Pod Insights Waveform: The MKBHD Podcast The Steam Machine Takes on PS5 and Xbox About this episode While Marques is out enjoying the Ultimate Frisbee on a beach somewhere, Andrew and David sit down to talk about everything from the new Steam devices to Google Gemini 3. After that, things go off the rails quickly as everyone discusses the pros and cons of local storage vs cloud storage. Enjoy!
Shop the merch:
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Links:
Valve - New Steam devices
Tom's Guide - Rabbit next-gen hardware
Tom's Guide - Employee payment story
Google - Gemini 3 announcement blog
Google - Antigravity announcement
Verge - Cloudflare outage
Damien Wilde YouTube channel
Dave2D - Steam video
ShortCircuit - M5 video
@Privatetalky on Twitter/X - Storage tweet
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Framer: https://www.framer.com/design (code: wave)
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/MKBHD
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Music provided by Epidemic Sound
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Hosts:
Marques: https://www.threads.net/@mkbhd
Andrew: https://www.threads.net/@andrew_manganelli
David: https://www.threads.net/@davidimel
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Transcript 16,758 words · 10 speakers
Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:00 Andrew Manganelli? This episode is brought to you by On Investing, an original podcast from Charles Schwab. Each week, host Lizanne Saunders, Schwab's Chief Investment Strategist, and Colin Martin, Head of Fixed Income Research and Strategy for the Schwab Center for Financial Research, bring your fresh insights on what's happening in the markets and why, and what the implications might be for your portfolio. Join Colin and Lizanne as they explore questions like, how do you evaluate corporate bonds that look interesting? And what sectors are on the move right now? Download the latest episodes and subscribe at schwab.com/oninvesting or wherever you get your podcasts.
0:33 Speaker 01 Support for the show comes from Jira by Atlassian. AI is only as useful as the context it has to work from. But when that context is scattered across tools, threads, and DMs, that means your team and your AI agents end up flying blind. That's the problem that Jira solves. What's the goal tied to your project? What got decided last week in Slack? Atlassian's teamwork graph pulls all these pieces together, from Jira, Confluence, Slack, GitHub, and more. So, nothing falls through the cracks. With Jira, you can actually share that context with the AI agents you already use, like Claude, Cursor, and GitHub Copilot, assign them work directly, or connect your agents through MCP. Spend less time digging through endless links and DMs, less time chasing down what got decided and by who, and more time actually shipping. Learn more at jira.com.
1:18 Speaker 01 That's J-I-R-A dot com.
1:25 Speaker 02 This podcast is so gross.
1:30 Speaker 02 Marquez, I'm sorry. Marquez, I came to work and I really gave it my best effort. I just tried to make a good podcast while you were gone. And then all this happened. I'm sorry.
1:47 Speaker 01 What is up, people of the internet? Welcome back to another episode of the Waveform Podcast. We're your hosts, I'm David.
1:52 Andrew Manganelli? And I'm Andrew.
1:53 Speaker 01 And I'm David. And today, we got a lot of stuff going on. As you might have noticed, Marquez is gone. He's gone.
2:02 Andrew Manganelli? Wait, what?
2:03 Speaker 01 I know.
2:04 Speaker 02 Where'd he go?
2:04 Speaker 01 I know we sound the same, but he's gone.
2:06 Andrew Manganelli? Oh, my God, I had no idea.
2:07 Speaker 01 Yeah, he's out being hot on a beach. He's throwing frisbees. I asked him, why are you doing world championships again? I thought you already won.
2:16 Andrew Manganelli? Listen, I'm an ultimate player. Even this one's confusing.
2:19 Speaker 01 He was like, I'm gone for Worlds. And I was like, you just brought...
2:22 Speaker 02 We did a whole episode of your trophy.
2:25 David Imel? Anyway, he's doing that on a beach now, so good luck, I guess. Anyway, we got a lot of stuff to talk about this week. We barely missed the Steam announcement last week, which is a bunch of new Steam hardware, which is very exciting. Sundar Pichai did us a big favor and dropped Gemini 3 on a Tuesday. So we're actually able to talk about it relatively on time. We're only going to be four days late this week. And we've got a few other things like Rabbit being a bad company again. What else? Oh, yeah, CloudFlare took down the internet again. We got a lot of fun stuff for you today.
2:58 Andrew Manganelli? All the usual suspects.
3:00 David Imel? All the usual suspects. So also, we launched new merch this week.
3:05 Andrew Manganelli? We did.
3:06 David Imel? So I think we should talk about that real quick.
3:07 Andrew Manganelli? We're gonna do it real quick. This has been a long time coming, because our team's been like, really going hard on this for a while. Getting everything set up on the shop and getting all the designs and all those samples and making sure prints are correct. But we're really, really pumped about this. I think most importantly is like, as a big channel, it's really easy to just throw a logo on a shirt and sell it to an audience. And that's something Marques has not wanted to do. And I think the design team really took it to heart in this one, where all of these shirts, we have one for each channel right now. If you were to look at it, I don't think you would immediately say that's MKBHD or that's like YouTuber merch. It would be like, that's a cool design. And then if you know, you know, which is kind of what we were going for.
3:51 David Imel? Kind of the vibe.
3:52 Andrew Manganelli? Yeah, so we have, I'm wearing the waveform shirt right now. So is Adam. Adam looks cooler because Adam has a jacket on. That's not the only reason. It's like a purply color with kind of the top of the MKBHD logo that like waves and patterns out, almost like the Joy Division.
4:11 David Imel? Yeah, it kind of looks like the Joy Division.
4:12 Andrew Manganelli? We also have an autofocus one that David's wearing right now, which is a red camera with like a manual shifting knob and a tire as the focus ring. That's probably my favorite design.
4:24 David Imel? Me too.
4:24 Andrew Manganelli? That one's so cool.
4:25 David Imel? I like it a lot, yeah.
4:26 Andrew Manganelli? Ellis is wearing our main channel. It's kind of like the logo spinning around in a cool pattern. And then no one has the studio one here, but it's basically our studio logo. Deconstructed and just a bunch of really cool colors.
4:37 David Imel? Yeah.
4:38 Andrew Manganelli? Great. The shirts fit really nice. They're great material. I think it's the best merch we've ever done.
4:44 David Imel? Yeah.
4:44 Andrew Manganelli? Um, so just big shout out to Tim, Olivia, Brandon, Vin, Jono, and even our old intern, David. I think he's the one who maybe pitched the waveform design.
4:52 David Imel? Yeah.
4:53 Andrew Manganelli? So, uh, he's not here anymore, but they all worked really, really hard.
4:56 David Imel? Yeah.
4:56 Andrew Manganelli? On all of this.
4:57 David Imel? No, it's legit very good. And I'm, you know, I know you're not going to believe me because we're selling it. It actually is good.
5:04 Andrew Manganelli? I mean, look for yourself. We took like, we had a professional photographer come in.
5:08 David Imel? Yeah.
5:08 Andrew Manganelli? And they took photos.
5:09 David Imel? The photos are cool.
5:10 Andrew Manganelli? They're really good. Adam looks really good in his.
5:13 Speaker 04 Uh, it's funny because I showed my fiance just the pictures and she was like, you never dress like this, but you look cool.
5:20 Andrew Manganelli? That's all because we had the photographer, but we also had Brandon and Vin dressing all of us, so.
5:25 David Imel? They were like styling us. I wore none of my own clothes that day.
5:28 Andrew Manganelli? I think I wore your jacket.
5:30 David Imel? There's also a great treat. Uh, Olivia, our, one of our graphic designers, she was wearing this red hat with the studio shirt. And, uh, someone on Twitter had posted like Pokemon trainer cosplay. Anyway, yeah, check that out on the store, but until then, until you do that, we're going to be talking at you. So let's talk about the new Steam devices.
5:51 Andrew Manganelli? Yes.
5:51 David Imel? Uh, because that's the first thing that happened last week that we barely missed because it happened literally Wednesday afternoon.
5:56 Andrew Manganelli? I think it happened, or all the videos came out on Thursday.
5:58 David Imel? Uh, yeah.
6:00 Andrew Manganelli? For what I was, or.
6:01 David Imel? I thought it was Wednesday.
6:02 Andrew Manganelli? Linus's video came out on Thursday.
6:03 David Imel? Well, maybe he's just late.
6:04 Andrew Manganelli? Maybe.
6:05 David Imel? I think Dave.
6:06 Speaker 04 They just had an embargo time probably because there were some videos that came out Wednesday night.
6:10 David Imel? Okay.
6:10 Andrew Manganelli? Did they?
6:11 David Imel? Yeah.
6:11 Speaker 04 Because I remember thinking like, I'm mad that we missed it, but thank God we missed it because I would have known nothing about it.
6:17 Andrew Manganelli? Dave's was on the 12th, so yeah, Wednesday afternoon.
6:20 David Imel? All right. Well, to give you guys a little bit of context, the Steam machine is this idea that Valve has had for a very long time. Valve is the company that makes Steam. It is the biggest gaming platform in the world. It runs on computers and you can play everything on it. And there's been this transition over the last few years of, you know, you used to be able to have a console where you played on your TV. Or you had like a handheld device, like a Nintendo DS or something, but there was never really this like melding of the two. And considering Steam has like. So, almost every game ever made besides like Nintendo games on it. Um, and maybe some exclusives to like consoles.
6:56 Andrew Manganelli? Yeah, there's some, I think more gaming companies are making their own launchers. So like Battle.net and Epic. Uh, but I mean, it clearly has the most amount of games, period, on a single.
7:07 David Imel? And it's like the most affordable. They're very, Steam is very famous. Everyone who's listening to this probably already knows this, but like Steam is very famous for its like insane mega sales during the summer and during the spring and like everyone that has Steam has way too many games that they've never played. It's a, both a waste of money and also very fun to just collect software. Anyway, a number of years ago Valve released the original Steam Machines. And the idea of this was like, okay, we can kind of split the difference between being a gaming PC and a console. You should be able to just have something hooked up to your TV. You should be able to play it with a controller because, I mean, it's just a gaming console after all, but Valve is very hardcore about things working on Linux. It's all this stuff.
7:49 David Imel? Um, that was a colossal failure because they, Valve has also been very much pro third party. And when they launched the original Steam Machines, they launched them with a bunch of different companies that were doing it. There was like Alienware and there was Asus and there was all these different configurations. And to be honest, it was just very confusing. Those companies were needed to make margin, all of this stuff. And so now what's, what Valve is doing after the success of the Steam Deck, which came out a couple of years ago, two years ago? I think two years ago.
8:21 Andrew Manganelli? Couple of years ago. I recently took ours from the office and I've been playing it non-stop.
8:26 David Imel? The OLED one?
8:27 Andrew Manganelli? I think it's just the first one, but I'm obsessed with it.
8:30 David Imel? So like Valve kind of took the idea of what the Switch had done by, you know, making a console that could be plugged into your TV or played remotely. And it put like a whole, a whole computer into a handheld console, which was really cool. That was super popular and it kind of created this wave of new handheld gaming PCs that people are using. There's an Asus one that's very popular. There's a Lenovo one that's very popular. Uh, and now they decided to re-enter the Steam Machine world. So, we have three new announcements from Valve. Number one is the Steam Machine again, but this time it is a small cube.
9:06 Andrew Manganelli? Mm-hmm.
9:07 David Imel? And it's kind of like. Optimized for Steam in a number of ways and they're trying to create a little bit of an ecosystem because as I mentioned before, them going to a bunch of third parties was like, that is good for choice, but it makes it hard to kind of sell a bunch of stuff together that works really well together. So all the hardware that they announced specifically works well together. So the new Steam machine is this small cube. It's running a semi-custom AMD solution with a Zenfone CPU with peak frequencies of 4.8 GHz boost and has an RDNA3 GPU running at 2.45 GHz that sustains a 110 watt TDP. This is specifically designed
9:48 David Imel? to hit pretty much every single game on Steam at 4K 60 FPS. That is their goal with this, which is a pretty big ask. Specifically, obviously, that's using FSR, so it's like upscaling and that kind of stuff, but the point is that you should be able to, you know, plug this into your TV and just like jump on any game on Steam at 60 FPS, 4K. Really cool.
