sorry. Seen these bots on Blue Sky where it's just someone appearing to have a guy. It's like, wow, I read that from the thing. What do you think about this?

• 59:44Speaker 04

  Right.

• 59:44Ed Zitron?

  I've never seen them get to sending me to a website, but I imagine that's, that's a few down the chain.

• 59:49Speaker 04

  The way it normally happens, if you go to like CNBC or any finance channel, you'll see these on any new video they post. They'll talk, so like CNBC is my favorite one to look at for this because you'll see, and it's not their fault, they're just the target of it. But you'll see a bot comment that'll say something like, I have hundreds of thousands of dollars and I don't know how to invest it.

• 1:00:11Ed Zitron?

  Right.

• 1:00:11Speaker 04

  Right? And it's always some ridiculous number, you know, and then there's a reply to it. It's like, I had excellent luck with John Smith and John Smith.

• 1:00:21Ed Zitron?

  Is this the comments like?

• 1:00:22Speaker 04

  Yeah, they're comments.

• 1:00:23Ed Zitron?

  I've seen these in Quora.

• 1:00:25Speaker 04

  Okay.

• 1:00:25Ed Zitron?

  Where it's like, how do I invest $150,000? It's like, well, I did it on

• 1:00:29Speaker 04

  Right.

• 1:00:30Ed Zitron?

  Osscoin or whatever.

• 1:00:31Speaker 04

  Yeah. But these, they'll talk about like the name of a person. And have this fake conversation about some financial advisor who doesn't exist. And then you Google that name, which is fairly unique, right? So that's the only thing that comes up and then it's a website that's a scam. And they, you know, these

• 1:00:50Ed Zitron?

  Quite nuanced compared to the original one.

• 1:00:53Speaker 04

  It's less obvious than buy questionable cryptocurrency or NFT on website.

• 1:01:02Ed Zitron?

  Yeah, and I don't know how you even deal with this. I don't know what the solution is, other than shutting them all down.

• 1:01:10Speaker 04

  Yeah, the channel owners have to ban them, but there's too many.

• 1:01:13Ed Zitron?

  You get a lot on Reddit too, I'm seeing. I don't know if you're active on your subreddit much, I haven't checked.

• 1:01:18Speaker 04

  Not too much.

• 1:01:18Ed Zitron?

  Yeah, I'm in mine too much, but I do catch someone occasionally who is just an obvious bot. Sickos, disgusting.

• 1:01:26Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:01:27Ed Zitron?

  But I just, I ignorantly just assumed that they were being annoying and they were there to sow Discord rather than send me to something to buy.

• 1:01:34Speaker 04

  Right. I think that's a thing too. I forget who the report was from, there was a recent report about something close. Actually, I think I saw it re-reported and fact-checked by Kurtz Kazak, the channel. Where it was close to like 50% of internet traffic is bots at this point.

• 1:01:52Ed Zitron?

  Yes, and that's gonna fuck the ad industry.

• 1:01:55Speaker 04

  It's gonna be bad for everything because like fuck the ad industry, it's gonna be bad for humanity.

• 1:02:02Ed Zitron?

  To be clear, I don't care about the ad industry, I'm saying that that's how everything's paid for online.

• 1:02:06Speaker 04

  Yeah, it'll screw that, it'll screw, it's, this is like Library of Alexandria is on fire.

• 1:02:12Ed Zitron?

  Yes, yes.

• 1:02:13Speaker 04

  Like this is, this is like a loss of, of knowledge issues. And I think it's because, you know, there's, there's been a consolidation of sites into media, forms of media. Media for presentation like videos, Discord, things where it's not well preserved. And as those things collapse, because like you said, the ad industry collapses or whatever, there's gonna be a loss of information and knowledge. The death of the internet, you know, it's gonna happen from the

• 1:02:49Speaker 04

  The fact that you can no longer tell if you're the only real human in the threat or not for the conversation.

• 1:02:55Ed Zitron?

  Right.

• 1:02:56Speaker 04

  And so you're gonna stop interacting at all because you don't know if they're bots or not.

• 1:03:00Ed Zitron?

  You think that this is gonna happen?

• 1:03:01Speaker 04

  I think it's happening. What I don't know is are the companies that control the large platforms incentivized to stop it?

• 1:03:12Ed Zitron?

  I wonder because there is a level of like any engagement is good engagement, but if people don't engage, what are they gonna do?

• 1:03:18Speaker 04

  There might be a tipping point, maybe right now. It's something they don't really touch like, you know, it took YouTube an awfully long time to start effectively addressing the bot problem.

• 1:03:28Ed Zitron?

  Right.

• 1:03:28Speaker 04

  And they still haven't really done it. And so.

• 1:03:31Ed Zitron?

  And that was just bot commenters or so views?

• 1:03:33Speaker 04

  Yeah, well, there's that too. Yeah, there's, I don't know too much about the views side, but the bot commenter side, they um, it's hard to know, are they dragging their feet on this as a counterintelligence operation? If the bots are intentionally really stupid, then they could be useful for trying to determine what are YouTube's countermeasures to get rid of those bots?

• 1:03:56Ed Zitron?

  So that they can circumvent them.

• 1:03:58Speaker 04

  Right. So you maybe if you're playing YouTube's side of it, you know, the thought is we don't want to just ban these because they're gonna figure out our mechanisms we use for more important ones.

• 1:04:08Ed Zitron?

  It's exactly, you know what? I actually buy that theory because that's exactly what they did with SEO. With SEO, they're just like, well, we couldn't possibly tell you how this works because someone would just do it.

• 1:04:16Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah, with Google, right?

• 1:04:18Ed Zitron?

