The Interview: Steve Burke of GamersNexus

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cool zone media

hello and welcome to this week's better

host ed zittron and for this week's episode i flew out to north carolina to do a longer form interview the first of its kind on the show a little slower a little more fun and i did it with steve burke founder and host of gamers nexus an incredible hardware youtube channel that's been going since 2008 and has over two and a half million subscribers we talked about the history of gamers

the state of the hardware industry, tech journalism, GamersNexis' incredibly scientific approach to hardware testing, and of course a little bit about AI.

I think you're going to really like it.

Enjoy.

So, how long has the channel been running?

How long have you been doing this now?

About 17 years and five months.

And you started off just doing gaming content?

I did go back in the files and found like a Modern Warfare trailer, I think, and then the Office Space Parody, which was awesome.

Yeah,

so it started as game reviews and trailer analysis videos, which was the Modern Warfare 1 and Battlefield trailer analysis.

That was like a whole sub-genre back then.

You got the trailer, you kind of picked apart what's going to be in this game.

And yeah, then I did gaming reviews.

We spotlighted a bunch of indie games through Steam's Greenlight program and

kind of slowly got into hardware.

What was Greenlight?

Is that kind of the early, early access?

Yeah, that was Steam's thing where they gave indie developers who are unestablished kind of a way to try and get onto Steam.

And so we did a lot of early coverage of games.

And I saw you doing a lot of convention interviews.

How did you grow from there to where you are today, which is a huge studio and massive testing facilities and such?

The interviews and the stuff at the conventions was kind of the turning point for me because I was up until maybe 2012 or something like that, plus or minus year, I was still technically in college.

And then I went to

PAX, Penny Arcade Expo.

I think I went to the 2010 one.

And after I got home from that, I decided this is kind of the only thing I want to do.

Right.

Go to stuff like this.

And so it took me two years, but you know, I eventually just dropped out.

And then,

yeah, then just started doing more of those.

And

it was the best way.

First of all, they're just fun, but then secondly, it was sort of how I started actually meeting the people we would end up working with in the hardware industry.

Right.

And did,

how'd you get into testing?

Because I found one of you, I think, your first viral clips, which was the testing a power supply with a paper clip, I believe.

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

So, how did you move into that?

Because it, it seemed like it took a minute to get there.

Yeah.

So

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

So that's when the hardware really started.

And I'd already been building computers, but hadn't actually really published much about it.

So I started publishing build guides.

I think it was just as simple as those were the first thing that had any kind of like readership because it was all articles back then.

Right.

And so they they were.

So you started out writing.

Yeah, exclusively.

And then the channel got added in 2009, but it wasn't treated.

You know, YouTuber was not, that's not a job in 2009.

Like, that's, yeah.

It's a little before, yeah.

Like, you had maybe Casey Neistat was at the front edge of that.

Yeah, I think, I think it was like maybe Vine was, was it still around?

When did Vine pop up, Christ?

But no, back then.

So you were just on the fringe of this new content.

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

We got rid of the ads when we reintroduced the website recently.

But like point being,

you don't do that having no revenue unless you aren't really thinking about trying to make it a sustainable thing, right?

It was purely for fun.

And how did it become a sustainable?

How did it become your main job?

Yeah.

Uh, I think

as YouTube grew, basically, so we were kind of in the early, we weren't the first sort of, I'll call it generation of YouTubers who were able to successfully

make it a job, But I would say we were maybe in the next generation right after that.

And so yeah, I started publishing more videos alongside the articles.

So it really was with case reviews, computer case reviews, where we would originally just focus on only writing a case review.

At some point, I'm saying we a lot.

For a while, it was just me.

And then every now and then it'd be someone to help.

But we would do case reviews.

And then I realized this would do well with video video because there's depth to it and there's like just a lot of mechanical stuff.

And those videos started doing pretty okay.

And did you move away?

When did you move away from the website?

Because I know you've come back to it.

Yeah, we probably around 20,

I think around 2018 maybe is when I kind of like mothballed it basically for a couple of years.

And

that was just because at that point,

we had just moved out of the house and into an office, and then into the first office.

And there was just too much content flow on the video side.

And up until that point, I was the only one who was capable of maintaining the site and publishing to it, not because it was a special skill, but because the website was so completely fucked up and cobbled together.

Because it didn't have a CMS or anything, it did, but I built it like

okay, yes.

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

Classic CMS shit.

Yeah.