10:10 Andrew Manganelli? I think that's a reasonable target also, 4K 60, because like, we're looking at this as more of a console, right? Like, I know PC gamers love to get way higher than that, a bunch of different crazy things with really, really expensive machines, but this isn't quite going after that market. This is to sit down on your couch and play.
10:30 David Imel? It is interesting though, because it is also a full PC.
10:34 Andrew Manganelli? Agreed, but like, but what this is going at, like, this doesn't need to run 4K 300 FPS, like crazy stuff that people can run on a $8,000 PC.
10:45 David Imel? Right. It's like, it's a computer that is made to be played on your couch. It can run all your Steam games. So they didn't announce a price yet. It is going to be probably more expensive than the traditional consoles, but that's because it has more access to more software and it runs SteamOS.
11:00 Andrew Manganelli? I spent so long on PC Parts Picker trying to like, figure out more or less what this would be-ish.
11:07 David Imel? Like what it could cost.
11:07 Andrew Manganelli? Like what it could cost.
11:09 David Imel? Yeah. And I found something, like the configuration I got, and I was like, posting about this and people kept going back and forth with me, like what they got, what I got, like, it seems like the average is like...
11:18 Speaker 04 Anywhere from 800 to like 1,000 ish, like the cheapest thing you can get that you would feel comfortable actually getting it to play. But then someone replied to me and they made a good point, which is like, they probably have deals that they can get with the like chip manufacturers and stuff like that, that they're making these like massive orders with to get the price even lower.
11:37 David Imel? The AMD and.
11:38 Speaker 04 So if it could be like five, $600.
11:40 Andrew Manganelli? It's gonna be more than that.
11:41 Speaker 04 I think so too.
11:42 David Imel? I think it'll be more, I think it'll be like 799.
11:44 Speaker 04 Well, that's where I was like landing, but if it's like 600, I think that's a steal.
11:48 David Imel? That'd be awesome.
11:48 Andrew Manganelli? A really good thing Linus brought up was, well, first of all, he said this will probably be, they told him no price yet, but more closely resembling a PC than a gaming console. So I think we automatically go over $500 on that, right?
12:01 David Imel? Yeah.
12:02 Andrew Manganelli? But not only that, but like what consoles can do is because when you buy a new console, there's X amount of games that can subsidize the price of a console.
12:10 David Imel? Yeah.
12:11 Andrew Manganelli? Because those are so expensive and you have to buy new games pretty much to buy those where this is running Steam.
12:16 David Imel? Yeah.
12:16 Andrew Manganelli? You could, X amount of these could ship out and you don't buy a single game for it because you have a library already. And it's just a PC you can install stuff on. So like.
12:26 David Imel? They actually have to make money on the hardware.
12:27 Andrew Manganelli? They have to really make money on the hardware for this. So it's most likely going to be.
12:33 Andrew Manganelli? I think 750 is like a reasonable guess, but I wouldn't doubt if it's on the closer to 1,000 than 500.
12:39 David Imel? Yeah, yeah.
12:40 Speaker 04 I feel like they just have to be careful though, because if it's too expensive, you could just build it your own. Like you can't upgrade some parts of this. So it's like.
12:48 Andrew Manganelli? There are certain things in this that you can't really build your own in terms of like connections with the controllers. Like they have better antennas and stuff inside of it. There was a specifically the HDMI port being able to connect to your TV and wake the, uh, the console itself through your TV remote and like through that, you wouldn't really be able to do that on a regular PC being hooked up to it. So there are some benefits to this being like.
13:14 David Imel? Yeah.
13:14 Andrew Manganelli? Really made top down connecting to your TV.
13:17 David Imel? There are a lot of optimizations, like it has super fast pot, like. Pause and wake, where it can be, the game can be sort of in a suspended state for months on end, and then you press one button and it's instantly back to it. So they have a lot of optimizations around that.
13:33 Andrew Manganelli? On Steam Deck, that works incredibly. The game I'm playing right now is called Slay the Spire. It's been around forever, but it's like
13:39 David Imel? I started playing that a great game.
13:40 Andrew Manganelli? You did start playing it. It's really fun, isn't it?
13:43 Speaker 04 I could see, though, that game way better to play on a Steam Deck when you're sitting on a couch, because by my PC, I have to like, kind of just get up and down and up and down.
13:50 Andrew Manganelli? Yeah, but like, being able to just, because it's turn-based, at any time when anything happens, I can just put the controller down and sleep it. And it could be three days later and I could be in the middle of the same turn. So I'm assuming this is gonna do the same thing.
14:03 David Imel? Yeah, yeah. The I/O ports are a little disappointing. They went with a lot of USB-A ports and only one USB-C port.
14:12 Andrew Manganelli? I saw people complaining about this.
14:14 David Imel? Yeah, I would love for them to move towards USB-C. I do think that a lot of the traditional gaming hardware and PC hardware is still utilizing USB-A, so that's probably why they were thinking that. But one USB-C port is just seems like a small amount. Either way, you're probably not even gonna be using the ports that much, so.
14:32 Andrew Manganelli? The way you charge the controllers through this magnetic puck that doubles as a 2.4 gigahertz connection to the game itself, but that puck plugs in and then charges the controller as well. Assuming the backside of that is a USB-A that it comes with, I guess it's just USB-C on the other side. You're probably plugging it straight into the front. Right, so that's what the USB ports for.
14:53 David Imel? Right, right, right.
14:54 Andrew Manganelli? It could be C and could just be C to C, that would probably be better, but.
14:56 David Imel? Yeah, I don't know. It has 16 gigs of RAM and 8 gigs of VRAM. Yeah, so it's also quite, I don't wanna say modular, but they're releasing CAD files for it, so you should be able to replace the front panel with anything you want. There is already a company that is making like e-ink displays and stuff for it, and different types of stuff that you can run on it. Like, you can show the like, temperatures of the different components.
15:21 Andrew Manganelli? It was running like, bench, or not benchmarks, but like specs and like heats and like graphs on the front through an e-ink display, because it's just a magnetic snap on the front of it, which some people had like wooden textures on it. I'm sure D-Brand's gonna go crazy because it's just flat.
15:36 David Imel? People have been joking that this is a GameCube, because it literally is a GameCube. And D-Brand has already announced that they are selling a GameCube wrap. That makes it look like a GameCube.
15:46 Andrew Manganelli? This is like, as a console that's going to live in a living room of people that live in a house, thank you for not making this absurd. Like, the PS5 to me still is insane. That's like-
15:59 Speaker 05 Does not fit into anything.
16:00 Andrew Manganelli? No, I am not putting that on my TV console. It just seems crazy. So like, not only that, but then making it modular on the front to be able to possibly add accents to it that would fit with the general aesthetic of a living room.
16:11 Speaker 05 Yeah.
16:12 Andrew Manganelli? To not have to be everyone's gaming dungeon-
16:15 Speaker 05 Yeah.
16:15 Andrew Manganelli? Is awesome.
16:15 Speaker 05 Yeah.
16:16 Andrew Manganelli? And did you see the LED, the like, user customizable LED bar on it?
16:20 Speaker 05 Yes.
16:21 Andrew Manganelli? That's fantastic. One of the ways, like, basically between the magnetic gap and the power buttons and I/O ports on the front, there's a little I/O bar that users can define what that will show, or LED bar, I forget what I said, but um, one of the ways you could do it is if you're downloading a game, it can show the progress of the downloading, so you could change the channel, watch TV while it's downloading, and then know how long you have until it's finished, and then swap back, like-
16:46 Speaker 05 Yeah.
16:46 Andrew Manganelli? Look, people are gonna think of some really cool stuff to do on that.
16:50 Speaker 05 Yeah. I love the idea. I don't play video games at all, so I have literally no interest in this product, but I love the idea- Reading.
16:58 Speaker 05 I love the idea of a living room PC. Yeah. Like, the idea of a PC with an OS that's like optimized to be on a TV several feet away from you. I feel like, and this is gonna sound crazy, but they, Nintendo sort of attempted this with the Wii, in the way that the home screen was laid out, and the way that they handled screensavers, and there was a web browser, and like, you know? True. And I feel like we haven't really come close to something that that's as pleasant- Yeah. -to have running in a living room. Yeah. So I would even consider buying this as someone who doesn't, actually, I do have a Steam account.
17:33 Andrew Manganelli? Everyone has a Steam account. Everyone has a Steam account.
17:36 Speaker 05 But um, I don't know. I want someone to make the non-gamer version of this. What would that look like?
17:40 Andrew Manganelli? That's-
17:41 Speaker 05 Something that's like more optimized for web browsing. I guess it's a thing I said. It's like, it's like an- WebOS. You say WebOS? WebOS. Dude, don't even get me started on WebOS. I've been the biggest defender of LGTVs ever since I bought one, like, this blows Samsung out of the water. I love my LGTV. WebOS, it was a 25 or 26, the one that came out last week.
18:05 David Imel? Is it bad?
18:08 Speaker 04 It's good?
18:08 Speaker 05 No, it's terrible.
18:09 Speaker 04 Oh, okay.
18:10 Speaker 05 It's so terrible, I can't even, I'll derail the steam talk. It's like, it's like, it's worse, get this, it's worse than AI overviews. It's like, what were you thinking? Life's good. What were you thinking? They should call, they should rename the company LB, because life's bad if you get WebOS 25 or 26 or whatever. God damn it sucks.
18:30 Speaker 04 So don't update, PSA.
18:32 Speaker 05 Yeah, don't update.
18:33 David Imel? Yeah, okay.
18:35 Speaker 05 There's a, there's a memory leak issue. There's a memory leak issue for any app that uses the built-in media player, which is all streaming apps. And most LG TVs have like one gig of internal, dude, it's like, and then, and then by default, it turns your screensavers into ads. So if you don't do anything on your TV, it displays a, it's just like, what is wrong? Sorry, sorry. But just like, ooh, you ruined my TV, LG.
19:02 David Imel? All right, well.
19:02 Speaker 04 To bring us back.
19:03 David Imel? Yeah, let's talk.
19:05 Speaker 04 Do you think Linux gaming is gonna be a thing now? Because I've been seeing a lot of movement of people trying to leave Windows because of the whole.
19:12 David Imel? Yeah, I've been seeing that too.
19:14 Speaker 04 And everyone's going to be like, oh, finally, we have like a Linux alternative. But I've been hearing that for a decade, so.
19:19 David Imel? I've been also hearing that for a decade. It seems to me that a lot of, like, people are buying computers specifically for the gaming aspect now. And it is also becoming a little bit.
19:31 Speaker 04 Well, I would say PCs specifically.
19:32 David Imel? Yes.
19:33 Speaker 04 Yeah.
19:33 David Imel? Well, yeah.
19:34 Speaker 04 Because no one I know is buying a Mac to game.
19:36 David Imel? That's right. Yeah, exactly. But it's kind of like people are buying Macs for like work and creative work, and then they're buying a PC just for gaming. There's not a lot of reason to just buy a Windows computer anymore, just as a general purpose computer. I think Linus actually just did a video about how good the M5s are.
19:54 Speaker 04 Yeah, the M5 is like great.
19:55 David Imel? How it's very hard to justify a Windows computer at this point. So I could see like a movement in the industry more towards things running Linux that have like a gaming skin on top of them. I think that the, the. Idea of having a dedicated gaming computer is getting much more normalized. So, we'll see that.
20:15 Andrew Manganelli? I'll let you guys talk about Linux. I know nothing. I'm not saying anything about this.
20:20 Speaker 04 Well, shout out to Damian Wild from 9to5 Google. He's been on his personal channel going like deep dive after deep dive in Linux gaming and it's very interesting.