  With Google, yeah. They own YouTube, so it's like, Jesus fucking crap.

• 1:04:22Speaker 04

  And the other thing too, you know, there's that, but there's also, if you want to take the more cynical side, the less YouTube side, it could be that they want to report high engagement numbers to shareholders.

• 1:04:30Ed Zitron?

  Yes.

• 1:04:31Speaker 04

  And bots do that.

• 1:04:32Ed Zitron?

  Well, I mean, they did that with by combining Gemini with Google Assistant.

• 1:04:35Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:04:35Ed Zitron?

  And they had 300 million, I think, weekly active users or some crap.

• 1:04:38Speaker 04

  Right. Yeah. So, but the end result is there may be a tipping point, maybe at some point,

• 1:04:46Speaker 04

  human engagement that's like somehow verified, which is scary for a different reason, but human engagement becomes almost artisanal, like the reason you buy something from Etsy instead of Amazon. You know, some guy made it in his garage.

• 1:05:00Ed Zitron?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:01Speaker 04

  And so.

• 1:05:03Ed Zitron?

  Etsy full of bots now.

• 1:05:04Speaker 04

  That too.

• 1:05:05Ed Zitron?

  Full of just automated. Etsy, do you subscribe to the whole dead internet theory? Do you think that?

• 1:05:10Speaker 04

  I think parts of it are starting to look.

• 1:05:17Speaker 04

  Practical.

• 1:05:17Ed Zitron?

  Like Facebook.

• 1:05:19Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:05:19Ed Zitron?

  That's my one where it's just like, this is like old people screaming at their TV at this point.

• 1:05:24Speaker 04

  Yeah, and it's it's filled with bots that either trick them or that enraged them into a response.

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• 1:06:47Ed Zitron?

  One of my favorite things to do is if you go on Facebook and you type in "Facebook support" into the chat box,

• 1:06:52Speaker 04

  Uh huh.

• 1:06:53Ed Zitron?

  and you find the groups that are people thinking they're posting on Facebook. And there was one of them that has like 10,000 people on it. And it's people like boomeras. I hate to sound, but it's like people in their 70s being like, "I don't know how the computer work." And three guys from Indonesia responded like, "I would love to help you. Here's a number from Indonesia, which is where Facebook support is."

• 1:07:15Speaker 04

  I mean, it's kind of, it is the, the... Basically, there was investment comments like on CNBC I was talking about where it looks like a real thing. You know, in this case, it maybe looks like actual Facebook support.

• 1:07:29Ed Zitron?

  Right.

• 1:07:30Speaker 04

  And the end result is, uh, maybe, maybe it's someone trying to help. Maybe they're enthusiasts. You really know Facebook.

• 1:07:37Ed Zitron?

  It's all Indonesian scammers.

• 1:07:39Speaker 04

  Okay.

• 1:07:39Ed Zitron?

  I've looked through, I may have spent a few hours of what, like, just, I could be doing literally anything else, just looking at them. And it's entirely guys in the global south just defrauding people.

• 1:07:50Speaker 04

  Yes, and there's whole channels now that are built around scam busting, right? Like, um, uh, I forget the names of some of them, but there's like YouTube channels where they'll, they'll walk through kind of the bot scam link. Um, I think the AI stuff, the LLMs, uh, you know, the core question of like, what do I think of AI? All of those can be tools for good things. I think the bad things right now are very profitable. Uh, it's the dumbest bad thing that's profitable is a scam.

• 1:08:22Ed Zitron?

  But even then, it's not profitable for the AI companies. It's profitable for the scammers. It's like the, the only people making money are Jensen Huang and scammers.

• 1:08:30Speaker 04

  Right, yeah. And maybe there's, I don't know. Uh, there's probably some, like, Fortune 500 company that thinks they're making money on it. I don't know.

• 1:08:40Ed Zitron?

  Not that I've found, but no, I, maybe there's one. No, this is like my one type of focus of like, anyone who mentions their revenue with AI, I know.

• 1:08:48Speaker 04

  Well, there was one, wasn't there some report that said, what was it, like over 90%?

• 1:08:53Ed Zitron?

  95% no ROI.

• 1:08:55Speaker 04

  Okay.

• 1:08:56Ed Zitron?

  Amazing report.

• 1:08:57Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:08:57Ed Zitron?

  Amazing report, because you know it was good, because immediately people said hit piece. The moment it says hit piece, you know that it's the truth. Just people immediately think, uh, it's a hit piece.

• 1:09:06Speaker 04

  Do you remember who the report was by?

• 1:09:08Ed Zitron?

  It was by, uh, the Nanda Lab at MIT.

• 1:09:11Speaker 04

  Oh, wow.

• 1:09:12Ed Zitron?

  And people got really arsey about it because they said, oh, it's just a bunch of interviews. That's how they did it. How the fuck do you think surveys work?

• 1:09:18Speaker 04

  Right.

• 1:09:19Ed Zitron?

  And.

• 1:09:19Speaker 04

  And so they'd spoke to?

• 1:09:20Ed Zitron?

  No, they spoke to a bunch of Fortune 100, I think, CEOs, and people really misread it. They said, oh, it's a learning gap between. People using this and not understanding AI. No, the paper says it's a learning gap because the AIs don't learn, but no one reads.

• 1:09:34Speaker 04

  Okay.

• 1:09:35Ed Zitron?

  But it's it's so strange as well because it's everywhere, but it's also nothing. And I mean, it feels like there is AI within the hardware world with like, I forget, forget the term, the upscaling ones.

• 1:09:46Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 1:09:47Ed Zitron?

  Do those generally work?

• 1:09:48Speaker 04

  That's actually a really good point. Uh, yeah, so.