And I'm not a professional web developer.

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

Yes.

That was something I came to realize.

And so anyway, it just more and more, you know, all the pieces were falling off the car while I was driving it.

And eventually I was like, I can't, I can't, like, I have to just

do one thing.

And YouTube is not a platform I need to maintain, which is good and bad.

Yes.

But

yeah, we kind of put the website on ice for a while.

And then it wasn't until Wendell from Level One Techs eventually approached me and he was like, hey, I'm a web developer actually.

And he really wanted us to get our

content scripts preserved in article form again.

Right.

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

Right.

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

That's really cool.

Yeah.

And you've brought it back, though.

You're somewhat more focused.

Like, is it, do you ever see the website growing into more of a media outlet or is it just

and is it just you writing it as well?

Yeah, it's just us.

You know, it's the same team.

It's the, it's basically the video scripts that the team writes converted into an article.

Right.

And so sometimes it like it's not going to read as naturally as a pure article might,

but we try to adapt it.

And

if there's any right now, to me, it's like sort of a community resource where I know for us at least internally, it's way more useful to have words.

Right.

You know, to skim through and control F than a video.

But also just like preservation-wise, it's easier to preserve articles and videos.

Are you

how is YouTube as a platform, though?

Is it are you a slave to the algorithm so much?

Do you try and appeal to it or do you just make content?

I think

YouTube as a platform,

there's a lot of ways to feel about it.

For me,

it's almost like asking me how I feel about water at this point.

Right.

You know, it's like, how do you feel about water?

And it's like, well, I mean, if I don't drink it, I die.

But like YouTube,

it's not something I try to game or play to.

It's basically just a fact of life for me.

You know, it's like it's there and I have to think about it.

And every now and then I'll probably complain about it.

But realistically,

I personally, I think it's kind of a fool's errand to

chase quote unquote the algorithm too much because it kind of stifles and takes focus away from the thing that actually matters, which is the content.

Right.

You know, and so like, yeah, there's things you could do.

Like you can play with the thumbnail or the title, but what I really wouldn't want to do is change the actual type of content that's being produced just for algorithmic purposes.

Because I think that that also creates kind of like a

almost like a black hole of creativity where you stop producing the content for the purpose it was intended and you start producing the content to be a farm to

use your phrase at that point become basically a slave to the algorithm where you can't escape it once you start doing that, I think.

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

Right, exactly.

Because

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

Right.

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

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

no, because

believe it or not, they don't talk to us.

I mean, I've heard content creators who do argue with them.

I've heard ones that don't talk to them at all.

It's interesting to hear, especially you're 2.6 million at this point.

I think so, yeah.

That they don't interact.

Yeah, so there was a period where they would assign basically a channel rep to you.

And

so I would get on a call.

I don't know, somewhere around maybe, it was in the high hundreds of thousands of subs.

And that was kind of cool because, like, okay, if something catastrophic happens, like, let's just say,

I don't know, whatever.

I get locked out of my account because I fudge the password too many times, something stupid like that, right?

Like, I at least have someone I can talk to.

Those people were

rotated through a revolving door basically every three or four months.

So, right when you start to know the person and they can help you, they're gone.

And that was by design, I think, as far as I understood it.

Uh, that program got killed.

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

Um,

and that's so strange.

And the best I have is a liaison.

He's called, and he's a great guy.

He's very nice.

It's not really his job, you know, to help us, but he does it because he's a nice guy.

And so he's like the guy for like dozens of creators.

Yeah, it's just so bizarre to me that there isn't a specific rep

with other people, but like a rep whose job it is to cater.

You would think that

you're entertainment talent on some level.

You'd think they'd want to be available to help.

And I'm sure if you asked Google, they would say that they do want to be available to help, and they are.

And you can tweet at them.

Oh, great.

Yeah.

But that's the weird thing about these platforms.

It does feel like

they benefit as much as possible while providing very little stuff.

Well, their revenue share is public.

You know, for AdSense, YouTube AdSense, so there's the ads before, after, in the middle of videos, whatever.

I think it's $45.55 with them getting 45%.

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

And I think it's variable depending on them.

30% for them.

They think that.

Yeah, for them.

So, you know, YouTube certainly certainly benefits.

They, to argue in their favor, hosting videos is unbelievably expensive.

So I get it.

I didn't know that.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Well, the split's pretty high.

I'm okay with it.