20:29 David Imel? Very cool. So, there's a couple of ecosystem optimizations in the cube. One is that it has a micro SD card slot and the idea of this is that if you have a Steam Deck, the Steam Deck has a micro SD card slot and that's where you mostly put your game library and like your save data. So, you can quickly just, when you get home, take your micro SD card out of your Steam Deck and put it in the Steam Cube and then suddenly you just have everything and it's all local. You don't have to download anything. It's pretty awesome. They also have a specialized antenna inside of the Steam Cube for the Steam Controller, the new Steam Controller, which we will get to.
21:02 Speaker 04 The Steam Cube?
21:04 David Imel? Yeah, it's the Steam Machine. It's a GameCube.
21:08 Andrew Manganelli? Steam Machine, awesome name by the way.
21:09 David Imel? Yeah.
21:10 Andrew Manganelli? I love it.
21:10 David Imel? Yeah.
21:11 Speaker 04 GameCube is better, I'm sorry.
21:12 Andrew Manganelli? Can't wait for Steam Machine 720.
21:14 David Imel? Yeah. Alright. There's a new Steam Controller, which we'll talk about now. It's kind of an evolution of... hey, man. When you gotta talk on the fly, you gotta add some filler. It's kind of an evolution of the last Steam Controller that they released a number of years ago. Really freaking weird controller because they introduced these touchpads that are basically ways to interact with games that traditionally did not work with just controllers and were made for mouse and keyboard. And they added those touchpads onto the Steam Deck and that ended up being very popular and people really liked it. So, they now have kind of evolved this concept, made them bigger, made them more concave, and now you have this massive controller that is
21:59 David Imel? kind of just like this bigger evolution of the older one. Really cool feature. New Tunnel Magnetoresistance Magnetic Thumbsticks, which is better than Hall Effect apparently. They're also magnetic like Hall Effect, but they have lower power use and they minimize the dead zones.
22:18 Speaker 04 Wait, what? What does any of that mean?
22:20 David Imel? Okay, so we've talked about Hall Effect before. Andrew should actually explain this because he knows more about it.
22:25 Andrew Manganelli? Hall Effect on a keyboard, which I'm assuming...
22:28 David Imel? The same.
22:29 Andrew Manganelli? It'll be pretty similar. It's basically on a regular keyboard switch. When you press down a key, it's moving a piece into a leaf. So when two pieces of metal connect, that can send something to the board underneath, right, and create a keystroke. Magnetic is when the key gets pushed down, there's a piece of metal that is now making a magnetic sort of connection.
22:53 David Imel? Like a magnetic field?
22:54 Andrew Manganelli? Field, yeah, I guess. However, it connects to the board. And with that, you can change the range of how much you need to push that down.
23:02 David Imel? Yeah.
23:03 Andrew Manganelli? And it can be much faster.
23:04 David Imel? Yeah.
23:04 Andrew Manganelli? So presumably for the joystick.
23:06 David Imel? And also it doesn't grind against itself.
23:07 Andrew Manganelli? Yeah, you're not, there's. Pretty much, I mean, it's a spring and a keyboard switch, but yeah, there's no real connecting parts doing that.
23:14 David Imel? Yeah, which is cool. So it means that it should last a lot longer. These are apparently even better than Hall Effect. And it's really nice seeing a company do this because notably on the Nintendo Switch One, they did not, and the OLED, they did not use Hall Effect. And the Joy-Con Drift issue where pretty much everyone's Joy-Cons would eventually just start like moving left constantly.
23:34 Andrew Manganelli? I appreciate that you tried to like isolate it to the Nintendo Switch One, but the Nintendo Switch Two.
23:40 David Imel? Well, I was just gonna say.
23:41 Andrew Manganelli? They have not updated.
23:42 David Imel? Everyone was like, oh, they're definitely gonna, because this is the main problem from the Switch One was the Joy-Con Drift. They didn't update it. They said that they made the chasm like bigger, but I, they didn't. It's the same parts, basically. So that's sad.
23:55 Andrew Manganelli? And so Steam just went out and said, we'll go one step further.
23:58 David Imel? Not two steps further because not only are we gonna do Hall Effect, we're gonna do the better version of Hall Effect, which is really cool. They have a, they have Grip Sense in the controller, which can sense how hard you're squeezing it.
24:09 Andrew Manganelli? Yeah, my, so I was listening to these. There are also four buttons behind.
24:15 David Imel? Yeah.
24:16 Andrew Manganelli? Was that part of, was that part of the Grip Sense? So like one of the features that you can do with the controller is if you're using the gyro controls in it, at any point, if you want to reset where the center of like the gyro is, you can unsqueeze the controller, right?
24:31 David Imel? Right.
24:31 Andrew Manganelli? Was that by squeezing those buttons on the back or was the controller itself?
24:35 David Imel? It says by gripping the buttons on the back, you can reset your gyro.
24:38 Andrew Manganelli? So it's less of a squeeze, it's more of like having pressure points on the buttons like that are on the back of the handle itself.
24:45 David Imel? Yeah.
24:45 Andrew Manganelli? Which is a really cool feature and I think you can also, according to. Dave's video, if you're like, you can use the gyro as a mouse cursor, essentially. Which is another point on top of now the touchpads of like, games that might not be optimized perfectly for controller versus a mouse cursor.
25:03 David Imel? Right. Also, you will be able to see it in the Steam Frame, which is the VR headset we're gonna talk about soon, which is kinda similar to in the Apple Vision Pro, you can see the Magic Keyboard and the Magic Mouse only. And I think they added like a Logitech Keyboard, but yeah. It kind of like peers through, apparently that will happen in the Steam Frame, which is cool. It charges via this magnetic puck that we talked about a little bit earlier. It's kind of this, it's a wire that comes out of the front of the Steam Frame that connects it to it. But that wire acts as a, as an antenna, right? And it has a 2.4 gigahertz.
25:37 Andrew Manganelli? I believe the puck itself is a small, almost oval shaped, I mean, I don't even know what to compare it to. It's very small. And what the puck does is, there's like a three pin magnetic place on the back of the controller, it get magnetic onto it, and then with that, it's gonna connect to your Steam machine through its own separate 2.4 gigahertz connection, which is awesome. So you have like, it's like eight milliseconds of latency, you're losing, don't have to deal with the Bluetooth latency stuff. And all you have to do is slap it on the back of your controller, or you could use Bluetooth normally, but like, that's awesome. And then what that does is, that just then can plug into a USB-C port,
26:17 Andrew Manganelli? or I think it has USB-C on it, and that doubles as the charging pass-through to charge the controllers, which I think have like 30 hours of battery life, I think they said. But I think, I'm a big 2.4 gigahertz stan, as like someone who, you know, I always use dongles for mice or keyboards when they're wireless, when I have the option to. Everyone in this office uses Bluetooth and it drives me insane, even though it probably works totally fine. But I am a dongle fan, and I think that is such a cool way to just make sure that all your controllers have their own individual.
26:51 David Imel? Connection.
26:51 Speaker 04 I can't believe you still use a mouse. Pleb.
26:55 Andrew Manganelli? Sorry.
26:56 David Imel? All right, and then the last thing they announced was the Steam Frame. So this is a new VR headset. It's kind of the next VR headset from Valve after the Valve Index that came out a number of years ago. It is powered by a Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 processor, which is interesting. It runs SteamOS, been in development since 2019, and it supports both VR and non-VR games. So not only can it do VR games like you're used to, like Half-Life: Alyx, but you can also play a Steam game where it's just in a big floating window in front of you. And I think that's kind of like a learning from the Vision Pro, from the Oculus Quest, that kind of stuff. It has a modular design, so you're able to take three different parts off of the headset,
27:39 David Imel? so you can use like a third-party strap accessory for it. So that way, it's not just one-size-fits-all. It kind of works like a ski mask by default.
27:49 Andrew Manganelli? Ski goggles.
27:50 David Imel? Ski goggles. Right, that's different.
27:52 Andrew Manganelli? They are different.
27:53 David Imel? That's different. And from people that have tested it, they have said that it's a little bit hard to adjust when you first do it, but you really only have to adjust it once, and then it should fit on pretty perfectly after that. They are prioritizing gaming performance over other XR things, so it's not supposed to be like a multi-use kind of like XR headset. They're like, this is a gaming VR headset, very specifically.
28:17 Andrew Manganelli? I think the biggest thing that proves that is it's black-and-white pass-through.
28:22 David Imel? Yeah, it's black and white, so you have pass-through, but yeah, it's black and white, so they're not prioritizing that. They have controllers that come with it that update 200 to 250 times per second, same as the Valve Index, and they have IR cameras on the inside that track your eye movement. And the reason they do this is because they have foveated rendering, which, if you don't know what that is, it renders the things you are looking at at a high resolution, and then everything around that, it renders at a very low resolution.
28:49 Andrew Manganelli? But it's foveated like graphics, isn't it? It's foveated streaming, is what they're calling it, which is crazy.
28:54 David Imel? Right, which is different.
28:55 Andrew Manganelli? Yeah, because it's like, it basically can tell where you're looking and know that's the part of the game to stream at a higher bitrate.
28:59 David Imel? Right.
29:00 Andrew Manganelli? To the point where I think, did Dave say there was a demo where they played a game... Where it's not even that it did the outside parts of it as lower frame rate or lower band bitrate, but it was just dark and he was trying to like ping his eyes around to try and catch it and was having a hard time.
29:17 David Imel? Catch it, yeah, because there are 18 infrared cameras that update every eight to 12 milliseconds to track where your eyes are looking. So that it can, yeah, it's, it's pretty awesome.
29:27 Andrew Manganelli? Yeah, I was, when I heard the foveated streaming thing, I was like, at what point do you spend so much? Money and everything, and I'm sure there's a really easy question to the, or answer to this, but like, you're doing all this stuff to save on performance. At what point does it cost that much more money to put in 18 IR cameras over just like having everything render?
29:52 David Imel? Well, I mean, you'd have to have a much like more powerful processor, which takes more power.
29:58 Andrew Manganelli? It's just cool how much you have to go into using less power.
30:03 David Imel? Yeah, yeah.
30:04 Speaker 05 Crypto and AI were not a thing, do you think we wouldn't be doing the foveated rendering at all? Like just because chips would be that much cheaper?
30:12 Andrew Manganelli? Oh, I have no idea. I'll blame crypto if you want me to.
30:16 Speaker 05 It's crypto's fault.
30:18 David Imel? It's crypto's fault. Uh, but that enables 250 megabit, megabit per second over Wi-Fi 7. And the end to end latency is about 10 to 20 milliseconds, which is very short for streaming to a VR headset. Because this is the thing that the headset itself can run games just dedicated inside of the headset. Cause you can run on the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3. Obviously that's not going to be powerful enough for enough stuff. So what they really want you to do is stream from something like your Steam Frame, which also has two, so the headset has two dedicated Wi-Fi antennas. There's a Wi-Fi 6 antenna, which is only for the, the game streaming. It is dedicated to the game streaming, so there's no other network traffic on it.
31:01 David Imel? So it can just push all of that game streaming data directly with nothing else happening. And then it has another, uh, band that is just used for general internet things like being updated and all of that kind of stuff. So it's very, very targeted at. Just being able to do that. There is actually no tethered mode available on this headset. Most other VR headsets, you can like plug into your computer and go through a cable. They don't want you to have to do that because they want it. They're like, we want you to have more free movement. As long as you have line of sight to your, your Steam machine or Wi-Fi 7 router, which not a lot of people have. So the Steam machine makes a little more sense. You should be able to have pretty much no latency issues. So.
31:41 Speaker 04 As cool as the, the Steam, what is that headset called?
31:44 Andrew Manganelli? Frame.
31:45 Speaker 04 Frame.
31:45 David Imel? Steam frame.
31:46 Speaker 04 Yeah. That's cool, but who cares? I feel like the coolest thing announced was the Steam machine. Like everyone is so hyped about
31:53 David Imel? Yeah.
31:54 Speaker 04 The little box. And this was just like, like, why even announce this?