• 1:09:51Ed Zitron?

  And that's different to large language models, different transformer based models.

• 1:09:54Speaker 04

  That's that's a really good point.

• 1:09:55Ed Zitron?

  DLSS and such.

• 1:09:56Speaker 04

  DLSS is like a real thing that works and does stuff.

• 1:10:00Ed Zitron?

  It's good.

• 1:10:00Speaker 04

  Uh, broadly, it's effective. I mean.

• 1:10:03Ed Zitron?

  And that's when it fills in the frames, right?

• 1:10:05Speaker 04

  DLSS, so there's kind of like sub technologies they have, but broadly speaking, DLSS originally started as just a, it stands for deep learning supersampling. And it started where they would take ground truth images, meaning like basically we're saying this is reality.

• 1:10:22Ed Zitron?

  Right.

• 1:10:23Speaker 04

  And I think they were 16K resolution, they're ridiculously high resolution. Uh, they would train on all these images and then use that data game by game to uh be able to upscale from a lower native render resolution to a higher, I'll call it projected resolution to the viewer, to the user.

• 1:10:45Ed Zitron?

  Right.

• 1:10:45Speaker 04

  And that was the original implementation and it is pretty good now. Like it's actually, if you need to run at 1080p native so that your video card can handle the game at a good frame rate, but make it look higher resolution, a lot of times it works. And actually to Nvidia's credit, DLSS in some situations can be better than native, which shouldn't be possible in theory, but because of the way um they've actually integrated the deep learning on it now, which has been rebranded these days to AI.

• 1:11:15Ed Zitron?

  Of course.

• 1:11:16Speaker 04

  But was called deep learning, uh, because the way they've integrated it, it can sometimes reconstruct details that should be there, but are not. Uh, and we've done some videos on that, but yeah, that's a use case of deep learning.

• 1:11:28Ed Zitron?

  That's completely different to the world of large language.

• 1:11:30Speaker 04

  Yeah, it's not an LLM. Yeah, it's it's like it has a. Singular purpose, right? Make the thing look better or generate frames to insert to smooth it over. And that's overall not bad. Also, there's places it's really useless.

• 1:11:42Ed Zitron?

  Yeah.

• 1:11:42Speaker 04

  But I think also that the difference is when that technology is useless, it's not really harmful. Whereas when an LLM is useless, it is harmful because it's it's putting bad information out.

• 1:11:55Ed Zitron?

  Or just even if it's not being used particularly well and someone's just fucking around with it, it's incredibly environmentally damaging.

• 1:12:01Speaker 04

  That is a great point as well.

• 1:12:02Ed Zitron?

  Has any of your stuff been plagiarized for the models? Do you know?

• 1:12:05Speaker 04

  For models? Uh, well, I know I did a, there was a great one where I did a Google search. And um, I searched for the release date of a product. And you know, Gemini spat out a year and it was wrong by two years. And I was like, what the fuck? And I I clicked to see what its sources were. And one of its top source was us. And I was like, what the fuck? Did we screw that up?

• 1:12:28Ed Zitron?

  Yeah. And what ended up happening?

• 1:12:30Speaker 04

  So I went to our own article and it was a revisit. We had published two years after the original product came out. And we made that clear in the article. Uh, but it's just looking at the published date. And mapping it to the product name. And it decided this is the release date two years later, you know, and and so like. It it learned or took from our content misrepresented it, misrepresented it. And then credited the incorrect information to us. So now it also makes it look like I got it wrong.

• 1:13:04Ed Zitron?

  Right. So everyone loses, including the customer.

• 1:13:07Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:13:08Ed Zitron?

  It's a shame though, but I mean, I feel like in the whole AI generative world. Your stuff is more valuable, the very hands-on, very specific work and the very hardcore testing you do.

• 1:13:19Speaker 04

  It's also, we're fortunate that it's kind of at the front end of like, if we're reviewing products. Then uh, someone who's an enthusiast trying to.

• 1:13:30Speaker 04

  Decide on a purchase is still coming to us before it's useful in training.

• 1:13:35Ed Zitron?

  And I imagine the generative content is kind of antithetical to the kind of testing you do as well because you can't really fake. Because

• 1:13:43Speaker 04

  Not really. You can't really like generate a review. You know, it would be obvious.

• 1:13:46Ed Zitron?

  And also you have these massive machines for testing stuff here.

• 1:13:49Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:13:50Ed Zitron?

  Which are insanely cool. And actually, that's a good question. How do you source this kind of stuff? Do you buy from industrial because you have like pressure tester? Well, actually, maybe you could speak to some of the machines.

• 1:14:00Speaker 04

  Run through it. Yeah. So yeah, we have a hemianic chamber, which is a sound chamber, an acoustic test chamber. We have a laser scanner that does 3D scans of like products and converts them into 3D models. We have pressure testers, we have fan testers, cooler testing, and then more traditional power supply testers, stuff like that.

• 1:14:23Ed Zitron?

  Right.

• 1:14:24Speaker 04

  And so, yeah, generally, the way we go about it is we identify a problem. Typically, this is kind of the part of the business I work on the most personally is like basically test engineering or design.

• 1:14:39Ed Zitron?

  Yeah.

• 1:14:40Speaker 04

  So we identify a shortcoming, which is like this product is claiming this thing. We are not able to validate or invalidate their claims because we don't have the tool to do it.

• 1:14:48Ed Zitron?

  Right.

• 1:14:49Speaker 04

  And then either I just do some research online and find the tool. Or, you know, sometimes the real challenge is knowing the name of a thing and that it exists.

• 1:14:58Ed Zitron?

  Right.

• 1:14:58Speaker 04

  And so I went through this with current clamps, which is just a clamp you put on a wire to read the current going through it. A long time ago, when I started this, I didn't know that was a tool that existed. And it's like magic because you you put a wire through a clamp, a plastic looking clamp. And then through the magic of electromagnetics, it tells you what the amperage is.

• 1:15:19Ed Zitron?

  Right.

• 1:15:19Speaker 04

  And when I found that, you know, early, and it's not a new, it's been around forever. But when it was new to me, I was like, holy shit, this is if I only knew the name of this thing sooner, I could have bought it.

• 1:15:33Ed Zitron?

  And all of your testing is effectively new to you. You've had to kind of build it and learn it yourself.

• 1:15:36Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:15:37Ed Zitron?

  With help from

• 1:15:38Speaker 04

  Right, with a lot of expert help outside. And yeah, I would say sourcing it mostly comes from either just doing research or we tour a lot of factories and engineering facilities and make videos on it. And normally when I'm there, I do my best to talk to the actual people who use that equipment. And that's, that's kind of how we learned that it exists. You know, like I did a tour recently of a facility where they showed us something that they had built for a client for testing cooling products. And when they were done explaining it, so I could talk about it in a video, I said to them, can I buy one of those?

• 1:16:16Ed Zitron?

  Would they? Would they sell it?

• 1:16:18Speaker 04

  Yeah, they yeah, yeah, they sell it. So.

• 1:16:21Ed Zitron?

  That's so cool.

• 1:16:22Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:16:22Ed Zitron?

  And do they come and train you to use it?

• 1:16:24Speaker 04

  Sometimes you can, you can either pay for training or they'll do it for free for up to whatever, four hours or something, you know?

• 1:16:30Ed Zitron?

  And do you generally operate these machines or do they train the crew?

• 1:16:34Speaker 04

  Generally, either I'm the first one to learn how to use it, or someone specific on the team might be one of the first ones to learn how to use it. So like, we had, for the laser scanner, it was Patrick on the team who ultimately, in that case, I had tasked him with learning how to use it. And he went through, he documented it, you know, and now anyone can use the SOP.

• 1:16:59Ed Zitron?

  And the laser scanner you were describing to me earlier, it's you use that to see if there's divots in like in the in the cooling, you explain.

• 1:17:08Speaker 04

  Surface.

• 1:17:08Ed Zitron?

  I'm doing a terrible job.

• 1:17:09Speaker 04

  No, you're pretty much right on it. I mean, it's, yeah, cooling product has a flat surface that needs to contact a piece of silicon. And what we're looking for is, okay, the performance is really good or really bad thermally. And we can't look at it and figure out why. Maybe if we scan this at a microscopic level, it'll reveal something. And so sometimes it'll reveal that there's these like, deep pits in the surface of the metal that you can't necessarily see by eye, and can really affect the cooling performance. Other times, you might see a curvature to it, where maybe externally, it's not obvious, but actually, when you install it on the silicon product, say, only two thirds of it are contacting the metal. And so this laser scanner scans the surface with the laser,

• 1:17:53Speaker 04

  and then makes a 3D model. And we can use that to inspect the problems.

• 1:17:59Ed Zitron?

  Do you ever get, do companies ever reach out for any consultancy things?

• 1:18:03Speaker 04

  They do that all the time. Uh, we reject all of it. Um, so, uh, because it's too mu- uh, there's a lot of reasons. The core of all of it is it's too much conflict of interest.

• 1:18:15Ed Zitron?

  Right.

• 1:18:15Speaker 04

  Where, let's just like, let's just say it's possible to take a testing job, a private testing job, and do it with absolutely zero bias towards future reviews. Like, just, we'll just accept that premise for a second. Even under those conditions, I still don't like it because now I'm put in a weird spot where when that product launches, it's gonna be hard for me to review it.

• 1:18:41Ed Zitron?

  Because you, oh, because you've already seen it.

• 1:18:44Speaker 04

  I've seen it and I, I might have provided input on it that they paid for if I'm involved, right? So, so now like, let's say I'm not happy with their execution, what am I gonna go say, I told them so, right?

• 1:18:56Ed Zitron?

  Yeah, how much can you reveal? And even then, I imagine the trade secrets aren't brilliant.

• 1:19:00Speaker 04

  You'd probably end up under an NDA. Um, the best approach to that would be to recuse yourself from reviewing it at all. But then the problem is, like, now I can't do my job for consumers.

• 1:19:10Ed Zitron?

  Yeah, how good is the money on I, like?

• 1:19:12Speaker 04

  Yeah. And I also think it just cannibalizes the process where you're taking things that would make excellent public videos and public data, and you're presenting it privately to never be seen by anyone.

• 1:19:23Ed Zitron?

  Right, for, and by the nature of these agreements, I imagine they could obfuscate your coverage on some level.

• 1:19:29Speaker 04

  I would think so. And also, it's just, yeah, you're, you're taking the thing that made you desirable to do the testing to begin with. You're doing it privately, so it's not public, so the desire to have you do the private testing reduces.

• 1:19:41Ed Zitron?

  Right.

• 1:19:42Speaker 04

  Like, it seems like it's just a sort of self sabotage.

• 1:19:45Ed Zitron?

  How do the hardware companies feel about you having such high level testing?

• 1:19:49Speaker 04

  Most of the people think it's cool.

• 1:19:51Ed Zitron?

  Right.

• 1:19:51Speaker 04

  You know, I think-

• 1:19:55Speaker 04

  The, I'm sure a lot of them don't care. I know that some of the company representatives have told me how they'll be more careful with how they market certain things if they know we're gonna inspect it.