31:59 Andrew Manganelli? Yeah. I like, well, no, no, I just, I agree and don't agree with you. It's like,
32:04 Andrew Manganelli? it's cool. The Steam machine is the coolest thing. I also agree. It's really hard. Assuming the frame is going to be closer to a thousand dollars. There's no pricing on it yet. It's so hard when Quest 3 is 500 bucks.
32:18 David Imel? Yeah.
32:18 Andrew Manganelli? Like, it's just gonna be tough to do that. But you can play your Steam library on Quest. You can play your Steam library. It's like two thirds of people playing VR on Steam are playing it on a better Quest.
32:27 Speaker 04 Well, is there?
32:28 Andrew Manganelli? I don't know if it's your full Steam library, but you can play Steam games on it.
32:31 David Imel? Yeah, you can play.
32:32 Andrew Manganelli? So it's, it's, that's gonna be the tough part. It's like, if you are really big into VR gaming, you're probably, there's probably something like this. If you really, really hate meta, there's another reason to do it. It's how much money do you want to spend to stick it to meta? Which there are probably plenty of people to do that, but I think we all agree the machine's the coolest part about this. I mean, the controller's really cool too, but it feels like part of the machine launch.
32:57 David Imel? Yeah. Yeah. Again, it's an ecosystem play.
33:00 Andrew Manganelli? For sure.
33:00 David Imel? They're really selling the machine. The thing about the machine that's a little disappointing is you cannot upgrade the CPU or GPU. You can upgrade the storage pretty easily. You can, you can technically upgrade the RAM, but it's much harder. But yeah, the CPU GPU are kind of like set in there. So it's kind of like buying a console in that way.
33:18 Andrew Manganelli? Like, will people be able to open this up and find a way to do it?
33:22 David Imel? People find a way. They're soldered in. Yeah, they're soldered in and it's a custom motherboard. So no.
33:27 Andrew Manganelli? I mean, to get it that small, like this is, it's small.
33:30 David Imel? Yeah.
33:30 Andrew Manganelli? Even compared to small PCs, like it is crazy how they got everything in there. Listen, people will find out how to do stuff on this. They always do. But I think it's, it's definitely is the like, the pros and cons of this are which way does it, which way does it lean towards a PC or a console? And the upgrade ability is definitely on the, it's better than a console because you can stick an M.2, stick in there and get way more storage than like a, an Xbox or a PlayStation. But like the rest of the stuff, it's just gonna have to have a lifecycle, like a console. And I personally think that's fine. I think you're opening it up to so many games out there on a Steam library.
34:14 Andrew Manganelli? I think so many games on the Steam library, when you start looking at indie developers, play really well on a TV with a controller. Like, like I said, I've been having so much fun with the Steam Deck and a lot of these like, different rogue-like games would be awesome on just a TV laying on the couch rather than at my computer. And this makes that part, everyone who's played PC games envisions like their old PC getting shoved into their media console and being like on their backup gaming system on like a TV. But that's such a pain in the neck and doesn't flow well. So this being able to do that is awesome and I'm super excited.
34:48 David Imel? Valve said like 15 to 20% of people who own Steam Decks have it plugged into the TV most of the time. And that is the reason they made this, because it's way more, it's way more powerful. So it's kind of addressing that market of people that mostly do couch gaming.
35:01 Andrew Manganelli? Yeah. And I think like a really good number in terms of if you want to gauge powerfulness. I know you were like comparing specs and everything. They said it's supposed to be six times as powerful as the Steam Deck.
35:11 David Imel? Yeah.
35:11 Andrew Manganelli? Which is, I mean.
35:13 David Imel? To me, that means nothing because I've never used a Steam Deck. So it's like.
35:16 Andrew Manganelli? That's fair.
35:17 David Imel? I don't know.
35:19 Speaker 05 Is that like, you know, Apple six times more powerful?
35:22 Andrew Manganelli? Just graph, it's just vague graph.
35:25 Speaker 05 Yeah, is that all day battery life?
35:27 David Imel? Yeah, I'm also six times more powerful than the Steam Deck.
35:30 Andrew Manganelli? I think there will be tons, tons of games that are gonna run flawlessly, exactly how you want them to. And then the higher echelon of games will be like, okay, this isn't running like it is with my 1580 on my computer.
35:44 Speaker 04 I can't wait for this to be out so everyone can like run the benchmarks and play the games and do the things. Cause I'm so on the fence with this, like, I don't know if I want it or not. Because one, pricing, I think it really depends on pricing, but two, I think also performance. Like, I'm really curious to see how it performs. Because I'm not spending hundreds of dollars on something that I'm gonna have to upgrade. And I can't even upgrade it in like three or four years.
36:06 David Imel? Are you K with 4K 60 on every game that you wanna play?
36:10 Speaker 04 I don't know.
36:11 Andrew Manganelli? Do you? What consoles do you own?
36:13 Speaker 04 I have a PS5 and it's fine. And I have the PS.
36:20 Speaker 04 Do it. There it is.
36:24 Speaker 04 Nice.
36:24 Speaker 05 Sorry.
36:25 Speaker 04 It's alright. No, I have a PS5, but that's like when I get the PlayStation, when they come out every 10 years or whatever. I kind of know like, okay, I'm just stuck with whatever this is. Like, I feel like the point of Steam and Steam games is that if a game comes out that I really wanna play, I could just upgrade something for 150 bucks and then now I could play that game, you know?
36:46 Andrew Manganelli? On your computer.
36:47 Speaker 04 Yeah, if I had like a computer, like a PC computer. So like, I can't do that with this thing.
36:51 Andrew Manganelli? To me, that's why like, I think this is really cool, cause it's just replacing that cycle of a console now. Like, if this is the console I like, because the games I prefer are on Steam and a lot of the games on Steam that I like, I would prefer to play on my TV and like a, like, I'd much rather sit down on my couch and play a game with a controller than sit at my desk with a controller. Like, the games I like to play on the computer are like Valorant or Overwatch. They're things that, I mean, there's console Overwatch, but.
37:19 David Imel? You have two inches between.
37:21 Andrew Manganelli? Yeah, yeah, like I, my nose is touching the screen and I'm screaming and like it literally puts me in a bad mood all day. I want to sit down on my couch. Enjoy some things.
37:30 David Imel? Yeah.
37:30 Andrew Manganelli? Pause it.
37:31 David Imel? Yeah.
37:31 Andrew Manganelli? When Claire does say pause, I don't have to be like, I can't pause the game, Claire. Like that, I want that to be a game I can pause and walk away from.
37:39 David Imel? The computer games are for stressing yourself out. The TV games are for enjoyment and relaxation.
37:44 Andrew Manganelli? Well, that's kind of where I guess my, my thinking about all of this goes. Like, is this more taking aim to replace PC people? Or is this trying to replace consoles?
37:53 David Imel? I think it's starting to replace consoles, but with the variety of the games you can play on Steam.
38:00 Andrew Manganelli? Yeah, I think there's so many people who are, play on computer and on consoles. And I think this is like ideal for them without having to buy a PlayStation. Now they can have the same library between the two of them.
38:12 David Imel? Also, in the last couple of years, there's been a massive rise of like indie games. And I think indie games are very well suited for the TV.
38:20 Andrew Manganelli? Perfect example, I told you about Slay this part of the other day. I bought it for eight bucks. For you to buy it on your Switch was like $30, wasn't it?
38:27 David Imel? Yeah.
38:28 Andrew Manganelli? Steam sales are so-
38:29 David Imel? I got it on Steam, I believe.
38:31 Andrew Manganelli? Oh, you did?
38:32 David Imel? Yeah.
38:32 Andrew Manganelli? Okay.
38:33 David Imel? Yeah, I did buy Hades 2, which was $30.
38:36 Andrew Manganelli? I think Hades 2 is my next buy.
38:38 David Imel? It's, yeah, it's very good.
38:39 Andrew Manganelli? I've heard it's really good.
38:41 David Imel? So that's that. We're a week late over where it's gonna be almost two weeks at this point, once you hear it. But I hope that hearing it out of our mouths was a better experience for some reason.
38:51 Andrew Manganelli? Hopefully. And if it's not, I already know what comment you're gonna make, like LOL, these people shouldn't talk about games. So there, I already made it for you. You don't have to. Thanks.
38:59 David Imel? I'm casual.
38:59 Andrew Manganelli? God, I hate when these people talk about games. They know nothing.
39:02 David Imel? Although I'm not casual in Dota 2, because I have almost 6,000 hours.
39:05 Andrew Manganelli? Yeah, but what's your rank?
39:07 David Imel? We don't talk about it. I'm really bad.
39:12 David Imel? Keep playing it. Anyway, um, if you're not good at a game-
39:17 Andrew Manganelli? Speaking of really bad.
39:17 David Imel? If you're not good at a game, you're good at other stuff, right? Like, I don't waste my time trying to get good at a video game.
39:23 Andrew Manganelli? Okay.
39:23 David Imel? I don't.
39:24 Andrew Manganelli? You just said you have 6,000 hours.
39:27 David Imel? Yeah, but I'm trying to get good. I could waste more hours trying to get good, but intentionally.
39:32 Andrew Manganelli? Trying.
39:33 David Imel? Anyway, let's move on.
39:34 Andrew Manganelli? Well, speaking of rabbits, Rabbit, the company.
39:37 David Imel? What happened? Where was the rabbits before?
39:39 Andrew Manganelli? Don't ask.
39:41 Speaker 05 The rabbits game with the white, the Raven rabbits?
39:44 Andrew Manganelli? The rabbit, that's Nintendo.
39:46 David Imel? Well, Raymond, Raymond is not Nintendo, but the
39:49 Andrew Manganelli? The rabbit.
39:49 David Imel? The rabbits ex Mario collab is Nintendo.
39:52 Andrew Manganelli? Okay, I played that one. Anyways.
39:55 David Imel? Okay.
39:56 Andrew Manganelli? There's a recent article from Jason England at Tom's Guide that had some interesting news about the company we all know and love Rabbit that we talk about so nicely all the time. If you don't know about them, they're the people who made that R1 AI box. That's most well known for being orange and being able to do almost nothing. But this all started from an interview with Jesse Liu from Tom's Guide, where he was coming on to announce that Rabbit OS 2 is coming out soon. And he continued to tease a new device, which first of all, two things about that interview or the article about that interview. Jason at Tom's guy is saying Rabbit OS 2 seems rather good now,
40:40 Andrew Manganelli? which seems kind of interesting because it wasn't before.
40:42 David Imel? I've been seeing on the internet as well.
40:44 Andrew Manganelli? You haven't seen that? Okay, well, he also said the review is coming soon, but I can't find the review anywhere, probably because it's something we're going to talk about later. But Jesse also kept teasing that the Gen 2 device is going to be a three in one. What does that mean?
40:58 Speaker 05 It means shampoo, conditioner, and body wash, bro.
41:03 Speaker 05 Come on, man.
41:05 David Imel? Which, by the way, are always bad.
41:07 Speaker 05 Yeah, don't use three in one.
41:09 David Imel? Never use two in one, three in one.
41:11 Andrew Manganelli? Good point.
41:12 Speaker 05 Don't do that.
41:12 Andrew Manganelli? First of all, what are the three devices? And what is the one thing it's in? Second of all, we make fun of everything that is like X in one
41:19 David Imel? Yeah.
41:20 Andrew Manganelli? in tech, in life general, because they're usually terrible.
41:22 David Imel? I love feeling the keyboard keys on my tablet.
41:25 Andrew Manganelli? On the back of my tablet with my.
41:26 David Imel? Three in one, one, orange, two, square.
41:29 Andrew Manganelli? Three, AI.
41:31 David Imel? Three, AI.
41:32 Andrew Manganelli? It's just the same thing, but R2.
41:35 David Imel? Yeah, yeah.