• 1:20:09Ed Zitron?

  Good. That rocks. I actually genuinely love that.

• 1:20:12Speaker 04

  Yeah, so, and that's not just us. You know, there's other reviewers who also do an excellent job. And because the review community, people kind of specialize in different areas. I think it just sort of collectively keeps companies somewhat on their toes. But obviously, you know, the company's gonna company.

• 1:20:30Ed Zitron?

  Yeah, they will shit about regardless.

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• 1:21:46Ed Zitron?

  What is a kind of testing you can't do right now that you want to in the future?

• 1:21:50Speaker 04

  I would say the probably the

• 1:21:55Speaker 04

  Well, so there's one we can do, but it's not really practical. And that would be basically more frequent transient testing. So there's something with power delivery, which I know you've been studying lately. Where there's transient spikes. And so on a GPU or a CPU, this would be a Basically a microscopic spike in the current or the power consumption.

• 1:22:22Ed Zitron?

  Right.

• 1:22:22Speaker 04

  For really like normally like 100 microseconds or something. We can test it. We've done it in the past. But because if you're capturing data for seconds at a time down to Scales of 30 microsecond gaps or whatever. The amount of data is enormous. It's really hard to process it.

• 1:22:40Ed Zitron?

  It's like a storage and processing problem.

• 1:22:42Speaker 04

  Yeah, it's a major processing problem.

• 1:22:44Ed Zitron?

  And what would you want to be so is that if there are, what would those spikes mean?

• 1:22:48Speaker 04

  It would help us to Stay on top of especially GPU manufacturers, but also CPU. If If there's sudden spikes that might take a system offline. So as an example, this happened with a previous generation Both Nvidia and AMD GPUs, but where they would have large Spikes in power draw that deviated from The nominal draw. So if you're at 450 watts and there's a spike to 1100 watts For 100 microseconds or something. This might Be enough to trip over current protection on the power supply. And just shut the computer off. And then the end user is like, what the fuck? My power supply is enough to handle 450 watts.

• 1:23:30Ed Zitron?

  Right.

• 1:23:30Speaker 04

  So I shut off.

• 1:23:31Ed Zitron?

  And this happened?

• 1:23:32Speaker 04

  Yeah, we we saw this with, I want to say it was the 30 series, the RTX 30 series. And like

• 1:23:40Speaker 04

  It was a problem that doesn't show up in normal power testing, but with an oscilloscope you can see it. And again, credit to Nvidia for the problems we point out on the positive side, they did actually fix this problem in the 40 series.

• 1:23:54Ed Zitron?

  Yeah. So here's a weird one, but I know it's near and dear to your heart, Linux gaming.

• 1:24:00Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:24:00Ed Zitron?

  Are you actually, do you think this is a viable alternative to Windows with Windows 10 kind of dying or being killed in the back?

• 1:24:08Speaker 04

  Yeah, I think, I think Microsoft is the best marketing that Linux has ever had.

• 1:24:14Ed Zitron?

  Go on.

• 1:24:14Speaker 04

  Yeah, my biggest concern with Windows is not like the death of 10 ongoing security support. It is the slow intrusion of spyware.

• 1:24:28Ed Zitron?

  Go on.

• 1:24:29Speaker 04

  Well, like Recall.

• 1:24:30Ed Zitron?

  Oh, yes, of course.

• 1:24:31Speaker 04

  Yeah, where Recall is marketed as the secure, locally saved encrypted reel of your information.

• 1:24:42Speaker 04

  But to me, like capturing screenshots of your desktop while you use it at all is problematic.

• 1:24:48Ed Zitron?

  Yes.

• 1:24:49Speaker 04

  And we've done some testing, it's not published yet, but it'll do some dumb filtering. So if it sees the word password on the screen, it won't take a screenshot.

• 1:24:57Ed Zitron?

  Right.

• 1:24:57Speaker 04

  But like you're not always going to have one of those words on the screen when it shouldn't take a screenshot.

• 1:25:03Ed Zitron?

  Right.

• 1:25:04Speaker 04

  Maybe you have some accounting documents open, you know, and it's information that's sensitive, but Recall doesn't know it's sensitive. And it's stuff like that that concerns me where it's breachable and exploitable because it exists, not necessarily because there is an exploit.

• 1:25:20Ed Zitron?

  Right.

• 1:25:21Speaker 04

  And then Windows 11 is continuing to add telemetry and user data and engagement monitoring tools.

• 1:25:31Ed Zitron?

  And that's kind of a big feature of Home S, like all the horrible S operating systems, the cheap ones.

• 1:25:37Speaker 04

  Yeah, it's, yeah, everything that, I, it's just, there's so much data harvesting.

• 1:25:44Speaker 04

  You know, Microsoft, this is why I think Microsoft hasn't really cared too much in recent years. If you, if you don't license Windows, they used to really care about that.

• 1:25:51Ed Zitron?

  Right, yes.

• 1:25:52Speaker 04

  Because now it's like, yeah, go ahead and steal it from us. Like, we're gonna just take all your data, and that's how we make the money anyway.

• 1:25:58Ed Zitron?

  Horrifying. But do you think Linux is viable as a gaming platform?

• 1:26:02Speaker 04

  I think it, as a gaming platform specifically, I think it's becoming a lot more viable. So, thanks to Valve and the Steam Deck and SteamOS, and its push for Proton as a translation layer between the application and the operating system.

• 1:26:17Ed Zitron?

  And what is that, just for?

• 1:26:19Speaker 04

  Yeah, so Proton is, it's a translation layer, which means it's working to effectively interpret the code that is, that the game is built with to run with better performance or at all on a different operating system, in this case Linux, or SteamOS specifically. And so, because of Valve's work on that to make games more compatible, run smoother, you know, deliver consistent frame rate and pacing of the frames, because their work there, in some instances, it actually has better performance than Windows.

• 1:26:56Ed Zitron?

  Right.

• 1:26:57Speaker 04

  The limiting factor is still, sometimes it just simply doesn't work. But that has become a lot less the case than what it was, say, 10 years ago. It's not a fix for everybody, there's still times you're gonna try and run a game, and it's not gonna work, and that's gonna suck.

• 1:27:12Ed Zitron?

  And how's the driver support, for example?

• 1:27:14Speaker 04

  Hit and miss, so we're really early in this testing, but as an example, I know Intel recently laid off a bunch of their teams that maintains various Linux drivers for different hardware. Yeah, and so it's kinda, you know, we don't really know what happens there. Maybe the community picks it up, I guess.

• 1:27:33Ed Zitron?

  I hope so.

• 1:27:34Speaker 04

  But, um, yeah.

• 1:27:36Ed Zitron?

  Maybe Valve will?

• 1:27:37Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah, it depends also.

• 1:27:40Ed Zitron?

  It really feels bad to just be like, who's gonna take responsibility for this thing we need?

• 1:27:44Speaker 04

  Yeah, and if it's even an open source driver to begin with. So, yeah, it's hit and miss, but I would say that the biggest limitation in my experience with Linux, and I'm not an expert in Linux, there's gonna be people in your audience who know...

• 1:27:56Ed Zitron?

  They email me whenever I say "alternative iOS."

• 1:27:59Speaker 04

  Well, that's why we better not even get into distributions of Linux, or...

• 1:28:02Ed Zitron?

  Oh, no, no, no, no, they will, they will be up my ass.

• 1:28:07Speaker 04

  Arch, by the way, but, yeah, I think the, um...

• 1:28:11Ed Zitron?

  I'll get emails.

• 1:28:13Speaker 04

  I think, I think the biggest, you know, limiting factor is compatibility with things like daily applications. So the tools we use for video editing generally just don't work on Linux. We'd have to use something else.

• 1:28:27Ed Zitron?

  Yeah.

• 1:28:27Speaker 04

  And that's a problem, but.

• 1:28:29Ed Zitron?

  Well, adjacent to this Linux conversation, how are you feeling about handheld gaming?

• 1:28:33Speaker 04

  Handhelds are really cool. I, I think there's faster innovation happening in handhelds than most other places.

• 1:28:39Ed Zitron?

  Are there any you really like? Cause I know Asus, cause been on the naughty list a bit, but I like the Steam Deck personally, but like, do you have a favorite brand?

• 1:28:49Speaker 04

  The Steam Deck and the Ally are both pretty cool devices despite the Ally's warranty issues. Like it actually is a cool piece of hardware. I thought the Lenovo Legion Go, the original was a really unique and innovative gimmick. And I don't use that word to like degrade it.

• 1:29:07Ed Zitron?

  What was the gimmick?

• 1:29:08Speaker 04

  The gimmick was the controller is detached.

• 1:29:10Ed Zitron?

  Oh.

• 1:29:10Speaker 04

  Kind of like the Switch, yeah. And then the, the Steam Deck is, it was just kind of the first in the, the new round of handhelds. You know, GPD existed before them and IONEO and those guys.

• 1:29:25Ed Zitron?

  I respect GPD. They're weird, but they're trying something.

• 1:29:29Speaker 04

  Yeah. GPD and IONEO both are weird, but trying something.

• 1:29:33Ed Zitron?

  Yeah. I, I appreciate, you don't have American manufacturers doing, actually that's good. Are there American manufacturers trying weird shit like that? Or is it predominantly?

• 1:29:40Speaker 04

  Um, I guess it depends like how you, how you define American here because, you know, uh, design, yes.

• 1:29:51Ed Zitron?

  Like who?

• 1:29:52Speaker 04

  Uh, depends on how you count Lenovo at this point. I don't know if you count them as American or not.

• 1:29:59Ed Zitron?

  Right, but they're trying weird shit.

• 1:30:01Speaker 04

  They are doing weird stuff and, and they, you know, they certainly have large US headquarters offices. I don't know where their design happens. It's probably, they have a Beijing, I think, office. It's probably there, but Valve is definitely the coolest in terms of. They set the tempo for this to reignite, like they're the ones who made handhelds interesting again. And everyone else jumped in and started doing stuff and that's pretty cool. And Valve also said, you know, we're gonna make SteamOS available to other handheld manufacturers if they want to use it. I don't know if there's a license or not, but like it's available.

• 1:30:39Ed Zitron?

  And that's not being picked up. I know you can kind of sideload it.

• 1:30:42Speaker 04

  Yeah, you can definitely sideload it. I think officially, I want to say Lenovo might have been the first one to actually offer it.

• 1:30:52Ed Zitron?

  Right.

• 1:30:52Speaker 04

  It was either Lenovo or I don't think it was Asus, but yeah, someone's picked it up.

• 1:30:56Ed Zitron?

  How do you feel about the Xbox Rog Ally?

• 1:31:00Speaker 04

  I think there's a lot of confusion around it in the more mainstream audience. I've noticed comment threads where people think it's gonna be required to play what you would consider an Xbox game. But it's like basically a PC, it's a handheld.

• 1:31:14Ed Zitron?

  It's just a Rog X Ally with Xbox branding, right?

• 1:31:17Speaker 04

  Basically, yeah. And I'm sure there's some software gimmicks, you know?

• 1:31:21Ed Zitron?