41:36 Andrew Manganelli? But anyway, so after he released that interview, they received multiple tips alleging that Rabbit has. A history of either paying late or failing to pay. Some of their employees are contractors. And a number of employees have been on strike since October. Hell, yeah. So this is what the report says. This is obviously still all alleged. We will link the article to both of these in the show notes. If you would like to read all of it. There is a hilarious graph of the timeline of how often people didn't get paid, which is basically just a straight line of people not getting paid. To be clear, people not getting paid is not hilarious. The graph. Yeah, yeah, the graph is very funny because it's barely a graph. It's just a list. Just every month, workers not paid. Workers.
42:19 Andrew Manganelli? So from January to June 2025, payments to some contractors employees were at minimum each month, eight days late. Some months being 37 days late. That's is that late? Is 37 days late? That's another month. That's just crazy. I'd love to get a double check. I'd love to get a double check when the check before just never came. And then July, August and September, there were contractors and employees who hadn't been paid at all. Some of the employees threatened to go to the press and were met with please not to. Those responses, the or Rabbit's response to the employees were along the lines of payments would be conditional based on additional investment coming to the company at the end of October. What? You might get paid if we make more money.
43:05 Andrew Manganelli? And it's not even if we make more money. If we get more investment. Yeah. I feel like that should be immediate red flag as employee. Three of the employees have been on strike since the start of October, which three does not sound like a lot. It's not, but Rabbit only has 26 employees. So that's a fair chunk of 26 isn't that much either. And if I can go on a side rant, Ellis will love this. I was trying to figure out how many employees Rabbit had. So I typed in Google, how many? How many employees does Rabbit AI have? What happened? The Google AI overview said. The Rabbit R1 company has 26 employees. And that actually goes into a whole thing about how they're not getting paid right after that because of the most recent article. But I was like 26.
43:49 Andrew Manganelli? That sounds totally reasonable. But I just want to find the exact quote that they got that from. So the links weren't really helping me on the side. And then I went into the AI mode and said, can I see the exact quote you got this 26 number from? And I said, well, it's not an exact quote. In fact, we're just basing this all on an estimation of other information. Some websites say five to 10, some say 25 to 50. But then I was clicking the sources for that. It was bringing me to other rabbit like companies. Oh. Basing the number off of the wrong thing. Only for me to then read the rest of the original article I was reading. And rabbit themselves are quoted and they're saying 26 employees. So it was right. There was an exact quote.
44:33 Andrew Manganelli? AI overview just couldn't find the quote that it was right about.
44:36 Speaker 05 It's the second worst product ever made.
44:39 Andrew Manganelli? Well, on their LinkedIn, it says two to 10. Their LinkedIn says two to 10, which is what I was about to write. But then in the Tom's guide quote, they said it's three employees who are currently on strike. And we have 26 total employees. Maybe it's two to 10 and then they have contractors. Possibly. I mean, they definitely, there's contractors are not paying, so that could be right. That's true.
45:00 Speaker 05 Just to clarify, I did not mean the rabbit R1 is the second worst product ever made. I meant Google AI overview.
45:05 Andrew Manganelli? Yeah. Is the first worst product the human AI pen?
45:08 Speaker 05 No, it's LG's WebOS 25. It's just insane that they did that to us.
45:13 Andrew Manganelli? Dang. Rabbit has responded to this. They claims they were ready to sell units in India, but due to regulations that got paused, which caused a money flow issue. They Jesse claims that they've signed it or they've signed a term for a next round of investing and will get everyone paid for sure. Cool. Take that as you will. But like with all of this going on, how can you look at rabbit in a positive light at all? I mean.
45:43 Speaker 05 Like this is the company that like their, they, their founding was like this weird NFT pivot. Do you remember that?
45:49 Andrew Manganelli? Vaguely I, the coffeezilla videos on all of this were like crazy based on like the NFT stuff and then how like some of the AI things that we were, it was doing was like if it, you asked to play its favorite song, it would just play the Beatles every time. It like wasn't even really doing anything. It was just like, oh yeah, the Beatles. And then their whole generative UI thing was completely false.
46:10 Speaker 05 And like their weird tech demo live event thing was like totally staged and like, I don't know, man, this.
46:18 Andrew Manganelli? Yeah. So it's one of those things where they're launching Rabbit OS 2 and they're saying a new product's coming out next year.
46:25 David Imel? Sounds like they're trying to get funding to pay those employees.
46:27 Andrew Manganelli? Yeah, it sounds like they're trying to pay their employees and maybe stay alive. I mean, they stayed alive longer than humane.
46:33 David Imel? Yeah.
46:34 Andrew Manganelli? Congrats.
46:35 Speaker 05 They ain't making printers.
46:36 Andrew Manganelli? Yeah.
46:37 David Imel? At least they're not in the HP dungeon.
46:40 Andrew Manganelli? Yeah, true. It's, none of this makes me say I want to give them another chance with the OS 2.
46:46 Speaker 05 But we gotta do the same thing we did a few weeks ago. We gotta find something nice to say.
46:50 David Imel? Why would we do that?
46:51 Andrew Manganelli? I'd still like the orange.
46:52 Speaker 05 Yeah, the orange. I think the Rabbit has amazing packaging.
46:57 Andrew Manganelli? The little like Game Boy case kind of thing?
46:59 Speaker 05 Clear plastic.
47:00 David Imel? It scratches very easily, though.
47:02 Speaker 05 Yeah, but it's great packaging. So we said something nice. You can't be mad.
47:06 Andrew Manganelli? Yeah. Everyone calls us tech doomers. I think it's totally reasonable to watch a company hype something up, completely fail to deliver, and lose trust in that company.
47:16 David Imel? Yeah.
47:17 Andrew Manganelli? I think that's fair.
47:17 Speaker 05 Yeah, yeah. Especially when it's over and over and over again, you know?
47:21 David Imel? Yeah. Fool me once.
47:23 Andrew Manganelli? So yeah, let us know if you're using Rabbit OS 2.
47:26 David Imel? Can't get fooled again.
47:27 Andrew Manganelli? And if there's more than 26 people saying that, I'll know one of them wasn't working for the company.
47:32 David Imel? All right. Well, that's depressing. I guess we'll, uh...
47:38 Andrew Manganelli? Speaking of depressing.
47:39 Speaker 05 Yeah.
47:39 David Imel? Ad break. Um, no, trivia. Trivia's not depressing. Trivia's like a fun part of our show.
47:45 Andrew Manganelli? My score is dwindling and that's depressing.
47:48 David Imel? Compared to mine.
47:48 Speaker 05 Throughout American history, we have had so many visionaries make immense profits off of their brilliant ideas. We had Steve Jobs and Bill Gates believe that the personal computer could change the American home. We had Sergey Brin and Larry Page believe that a search tool was what Americans needed and the world needed to find what the information that they needed on the web.
48:11 Speaker 04 Jimmy Wales.
48:12 Speaker 05 Who's Jimmy Wales?
48:14 David Imel? The Wikipedia guy.
48:15 Speaker 05 Oh, we had Jimmy Wales, you know? And we had Gabe Newell, who realized that knives actually make a better casino than product.
48:25 David Imel? True.
48:26 Speaker 05 And with his billions, Gabe Newell just received shipment of his new 360-foot mega yacht. This thing has... And I got, I, from reading, it has a hospital onboard? It has a basketball court onboard?
48:43 David Imel? Nice.
48:44 Speaker 05 It has 15 gaming PCs, which feels like not that many.
48:48 Andrew Manganelli? Is that how many fit on a basketball court?
48:50 Speaker 05 It has a hot... That's how many fit near the hot tub. But guys, what is the name of this yacht? And this is a multiple choice question, so let's get our options.
49:00 David Imel? Is this from his yacht brand? Because he's now the CEO of a yacht brand.
49:03 Speaker 05 You're kidding me.
49:04 David Imel? I'm not kidding you. This is like recent news from a couple of months ago.
49:07 Speaker 05 Jesus.
49:08 David Imel? He like has a yacht company now.
49:10 Andrew Manganelli? This guy owns a yacht company and can't buy steam.com?
49:14 David Imel? Who owns steam.com?
49:15 Andrew Manganelli? No one, still.
49:17 Speaker 05 It, is it like a Satoshi Nakamoto sort of situation?
49:21 Andrew Manganelli? I have no idea.
49:21 David Imel? Yeah, maybe.
49:22 Andrew Manganelli? Steam.com used to be... Never mind.
49:25 David Imel? I would sell this to Valve for like $1 billion.
49:28 Andrew Manganelli? A.
49:30 Speaker 05 A, Alyx, A-L-Y-X, named after the Half-Life character. B, Leviathan, because it's really, really big. C, the USS Shinji Ikaru. And I had to look this up. Shinji Ikaru is a Neon Genesis Evangelion character. I hope I said all, any of that right. Or D, Zero Day, named after the kind of exploit.
49:57 David Imel? Why do we do the music?
49:59 Speaker 05 Because otherwise, I'm just going to be reading a list.
50:01 David Imel? Yeah, fair. I like the music, to be clear. Okay, um...
50:08 David Imel? We're going to talk about Gemini 3 and the other stuff Google did after this. So...
50:15 Speaker 05 Bye!
50:16 David Imel? Don't go away. Bye.
50:19 Speaker 05 No, not, not bye, we'll be right back.
50:20 David Imel? We'll be right back. Sorry.
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51:15 Speaker 01 Thousands of businesses from early-stage startups to Fortune 500s are choosing to build their websites in Framer, where changes take minutes instead of days. Learn how you can get more out of your site from a Framer specialist or get started building for free today at framer.com/wave for 30% off a Framer Pro annual plan. That's framer.com/wave. Rules and restrictions may apply.
51:35 Speaker 06 Support for the show comes from Google Gemini. You know that moment when curiosity strikes? You're exploring a new city with the family, and a sculpture catches your daughter's eye. What is that? Who made it? With Gemini, you can snap a picture and get a fully interactive breakdown of its history, architecture, and even hidden secrets. Gemini is built for moments like that. Whether you're learning something new, solving a problem, or looking for your next favorite thing, Google Gemini is here to help. Download Gemini, Google's AI app, or visit gemini.google.com to learn more.
52:14 Speaker 07 This episode is brought to you by Indeed. You're ready to level up your business, but the pressure to find the right person to make that happen is intense. Indeed Sponsored Jobs can help carry the load. It boosts your job post to help it reach quality talent fast. Cut through the chaos with Indeed Sponsored Jobs. Get a $75 sponsored job credit at indeed.com/podcast. Terms and conditions apply. Hiring now? Then this is a job for Indeed Sponsored Jobs.
52:44 David Imel? Welcome back. We are blessed by Google this week for dropping a big announcement on a Tuesday.
52:49 Andrew Manganelli? Google!
52:50 David Imel? Google! Thank you to Sundar for dropping this on a Tuesday. Anyway, we got a big announcement. It's Gemini 3. So previously, we were on Gemini 2.5, and it was kind of falling behind a little bit. Opening, I had released GPT-5, which was a little bit of a disappointment. Recently, they had GPT-5.1. We had Cloud Sonnet 4.5. Now, Google has released Gemini 3. Google is calling it its most intelligent and factually accurate AI system yet. That's quite important. They call it the strongest model in the world for multimodality and reasoning. Supposed to be much better at nuance. They talked about this a lot. So like, trying to actually understand what you mean instead of just what you say.
53:34 David Imel? That was a big focus for them. Another big thing about Gemini 3 is it's supposed to be much less sycophantic and much more objective. So it's supposed to be a lot more to the point when it gives you answers. It's not going to be like, "You're absolutely right. You're the most beautiful person in the world." Something like that. So it's a...
53:52 Andrew Manganelli? What if that's what I want?
53:53 David Imel? I mean, you could probably ask it to do that. But by default, it's going to be just a lot more straight to the point, more objective. It's also much better at math and science. And yeah, so...
54:06 Andrew Manganelli? These updates just sound like it went from 3rd to 4th grade.
54:09 David Imel? Yeah.
54:10 Andrew Manganelli? Like, each one of these is just like, we're going through elementary school now.