  I wonder if it works because that's not be- I love my Rog Ally, but the fucking software that pops up really gets in the way of gaming.

• 1:31:28Speaker 04

  Yeah, I don't really know what Microsoft is doing with Xbox. It just seems like they're, they're not sure what to do with that brand right now.

• 1:31:35Ed Zitron?

  I have, I was gonna ask like, what do you think Microsoft's deal with gaming is right now? They seem almost like they don't want to do it.

• 1:31:42Speaker 04

  It's weird because they, they were so committed to locking people into the Xbox for like a generation or two. And then at some point, I, my memory of it is they kind of realized like, wait a minute. You know, as we move to X86 architectures, for consoles, PC gaming kind of works on both these devices. So we don't really care if they buy it on PC or on Xbox, as long as they use our device.

• 1:32:08Ed Zitron?

  And they raised the price on Game Pass as well.

• 1:32:11Speaker 04

  Yeah, and, and games.

• 1:32:13Ed Zitron?

  Oh, of course. And also the Xbox.

• 1:32:15Speaker 04

  Yeah. And then, you know, surprised Pikachu face when they raised the price on games and then they raised the price on games pass. And then everybody cancels.

• 1:32:25Ed Zitron?

  Well, they lost so much. I read something, they lost like- A hundred million dollars or something, even more because they put Call of Duty on Game Pass?

• 1:32:32Speaker 04

  Yeah, I'm sure it was.

• 1:32:33Ed Zitron?

  Genius fucking move, lads. It really, it's a shame as well because when you get past all the horrible menus, it is kind of cool that you can just plug a game. I don't know, I've been playing PC games long enough that I was excited when you could just plug a controller in and it wasn't some sort of nightmare.

• 1:32:49Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:32:50Ed Zitron?

  Though PS5 controllers, you still have to do the weird DualShock emulator thingy.

• 1:32:54Speaker 04

  Yeah, the, it's gotten a lot more accessible and, um, but I, I think the handhelds are, are pretty cool. There's a lot of focus there. I'm not sure when Valve's gonna do it. I really want them to bring SteamOS to desktop properly because it's not currently officially released for desktops.

• 1:33:14Ed Zitron?

  Right.

• 1:33:14Speaker 04

  But they've done so much optimization work there. We're like, the coolest thing that gets probably the least coverage outside of our space is, they've really tuned the pacing of delivery of frames. So if you have 60 FPS, 60 frames per second, and it's delivered at an inconsistent interval. So you have a frame delivered in 16 milliseconds and then the next frame is delivered in 100 milliseconds. And that repeats, that's gonna feel really bad despite being 60 FPS averaged over the period. You might have some that are four milliseconds, some that are 16, some that are 100.

• 1:33:51Ed Zitron?

  I never thought that FPS could be a marketing term. Now I finally, oh, Jesus.

• 1:33:55Speaker 04

  Yeah, and so like, the work they've done to optimize the, for the frame delivery is great. Where they sometimes have better frame time pacing than Windows. And I would like to see that come to desktop, so.

• 1:34:09Ed Zitron?

  So as we wrap up, what are you excited about? What, what in tech, in hardware and whatever is actually like, kind of bringing you cheer?

• 1:34:16Speaker 04

  Yeah, I think on the DIY enthusiast side, there's still a lot of really cool innovation happening, especially in cases right now, believe it or not, like computer cases.

• 1:34:27Ed Zitron?

  Yeah, how?

• 1:34:28Speaker 04

  You would think that it's like, a pretty answered, I mean, it's, it's all thermodynamics, which is well documented.

• 1:34:36Ed Zitron?

  Right.

• 1:34:37Speaker 04

  Uh, it's not like silicon engineering, but they're still, they're, I don't know, there's just a lot of improvement in.

• 1:34:45Speaker 04

  Getting an affordable, like, good-looking design that actually has a lot of function to it. So over the last six or seven years, they've really switched the focus on cooling performance, and then cooling performance that still looks good. And so that's, it's exciting to see that.

• 1:34:59Ed Zitron?

  And what does that, does it, the cases get smaller, or are they just?

• 1:35:02Speaker 04

  They can, yeah.

• 1:35:03Ed Zitron?

  Better thermal management?

• 1:35:05Speaker 04

  Better thermals, as a result of that, maybe lower noise. The computer just looks cooler. The smaller boxes have gotten a lot more viable, so if you want to build something that you take from, I don't know, like, if, if there's a kid who travels between a college dorm and home in summer, you know, having like a small, a small mini ITX box is pretty appealing, and those have gotten really good.

• 1:35:30Ed Zitron?

  Yeah, the, the mini ITXs are always so interesting to me. I love the idea of kind of like an Apple TV-sized one. That's a pipe dream, but still.

• 1:35:37Speaker 04

  It's not hard to do. It's, yeah, I mean, they've gotten easier. But the other thing, I think coolers are also pretty exciting right now. A lot of really neat technological development on cooling products.

• 1:35:50Speaker 04

  GPUs, I think, are probably the, the biggest hang-up for people, where the pricing has just gotten kind of stupid for consumer market GPUs. And, yeah, I think that, that's the one that's kind of like, kind of a bummer, I guess.

• 1:36:07Ed Zitron?

  Yeah, and I mean, do you see any viable competitor to Nvidia and AMD at any point? Do you think that there's any chance of any smaller competitor?

• 1:36:15Speaker 04

  The only one is Intel, which I never really answered your question on, Arc. I think right now, Arc is going to stick around. But right now, it only goes up to like $250, and after that, it's all AMD and Nvidia. And AMD, you know, part of it's their fault. They need to really want it and compete, and they just aren't. Like, the products are okay, but they keep doing the stupidest things with their prices and their marketing. And I think part of it is, they sell every epic CPU they make, so they allocate all the wafer supply to that. And GPUs are kind of backburnered, but, you know, the end result is we just end up in this stalemate we've been in forever now.