54:14 David Imel? Yeah.
54:14 Andrew Manganelli? We're really good at math.
54:16 David Imel? Yeah. I listened to an interview with Demis Hassabis, who is the CEO of Google DeepMind. And a few years ago, he did this interview, and he said, "We are 5 to 10 years away from AGI." And then in this interview, he said, "We're 5 to 10 years away from AGI." And that was like...
54:33 Andrew Manganelli? You want to guess what he'll say in 5 to 10 years?
54:34 David Imel? I was going to say. Pretty sure he said that 3 years ago, so. A big feature of Gemini 3 is that it's supposed to create dynamic interfaces. So if you ask, like, "What is the three-body problem in Google Search?", and it uses the AI mode, it's supposed to explain it and then also create an interactive animation that you can like play with to actually show you how it works. And that's a really big...
55:04 David Imel? Feature of this of this model that they're really pushing is kind of the learning capabilities, the ability to be able to move through things that you're trying to learn with this platform.
55:17 David Imel? And it didn't work for me. So I tried pretty much every single exact prompt that they had given it in the ads that they put out, and none of them worked. On one of them, I asked for a visualization of the three-body problem, just like it had asked, or just like they'd put in the video, and it described what a visualization might look like. And then I said, can you just make the visualization? And it said, I don't have the ability to make interactive visualizations. And I'm definitely on Gemini.
55:47 Speaker 04 This is just on like the google.com AI mode?
55:50 David Imel? AI mode, yeah.
55:51 Speaker 04 AI mode, but you have to change the dropdown to the one that includes like graphical things. There's like the default one, which is just like regular problem solving, and then they have a special one that will like whip up UIs and stuff.
56:03 David Imel? Yeah.
56:03 Speaker 04 How do you get to that?
56:06 Speaker 04 Me and Dave were trying to figure this out earlier because on my account, it's just a dropdown. And on his, it's nowhere to be found.
56:11 David Imel? On mine, it does not show at all.
56:12 Speaker 04 Maybe it's like rolling out slowly.
56:13 David Imel? It's possible that this is rolling out slowly. But yeah, it seems like Google is kind of starting to try to skew Gemini towards being like a tool that you can use to learn, a tool that you can use to build UIs. And as part of that, they've released Google Anti-Gravity. And this is a dedicated app that you can download. It's kind of Google's response to Cursor. Cursor was this AI coding app that has blown up in the last year, gotten very, very popular. Most companies are using it as an IDE.
56:43 Speaker 04 You may remember it from Trivia Extravaganza, where Ellis looked at all of the startups that were founded by YC, and it was like the cursor of blank, the blank, the cursor of blank. Like those companies, that's what Cursor was from.
56:57 David Imel? Yeah, and Cursor costs $20 a month for the pro version. Pro Plus is 60, and Ultra is 200. So Google's Anti-Gravity is free, which is pretty cool.
57:08 Speaker 04 For now.
57:09 David Imel? For now. And it's pretty good. Adam and I both used it last night. I used it to create, so whenever there's a new model that comes out that talks about its vibe coding capabilities, I just have it build my pina colo locator app, which is like where to find the best pina colada near you. And it honestly did a pretty decent job.
57:28 Speaker 04 It did a pretty decent job. It looked like a template you would find on a website building.
57:34 David Imel? Yeah.
57:34 Speaker 04 Whether or not it was functional was different, but like at least the front-facing UI of it all was like, okay, I could see this.
57:40 David Imel? Yeah, but I had made Gemini 2.5 build Pina Cola locator and it looked horrible. So this is definitely a big improvement in the Pina Colada finding capabilities. If you want to use that as a benchmark.
57:52 Speaker 04 I was just gonna say, this is the benchmark that all AI companies should be using.
57:56 David Imel? Yeah, but the kind of cool thing about Google Anti-Gravity is that it's got different modes depending on how forward with the agents you want to be. So there's a mode where it's mostly you coding, but then you can just like talk to it. There's one where you tell it what you want it to do, but then it creates a checklist and it asks you across every step if you liked that or if you want to modify it. And then there's another mode where it just basically does everything in one shot. And so it is an IDE, but based on the interview that I heard with Demis, it's more that it's like a development tool that they built an IDE around as opposed to an IDE with AI features. So it's agent first.
58:38 David Imel? So, I mean, it's pretty cool and I think that a lot of the industry is now gonna move over from Cursor, which is kind of bad for Cursor. Famously, Google bought Windsurf, which was like one of the biggest acquisitions ever. And that was also, I believe, like an AI coding environment.
58:55 Speaker 04 I'm really interested in this in particular because Cursor has been such a game changer for the developers I know.
59:01 David Imel? Yeah.
59:01 Speaker 04 And they're working in like very big code bases. So like Cursor seems to be able to understand everything, you know?
59:07 David Imel? Yeah.
59:08 Speaker 04 I obviously haven't, like when we mess around with these things, we don't, we're not connecting to some like big corporate database, you know?
59:14 David Imel? Yeah.
59:14 Speaker 04 So I'm not sure how it's gonna function in those situations. I would imagine, fine.
59:18 David Imel? Yeah.
59:19 Speaker 04 But I don't know, we haven't been able to test it. I just like opened up my personal website and had to do a couple of things just to see if it would get the context of it. So like to your point earlier where you were saying that they were trying to make it more nuanced. One of the things I did was in my personal website, I basically just have a list of the places that I've worked, right? So like I have, it's my resume. So I have Waveform as one of them, like Waveform Podcast. And I told it in the IDE, I didn't do this in Google Gemini or anything like that. I was just like, put a floating emoji of a microphone next to Waveform Podcast, which
59:53 Speaker 04 Coding a floating emoji that will like animate a little bit, not super difficult, but the context of like, understanding the word waveform podcast, finding where it is on the page, putting this right next to that in particular, I was wondering if that would work, if that would like trip it up at all, and it did it like perfectly fine, which was like pretty interesting.
1:00:11 David Imel? So how did you do that? Did you give it a screenshot of your website?
1:00:14 Speaker 04 No, I opened up my project, because I have my Reacts code, just like, my website is built in React and I don't even know, something, whatever. It's built in React, so I have that folder on my computer, in my computer. So I just opened it up on an IDE, it looked through everything and was able to like, yeah, figure it out.
1:00:33 David Imel? Yeah.
1:00:33 Speaker 04 Um, one thing that I did find interesting though, was this morning, I was trying to, I've been like having on my to do list and my website forever, that I want to add a second page, right?
1:00:43 Andrew Manganelli? You have a second page?
1:00:45 Speaker 04 For what?
1:00:46 Andrew Manganelli? Games.
1:00:47 Speaker 04 I know, so that I did that this morning.
1:00:49 Andrew Manganelli? Oh, you did?
1:00:50 Speaker 04 I had to, I wanted to add a second page because I didn't have a second page at first. It was just a static website, because that's the easiest thing to host in AWS, like whatever. Uh, so I told it to use React Router to make a second page, which is, that's just how you like navigate pages in React, whatever. Uh, and it completely just built out a second page for me, no problem. And I was like, okay, that's, that's fine, that's cool. Like, I'm glad it did that relatively quickly. And then I was like, okay, now make a snake game in that page. And it made a snake game, so if you go to my website and you look at that snake game, there's a snake game there.
1:01:20 David Imel? Adamalena.com?
1:01:22 Speaker 04 What?
1:01:22 David Imel? Adamalena.com?
1:01:23 Speaker 04 Yes, yes, adamalena.com. But I also put Marquez's face as the little thing that you have to eat if you play the snake game. But I'll just, if anyone wants to see, please just go to the video, not my website, because I pay per click for people that go there, so.
1:01:39 Andrew Manganelli? Also, unless I'm using the wrong keys, oh, oh, it's ASD.
1:01:44 David Imel? And it does kind of break. If you go left and then, if you go left and then right, it immediately kills you.
1:01:49 Andrew Manganelli? I thought that's what just snaked it.
1:01:51 David Imel? Oh, maybe it does.
1:01:52 Andrew Manganelli? Because you're on top of yourself. Nothing's popping up though.
1:01:55 David Imel? Okay.
1:01:55 Andrew Manganelli? I'm just spinning around. Um, oh, wait, I got a score and I don't even know how I got it. Okay.
1:02:01 David Imel? One thing that I found very funny about Google Anti-Gravity is you have to obviously give it a lot of permissions because it has to be able to control parts of your computer.
1:02:08 Andrew Manganelli? Everything.
1:02:09 David Imel? Everything. But when you install it and then it brings up the website where it's like, "Thanks for installing Google Anti-Gravity. You've successfully authenticated." It has a Docs link and then it has a Twitter link and it calls it, it says Twitter. It doesn't call it X, which I find, as it should, quite funny. Anyway, something about Gemini 3 that I was thinking about that feels a bit concerning is like, this is very cool that you can do these generative UIs, right? Like, you're supposed to be able to do these generated, interactive tools that helps you understand math and science. You can ask it about mortgages and it creates like charts that kind of like show you what things would cost and all this stuff. But this is all happening on Google.com,
1:02:54 David Imel? right? Like, a number of years ago, Google got in a lot of trouble with the European Union for scraping websites and putting the little text answers on the side of Google.com. And they got in trouble because they weren't guiding people to the websites. And we've talked about this before. If people are not getting guided to the websites, those website owners are not making money. If those website owners do not make money, then Google does not have information to scrape from. So if you keep people on Google.com and you're just, you ask any question and it just creates an interactive thing for you on Google.com, it kind of feels like Google is trying to make Gemini and Google.com effectively the same thing, where you can just do everything in one little window. And I see where the
1:03:39 David Imel? value in that is, obviously, but then no websites are going to get any traffic. So, I don't know, the far-reaching elements of this, if this is like very successful, make it feel like SEO is just officially cooked.
1:03:56 Andrew Manganelli? Well, it's a new SEO now. Now your SEO has to get picked up by...
1:03:59 David Imel? Yeah, but then you're not getting paid.
1:04:01 Andrew Manganelli? But then you get nothing.
1:04:01 David Imel? You get nothing. So what's even the benefit? Yeah, I don't know. I foresee a future in which there is a much tighter integration of content creator slash like writer relationships with their audience. And that's going to be the way people make money. It's not going to be the banner ad version of the internet that we have had for a very long time and has been dying a pretty quick death. But either way, that is, it is pretty weird. There have been pretty interesting demos that people have been putting all over the internet. Someone asked for a interactive 3D Lego builder and it made it for them like instantaneously, which is pretty cool. I can't get any of this stuff to work and it's very frustrating.
1:04:42 Speaker 04 I think you're using the wrong mode.
1:04:43 David Imel? I don't know, man. I've been trying.
1:04:44 Speaker 04 You need that dropdown.
1:04:45 David Imel? I've been trying. Either way, people are pretty excited about it, which is a big shift from how people were feeling about GPT-5, which was a pretty big letdown to a lot of people. So it's, the races are heating up forever and always. And now we're here.
1:05:02 Andrew Manganelli? I had a made a pretty sick game this morning. Or you'd use the example that...
1:05:06 Speaker 04 Oh, yeah. So when David and I were trying to test this out, we were trying to figure out why it was showing up on my account, not on his.
1:05:11 David Imel? Yeah.
1:05:12 Speaker 04 One of the prompts was that someone on X had posted like, "Make me a dino game that has me jumping over the latest news stories from today." And then it's basically like, you know, when Chrome has no internet and you can just play the dino game that jumps over things and gets a high score? It's that, but every obstacle that comes your way is just a news story. But the first news story, because it did it for me, like it spun it up. I had a little game to play. The first news story was such a long headline that there was no way to win. It was just like you would jump and it would just...
1:05:41 Andrew Manganelli? You couldn't jump high enough.
1:05:42 Speaker 04 You would fall immediately into the first block and just like crash out.
1:05:45 David Imel? Yeah, it was very funny. So, I don't know, mess around with it. See what you, see what dumb games you can make. And anyway, that was the big news of the week. So I think that we are going to take it to trivia before we do our second.
1:05:57 Andrew Manganelli? Trivia.
1:05:58 David Imel? Ad break. Trivia, dude. Trivia, dude.
1:06:01 Speaker 04 The standard way to measure reverb time is called RT60, which is the amount of time the reverb tail takes to drop 60 decibels.
1:06:09 Speaker 05 Wait, why are you asking a question about reverb?
1:06:13 Speaker 04 Because the shirt that I'm currently wearing and that Andrew is also wearing is called reverb, the waveform reverb.
1:06:18 Andrew Manganelli? I thought you were going to put the reverb on.
1:06:20 David Imel? Oh, yeah. Reverb.
1:06:25 Speaker 04 Please write on your whiteboards. The correct abbreviation for decibels.
1:06:31 David Imel? Okay.
1:06:32 Speaker 04 The correct abbreviation.
1:06:34 David Imel? I got it.
1:06:35 Speaker 04 Okay. If you say so.
1:06:38 Andrew Manganelli? This is definitely a trick question. Question, question, question.
1:06:43 David Imel? Alone.
1:06:47 David Imel? You got it.
1:06:49 David Imel? Alone.
1:06:52 Speaker 04 Alone.
1:06:55 David Imel? Anyway.
1:06:56 Speaker 04 We'll be right back.
1:07:08 Speaker 01 Support for the show comes from Jira by Atlassian. So AI is only as useful as the context it has to work from. But when that context is scattered across tools like threads and DMs, that means your team and your AI agents end up flying kind of blind. That's the problem Jira solves. What's the gold title to your project? What got decided last week in Slack? Atlassian's teamwork graph pulls all of these pieces together from Jira, Confluence, Slack, GitHub, and more, so nothing falls through the cracks. With Jira, you can actually share that context with the AI agents you already use, like Claude, Cursor, and GitHub Copilot. Assign them work directly or connect your agents through MCP. Spend less time digging through endless links and DMs, less time chasing down what got decided and by who, and more time actually shipping. Learn more at jira.com.
1:07:53 Speaker 01 That's J-I-R-A dot com.
1:07:56 Speaker 07 This episode is brought to you by Indeed. You're ready to level up your business, but the pressure to find the right person to make that happen is intense. Indeed Sponsored Jobs can help carry the load. It boosts your job post to help it reach quality talent fast. Cut through the chaos with Indeed Sponsored Jobs. Get a $75 sponsored job credit at indeed.com/podcast. Terms and conditions apply. Hiring now? Then this is a job for Indeed Sponsored Jobs.
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1:08:56 Speaker 05 All right, welcome back. We're beginning this third segment with a story because Adam and I ran into each other on our morning commutes. And we got on the path train, we left New York City, we got to New Jersey, and we were waiting at the bus stop. And New Jersey Transit buses have an app that The Verge famously said is a bad app, but I think is a good app. Me lie. Damn, it's a good app.
1:09:21 Speaker 04 It's okay.
1:09:22 Speaker 05 It's for a public transit app, it's amazing. Okay, so let's, anyway, we opened the New Jersey Transit app and tried to activate our tickets and low and behold, we cannot connect to the server. And I'm like, what's going on? And then Adam goes, oh, it must be the cloudflare thing. And I go, what cloudflare thing? And that's how I found out. And then we had the really funny joke of like, how do we explain to the bus driver that neither of us have cash, but we need to get to work? And the app doesn't work. Like, do you go up to the bus driver and say, so do you know what cloudflare?
1:09:55 Andrew Manganelli? So cloudflare, you basically got EMPed.
1:10:00 Speaker 04 Basically, every, I forget, what day was this? Tuesday?
1:10:03 Andrew Manganelli? Yeah.
1:10:04 Speaker 04 Earlier this week.
1:10:05 Speaker 05 This is yesterday.
1:10:06 Speaker 04 Yeah.
1:10:07 Andrew Manganelli? It was yesterday.
1:10:08 Speaker 04 Yesterday at the time of recording.
1:10:09 Andrew Manganelli? I was trying to find something at Ikea, because Alex is going to, the Ikea website was down.
1:10:12 Speaker 04 Yeah, like, a lot of the internet was down. And I feel like every time one of these moments happen, everyone collectively realizes how much power we give these like, server companies, basically, that keep the infrastructure of the whole internet up.
1:10:25 Speaker 05 Didn't you say that down, didn't you say down detector was down?
1:10:28 Andrew Manganelli? Yeah, down detector was down.
1:10:29 Speaker 04 Even down detector was down.
1:10:30 Andrew Manganelli? If down detector's down, whatever you're about to search for is probably down.
1:10:35 Speaker 04 Yeah.
1:10:35 Andrew Manganelli? They don't need to be up during that.
1:10:37 Speaker 04 Yeah, no, but it's just like one of those moments that everyone, like when AWS goes down. I think that happened like two weeks ago and everyone's like, damn, like there's a lot of services that run on AWS. People like legit can't use their jobs.
1:10:48 David Imel? Yeah, it feels like large portions of the internet are just falling apart like every few months now.
1:10:51 Speaker 04 Yeah, but brings me to my discussion point because Jono sent me a tweet that he found this morning from Privates Talk Y on X that he was like, this might be a good discussion away from. And I clicked and I was like, huh, okay, yeah. So here's the question, you have to pick one. Do you want unlimited cloud storage? But you can only use cloud services or unlimited local storage, but everything is local.
1:11:21 David Imel? So when you say everything is local, you mean you have to download every YouTube video you want to watch?
1:11:25 Speaker 04 Every YouTube video, every service you use, it has to be local. So Spotify, you have to download the songs first.
1:11:30 Speaker 05 Wait, how do I use Twitter then?
1:11:32 Speaker 04 You have to download a hundred tweets at a time.
1:11:35 David Imel? Isn't that what Twitter already kind of does?
1:11:36 Speaker 04 Yeah.
1:11:37 David Imel? Kind of, but yeah.
1:11:38 Andrew Manganelli? Uh, that's.
1:11:40 David Imel? I would say.
1:11:41 Speaker 04 Well, no, you would have to have the entirety of Twitter on your phone.
1:11:44 David Imel? It's really hard. But you have unlimited storage.
1:11:46 Speaker 05 Yeah.
1:11:47 Andrew Manganelli? It's hard to imagine this as a regular website browsing kind of thing in terms of like YouTube, Twitter and stuff like that. As it just like, everything that I save, would I rather have it all local or all cloud based? I still think that's a fair question because would I rather have it all local where I'm individually
1:12:07 Andrew Manganelli? transferring things between all my different devices, which can be a pain in the neck? Or would I rather all my devices be able to connect to the same cloud thing? But then we have an internet issue. Even that's a hard question. I think if it was in terms of live your entire life on the internet, we'd have to start imagining some things that don't really exist for things like YouTube and I mean, unless my phone just had.
1:12:35 Andrew Manganelli? One billion terabytes of just literally every single thing in the world.
1:12:41 Speaker 05 Could I still use like, like, how different is the world in this fantasy? Like, can I use iMessage? Or is it like every time I want to sync my iMessage across devices, I need to like, put all of my texts on a thumb drive and like move them over?
1:12:57 Andrew Manganelli? That's it, dude, even if it's just stuff you're saving locally, like if I took some photos, now every time I want to send them to the other families that I was with, I have to bring them an SSD and like plug it into their computer.
1:13:12 Speaker 05 What's the IP over Avian from?
1:13:15 Speaker 04 Oh, yeah, over Avian care.
1:13:16 Speaker 05 Yeah.
1:13:17 Speaker 04 Yeah. Okay, I'm gonna bring this back into territory that I'm intimately familiar with. Do you guys use Obsidian?
1:13:24 Andrew Manganelli? No.
1:13:24 Speaker 04 No. The note taking app, no one, okay, cool.
1:13:26 Andrew Manganelli? You knew the answer to that question.
1:13:28 Speaker 04 I know, I just had to set it up. I know. So the way Obsidian Sync works is the files themselves are local. They're in a folder on like your hard drive somewhere. And what you do is you can either set this up yourself or pay Obsidian $5 a month, which is how they make money, to keep that folder in sync across all of your devices. If you don't want to pay them, you could just set it up yourself. So that's like an option. So in this world, in this scenario, I'm envisioning basically everything works like that. Like you have a hard drive somewhere at home that has unlimited folders. So to your iMessage question, you would have to then like, every time you pull out your phone, you gotta like pull down to refresh and have it sync across the servers, you know?
1:14:05 Andrew Manganelli? And then I would get all my local files on all of my devices?
1:14:08 Speaker 04 Yes, exactly.
1:14:09 Andrew Manganelli? So that's the obvious answer, no?
1:14:10 Speaker 05 It's not cloud versus, it's not cloud versus local. It's would you rather have access to the world's like cloud network, cloud backend? Or would you rather have to set up everything yourself, PewDiePie style, so to speak?
1:14:23 Speaker 04 Yeah.
1:14:24 Speaker 05 Hmm. I have thought about this so many times, Adam. Now that I understand the true paradigm of what you're presenting here, I really have a lot to say. Because in a perfect world, I would love to have everything local. It's the reason I don't have an eight-sleep mattress. Well, there's a lot of reasons I don't have an eight-sleep mattress, but that's up there.
1:14:48 Speaker 05 I, if I could be confident that I was secure, that all my stuff was like encrypted properly and no one could break into my home networks. Or cert-, you know, then-
1:15:02 Speaker 04 Well, that's the benefit of like the cloud.
1:15:04 Speaker 05 Yeah. I think the security is what keeps me from like going full quote unquote off grid. And I know it's like the most ridiculous use of off grid ever, but you know, like I think I will be bound to the cloud flares, to the Google Drives. Actually, Google Drive is not secure at all. Don't, don't keep safe.
1:15:24 Andrew Manganelli? It's secure because it's impossible to download anything from it. So that wasn't gonna take your stuff anyways.
1:15:29 David Imel? But think about this too, like if you had to have everything local, you, if anything was on your computer, you couldn't access it on your phone and vice versa.
1:15:37 Speaker 05 No, no, not local. Like, like, I, I think what Adam's actually asking is like, would it, would you ra-, like assuming a world where there was no black and white, where either like you did not have access to any internet backbone stuff other than DNS. Like, cause it, cause in, I think in Adam's definition of local, you're allowed to set up a server. You know what I mean? Where you create your own cloud storage and have in infinite storage in that world.
1:16:05 Speaker 04 But you have to deal with it then.
1:16:07 Speaker 05 Yeah, but then you have, then you have to be the one that's like actively managing it. It's like the, it's almost like asking like, it's not like asking like, would you rather eat vegetables or not eat vegetables? It's like, would you rather only eat vegetables that you grow yourself? Or only eat vegetables that you get from the store? Which I guess for most people, they've already made that choice. But it's the same way with file storage. Like, most people do not host a single thing-
1:16:29 David Imel? Right.
1:16:29 Speaker 05 -themselves. And as someone who's like tried to host things themselves in their apartment, like got a big fancy router that I can hold multiple networks on and like, dude, that, that- Fucking sucks. It's a lot. It's a lot of work. It's definitely a lot of work. I know, but the idea of being free. See, I told you, I thought a lot about. Especially if you have unlimited storage.
1:16:49 Andrew Manganelli? In this, in this perfect world of unlimited storage, sounds like locals the obvious answer with the extra work.
1:16:56 Speaker 04 But I just thought that it would, it was an interesting question because like then my mind went to like what Ellis was saying like, okay, then there's the privacy, the security, the ease of use. The part of the big talk about all this AI stuff is that it's all done on a server somewhere. You don't have to worry about it like, so does that mean I need to download these models and run it myself on my own server if I want to use AI?
1:17:14 Andrew Manganelli? Don't use it.
1:17:15 Speaker 05 Well, don't. That's a whole other thing that we should talk, we should do a bonus episode on that. But Andrew, like one of your favorite products of the last 12 months that I've heard you bring up a lot is the picture frame, the smart picture frame. Like, would you get as much enjoyment out of that picture frame if you had to manage that server yourself?