• 1:36:56Ed Zitron?

  What about combined GPUs and CPUs? Is that, is that something you're seeing much growth from? Do you think that that's going to be a focus, or is that kind of just a side quest?

• 1:37:04Speaker 04

  APUs, basically, yeah. Yeah, I mean, the entire handheld market is that.

• 1:37:09Ed Zitron?

  Yeah.

• 1:37:09Speaker 04

  So there's a lot of success there and they're they're clearly good devices now for that. They're not good enough for like high fidelity, high resolution, high graphics quality gaming on a desktop. But yeah, mobile devices, they're great. For their faults, upscalers like DLSS and FSR do make it more viable to run an integrated graphics solution and actually have a decent experience.

• 1:37:37Speaker 04

  Can't get close to a dedicated GPU, but they're they're good. They're just they're in the same spot they've been in for 15 years where it's, you know, it's it's not really a replacement for a hundred dollar GPU is going to be better, probably.

• 1:37:51Ed Zitron?

  Probably doesn't make enough money as well for them to sink a bunch of R and D into it either.

• 1:37:55Speaker 04

  Or it becomes a problem of ballooning the die area because you have to allocate some amount of your silicon to the GPU and the CPU. And so if you give more to the GPU to make it more powerful, you're making your CPU weaker. And the only real way to solve that is to put more silicon on the product, which is expensive. So, yeah.

• 1:38:17Ed Zitron?

  So a couple of questions before we wrap up. Who are your favorite creators at the moment? Because you there's a there seems like a good kind of solidarity between them. But who do you watch? What do you?

• 1:38:28Speaker 04

  I think historically, like going back, the large influences were Tech Report, Scott Wasson specifically. If I remember correctly, he was involved in the early days of Ars Technica also, like early, early days.

• 1:38:43Ed Zitron?

  I'm not sure. I'll have to look up.

• 1:38:45Speaker 04

  And so Scott Wasson did a lot of excellent, like, test design work. Ryan Shroud was part of his kind of era and the two of them with Tom Peterson from Intel Now worked on frame time testing. So so their publications set the framework for modern benchmarking with frame times. And I that was, you know, I still reference those content pieces. And in tech, I think is well respected, but has been shut down by, I think it was Future bought them.

• 1:39:16Ed Zitron?

  Yeah.

• 1:39:16Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:39:17Ed Zitron?

  I mean, anyone who's worked at Future knows what happened, which is that Future bought them and then shut.

• 1:39:21Speaker 04

  Shut it.

• 1:39:22Ed Zitron?

  Just didn't do shit with them.

• 1:39:23Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:39:23Ed Zitron?

  But who do you watch right now?

• 1:39:24Speaker 04

  Now, for I like the work that.

• 1:39:29Speaker 04

  Jared's Tech does some laptops, so he's an excellent laptop reviewer, does really good work there. We've helped Just Josh Tech, who's another laptop reviewer, with some of his testing methodology, and I think they've been doing good things to really try to advance on that. They're still relatively new to testing, but they're really trying. I think Jay's Two Cents, with his recent changes to testing, he's really kind of put in a lot of effort to overhaul it. And then the hardware and box guys are also awesome. But yeah, there's, I like hesitate to start naming channels, because there's a lot of

• 1:40:09Speaker 04

  channels, you know, that I like, or we talk to at shows, and I hate to leave anyone out.

• 1:40:15Ed Zitron?

  No, I know what you mean. I wasn't trying to single anyone out. It's just, I think that especially in my own work, I could be quite critical. So it's good to just focus on the things you actually like.

• 1:40:24Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:40:25Ed Zitron?

  So as a wrap, what's next for Gamers Nexus? What do you want to do next beyond testing? Is there a vertical you want to move into? I know you've got the other channel going.

• 1:40:33Speaker 04

  Yeah. Yeah, I have to go to the UK for that.

• 1:40:35Ed Zitron?

  Oh, I'm sorry.

• 1:40:36Speaker 04

  So I'll have to get recommendations from you.

• 1:40:40Ed Zitron?

  Leave.

• 1:40:41Speaker 04

  Okay, don't go.

• 1:40:43Ed Zitron?

  Where the airport is.

• 1:40:44Speaker 04

  Yeah. Yeah, I think that we have some, a relatively large focus in that channel, which is like looking at some more consumer advocacy topics. On the testing side, the biggest thing we're doing right now is overhauling our gaming benchmarks. So we're working to introduce some new types of charts and metrics that don't exist right now in reviews, called animation error. And just trying to, basically, we're taking a moment right now to try and find, you know, okay, we've been representing things a certain way in charts forever as a review community. Is there anything new here we can do? And that's kind of what we're

• 1:41:27Speaker 04

  trying to research. So that's the immediate focus.

• 1:41:31Ed Zitron?

  Well, Steve, it's been such a pleasure to come out here. Thank you so much for your time.

• 1:41:34Speaker 04

  Thanks.

• 1:41:43Ed Zitron?

  Thank you for listening to Better Offline. The editor and composer of the Better Offline theme song is Matt Osowski. You can check out more of his music and audio projects at mattosowski.com. M A T T O S O W S K I dot com. You can email me at [email protected] or visit betteroffline.com to find more podcast links and of course my newsletter. I also really recommend you go to chat dot where's your ed dot app to visit the Discord and go to r/betteroffline to check out our Reddit. Thank you so much for listening.

• 1:42:15Speaker 06

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