1:17:32 Andrew Manganelli? I guess.
1:17:34 Speaker 05 Sure.
1:17:36 Andrew Manganelli? Like the picture frames server? The way the picture frame works is it's pulling pictures off of my phone.
1:17:42 Speaker 05 Right, but if you had to, if you like, if you had a network like at your house, a router, and it was up to you entirely to vibe code all of the systems.
1:17:51 Andrew Manganelli? Oh, then we're talking in like a, yeah, this world is crazy then. So when you want to go watch TV.
1:18:01 Andrew Manganelli? Or I guess stream things, you have to have, you're setting up.
1:18:04 Speaker 05 No, I don't think there's that. It's a Plex server. You have to get a Plex server. Exactly.
1:18:09 Andrew Manganelli? Okay. Yeah, that's a ton of extra work.
1:18:11 Speaker 05 It is.
1:18:12 Andrew Manganelli? I think you just don't get to do anything.
1:18:14 Speaker 05 No, people, people do this. This is why you need to be on Twitter, man.
1:18:18 Andrew Manganelli? No, this is not why I need to be on Twitter.
1:18:21 Speaker 05 Didn't PewDiePie just, I cannot believe how many times I brought up PewDiePie in this episode, but did, this was like a whole thing. It's like PewDiePie like embarked on this as like a side quest and, and instantly got hacked. Nice.
1:18:36 Andrew Manganelli? Yeah, I don't know.
1:18:38 Speaker 05 You don't even seem interested by the concept.
1:18:40 Andrew Manganelli? I think I'm more confused by the concept.
1:18:44 Speaker 05 Okay.
1:18:44 Andrew Manganelli? If that makes sense. I'd probably just pick cloud then.
1:18:48 Speaker 05 You like, to you like, I mean, cloud is the obvious choice here, right?
1:18:54 David Imel? I mean.
1:18:55 Speaker 05 What we're talking about.
1:18:56 Andrew Manganelli? The one you don't want to make, but it's the easy choice.
1:18:57 Speaker 05 Yeah, there are obvious downsides. For example, like a random company like CloudFlare could have a bug and all of a sudden you lose access to like half of your digital life. You also like can never really know how secure your stuff is because you just have to trust these companies that time and time again actually like violate your trust. You have to pay them money, which sucks.
1:19:19 Speaker 05 I hate paying people money.
1:19:22 Andrew Manganelli? I mean, the same thing's true with the other thing. You could have a house fire and now you've lost.
1:19:26 Speaker 05 That's true.
1:19:26 Andrew Manganelli? Literally every piece of everything that you have. You could have a weird electrical surge. You could have a somebody spill water on something.
1:19:35 Speaker 05 Yeah.
1:19:36 Andrew Manganelli? Yeah.
1:19:36 David Imel? On the other hand.
1:19:38 Andrew Manganelli? This is one of those, those questions that has no answer and everyone on Facebook just yells at each other.
1:19:44 David Imel? On the other hand, if you wanted to like edit a video, you'd have to like stream the footage, right? If you were all online, you'd have to edit the video online. And then, and then if the internet isn't fast enough.
1:19:58 Andrew Manganelli? I guess, yeah, like you're streaming it from whatever server you've uploaded it to. In this metaphor, you plug in the memory card and it uploads to the cloud.
1:20:07 David Imel? And then, but then to edit a video locally, you have to like stream it.
1:20:11 Andrew Manganelli? Yeah.
1:20:11 Speaker 05 Let's, let's remove ourselves even further from the reality we live in. I think, I think the question that is most interesting here is, would you rather everything be Chromebook? Like there's no processing, no storage, nothing gets done on your end. You're effectively using a terminal at this point, right?
1:20:28 David Imel? No.
1:20:28 Speaker 05 Or everything be RTX 5090 Super Chud gaming PC?
1:20:34 David Imel? Gaming PC. Cause sometimes I'm in a coffee shop and either they don't have internet or the internet's bad and I want to edit video.
1:20:42 Speaker 05 But then, but then.
1:20:45 Andrew Manganelli? Where are you putting your video?
1:20:46 Speaker 05 On my unlimited local storage.
1:20:48 Andrew Manganelli? For you to watch by yourself?
1:20:50 Speaker 05 No. Yeah, maybe this is time. This is hard. Marquez, please come home.
1:20:56 Andrew Manganelli? Dad.
1:20:57 Speaker 05 Dad. Wait, you're right. Can you not be a YouTuber if you have unlimited local storage?
1:21:03 Speaker 04 The way that I was-
1:21:06 Speaker 04 No, no.
1:21:06 Speaker 05 Local.
1:21:07 Speaker 04 The way that I was thinking about this was the infrastructure, like, all these companies still exist. Like, the infrastructure's still there. But you can only access the things by having it local.
1:21:17 Andrew Manganelli? So everyone gets everything else but my goddamn frame. I have to figure out by myself.
1:21:21 Speaker 04 Well, YouTube or Spotify, let's say, like, you're heading out for the day. And it's like, I'm not gonna be home all day, but I wanna listen to music. I have to, like-
1:21:28 Andrew Manganelli? Download everything.
1:21:29 Speaker 04 Download everything in order to listen to it. Like, it's only available on local-
1:21:35 Andrew Manganelli? We lived that life, like, 15 years ago.
1:21:38 Speaker 04 Yeah, and everything was great.
1:21:39 Andrew Manganelli? It was.
1:21:40 Speaker 05 Everything was better.
1:21:41 Speaker 04 Okay, so here we go. We've landed on an answer. Just take us back 20 years.
1:21:44 Andrew Manganelli? If you just wanted to say iPods are sick, we could've just said that.
1:21:48 Speaker 05 Could've just said that. It's a really interesting point that I think a lot about because I do feel like we are increasingly- Yeah. -entering an era.
1:22:00 Speaker 05 I'm gonna choose my words very carefully here. Give me a sec.
1:22:04 Speaker 04 All right, so I'm leaving these pauses in.
1:22:06 Speaker 05 I think we are increasingly entering an era that resembles feudalism. Yeah, technofeudalism. Where we are nothing but serfs to the cloud flares and the Amazons and whatever Larry Ellison's nonsense is called. Yep. And, um-
1:22:23 Speaker 04 Isn't that already what we know?
1:22:25 Speaker 05 It's technofeudalism. Yeah. All right, can we please go to trivia, guys? Trivia. I wish I had, like, a sad version of the trivia music. Yeah, this is interesting. Guys, turns out you don't actually need- Marques Brownlee?
1:22:40 Andrew Manganelli? Well, the numbers will show that later, after this episode.
1:22:43 Speaker 05 There's that we do actually need Marques Brownlee. It turns out you don't actually need to be a technofeudalist to make a billion dollars. All you need to do is convince children across the world to gamble on knives. Let's go. Gabe Newell did that and bought a 360-foot yacht. I need you to tell me which of these is the actual name of his ginormo boat. Also bought a yacht company, to be clear. Did you, do we confirm that? Yes. Okay. What a, what a guy, man. Mm-hmm. Are you ready? He loves the sea. A, Alex, A-L-Y-X, like the Half-Life character that's not in Half-Life 3. B, Leviathan, which is just a word that means Gai-Normo.
1:23:23 Speaker 05 C, the USS Shinji Ikaru, from the Neon Genesis Evangelion protagonist, I think. Maybe he's an antagonist. Maybe it's a she, I don't know. Or D, Zero Day, referring to the kind of exploit.
1:23:43 David Imel? I put B, because I thought C was a trick question.
1:23:46 Speaker 05 B is the correct answer. It's called the Leviathan.
1:23:50 Andrew Manganelli? Such a boring name.
1:23:51 Speaker 05 Gabe Newell would, I mean, I don't actually know anything about this guy, I shouldn't. It just seemed kind of funny. But also, USS is reserved for US Navy vessels. Civilian vessels cannot have the USS thing. David, congratulations on scoring your eighth point. I needed this.
1:24:08 Andrew Manganelli? Oh, it's getting tight.
1:24:09 David Imel? What are you at, nine, 10?
1:24:11 Speaker 05 10, yes. So you're still two points ahead. But that might change, because my boy Adam's got some trivia for you right here.
1:24:22 Andrew Manganelli? Abbreviate decibels, please. What is it?
1:24:28 Andrew Manganelli? What do you think?
1:24:29 Speaker 05 And we are going to be very pedantic on this one.
1:24:33 Andrew Manganelli? As pedantic as the 6-7 part of my trivia?
1:24:40 Speaker 05 Yeah, actually.
1:24:41 David Imel? Really?
1:24:42 Andrew Manganelli? So I have to say this out loud?
1:24:44 Speaker 05 Well, okay, I'm not gonna be that pedantic.
1:24:49 Speaker 04 We have to say it out loud for audio listeners, anyway.
1:24:52 Andrew Manganelli? Okay.
1:24:52 Speaker 04 All right, what do you guys got?
1:24:53 David Imel? I wrote lowercase d capital B.
1:24:57 Speaker 05 Yes.
1:24:58 Andrew Manganelli? I don't know if I'll get marks off for this, but lowercase d capital B with a period after it. I don't know why I thought period.
1:25:07 David Imel? That's not as pedantic as I thought.
1:25:09 Speaker 05 The lowercase and uppercase was really what we're looking for here.
1:25:13 David Imel? Do you know why that is?
1:25:14 Speaker 05 Because bells is the unit, and a decibel is a tenth of a bell, or 10 bells. I guess a decibel would be 10 bells.
1:25:24 Andrew Manganelli? Wait.
1:25:25 David Imel? A bell is a unit of sound?
1:25:26 Andrew Manganelli? Yeah, is it actually like a bell?
1:25:28 Speaker 05 It's a unit of energy.
1:25:29 Andrew Manganelli? So it has nothing to do with bells?
1:25:31 Speaker 05 It's not even spelled.
1:25:31 Andrew Manganelli? This is why no one cares about audio.
1:25:33 Speaker 05 That's true. It is named after Alexander Graham Bell.
1:25:39 Andrew Manganelli? Founding father.
1:25:40 David Imel? Well, I think that's been it for this week. Thank you for tuning in. Make sure that you like, subscribe and um, I don't know.
1:25:48 Andrew Manganelli? Tell Elsie's a big dumb idiot.
1:25:49 David Imel? Yeah, do that on whatever platform you like using. Thanks for watching. Thanks for listening. We'll be back next week. Um, Marquez will finally be back from being hot in Portugal and um, hopefully we'll have more news for you.
1:26:01 Speaker 02 Is it even hot there right now?
1:26:03 Andrew Manganelli? I don't think it's, no.
1:26:04 David Imel? Doesn't look hot in all the videos. It looks kinda cool actually. Not like, you know, the other kinda hot.
1:26:09 Speaker 02 The kind that it's like totally normal to call your boss.
1:26:11 Andrew Manganelli? If you're running on a beach.
1:26:15 David Imel? Andrew, save us.
1:26:16 Andrew Manganelli? And you're throwing a frisbee. Wait for our series by Adam, Lena and Ellis River. We're partners with Vox Media Podcast Network.
1:26:21 Speaker 02 Honestly, produced is doing a lot of work there.
1:26:24 Andrew Manganelli? And our intro outro music is created by Vane Sil.
1:26:27 David Imel? Bingo.
1:26:29 Speaker 02 Let's go.
1:26:38 David Imel? Bro, I exercised once.
1:26:44 Andrew Manganelli? End sentence.
1:26:44 David Imel? I've been so, I've been so tired.
1:26:49 Speaker 09 How many discounts does USAA Auto Insurance offer? Too many to say here. Multi-vehicle discount, safe driver discount, uh, new vehicle discount, storage discount, legacy.
1:26:58 Speaker 08 How many discounts will you stack up? Tap the banner or visit usaa.com/autodisc counts. Restrictions apply.
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