Like, I actually, I'm fine with it

with them getting 45% or whatever it is of AdSense

because they don't impose restrictions on things like us selling our own ads.

Right.

So it's like, I don't really care, you know?

And I don't care if people block ads on our channel or whatever.

I don't give a shit.

But like the, I think it's, it's only if, if they ever overstep and they start restricting what you're allowed to put into your content in a way that

beyond like, I don't know, whatever, they, they have their own rules about

like hate speech and stuff like that, right?

Which is fair.

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

Then I'd have a big problem.

Apple style.

Is YouTube where you make most of the revenue?

In one way or another, yeah.

I mean, YouTube is the reason it's possible to do any of this because I was doing it as articles only.

And YouTube didn't really become a focus until I said like 2018 or so as a primary source.

And

so, yeah, through

mostly merchandise sales on our store through Patreon support, which is the monthly donations from viewers.

And then sort of after that, it's like ads we sell and then AdSense.

Right.

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

Pretty much, yeah.

Probably, probably till I would say like

till 2015, very seriously focused on only writing.

Yeah.

So was that your full-time thing?

Did you have other jobs as well?

I did several side quests.

So, yes, I would collect side quests from local business owners.

You know, like greetings, adventure.

I need a local website.

Can you build that for me?

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

Yeah.

And

let's actually get really

not necessarily super specific, but what's your history?

Like, without getting too biographical, like, how did you come into doing it?

Were you just naturally interested in this?

Was this just a childhood thing?

I guess it depends how far back we go, but

gaming.

was always an interest and continues to be an interest, of course.

I don't know.

I mean, the first game I played was probably Lemmings.

Hell yeah.

Yeah.

Hell yes.

Humans for me.

Yeah.

Yes.

First Lemmings game?

Yeah.

Yeah.

Hell yes.

No, I'm so you were primarily a PC gamer, though.

Yeah, for sure.

Yeah.

So Lemmings, and then there were some other ones back then.

And I played a lot of NES, SNES,

N64, GameCube, all that stuff.

A lot of Nintendo.

Eventually got a PS2 as well.

But after the N64 era, so like early 2000s was when I built my first computer.

Right.

Before that,

I was playing games like Command and Conquer, Red Alert,

and

things of that nature.

This was back when every family had a quote-unquote computer room, right?

Like there was a room for the computer.

Or a nook in Micah.

England's so small.

Right.

Yeah.

But like point being where it's just like,

this is the dedicated computer area for the computer this household shares.

Yes.

So I played games on that, built a computer, you know, early 2000s with Pentium 4 and

remained interested.

And I guess I started really getting more interested in the coverage when

we don't feel free to ask a follow-up if you're interested in this, but basically I was running like a gaming guild, like group of friends, you know?

Nice.

So I built a website.

Were you gaming together?

Yeah, Counter-Strike Source, Age of Empires 3,

EverQuest, things like that.

You played EverQuest?

Yeah.

What server?

I think I was on Curana.

I was on the Wraith.

The Wraith.

I think Curana merged into the Wraith.

I went on Stormhammer as well.

I paid the extra on it.

It was not worth it, man.

Oh, good to know.

Yeah, same scars then.

I interviewed Brad McQuaid once.

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

Yeah, I got in a lot of trouble over EverQuest 2.

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

Oh,

yeah, and also, though, specifically as like the, I don't know, there was like some kind of devil worshipping, like, whatever,

kind of like DD, right?

Yeah.

DD got the same treatment.

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

Right.

You had to work eight to nine nine hours a day.

Yeah.

Oh, God.

So, anyway, so you had this guild, sorry.

Yeah.

And long story short,

the website I had built for that group of friends with a forum that had all these gaming guides on it.

We worked very hard on.

As you know, we were pretty, at that point, we were mostly high school, early college age, at the highest end.

And everyone put a lot of effort into making these guides.

And then at one point, the website was hacked by just some common CMS breach.

Right.

And I didn't know how to restore from backup and didn't really know what I was doing.

So I lost all the data.

And so you could imagine for a group of like teenagers losing gaming guides is like devastating.

It's like, you're like my life's work.

A guide for how to rush in Age of Empires.

Yeah.

Oh my, oh my, well, I mean, that was Game FAQ's era, I guess.

But

if you were making your own, they can't have been that good on Game FAQs.

Yeah.

So the Library of Alexandria there.

Yeah, sorry.

Yeah, no yeah so we we lost that and that's when i made a new website and that was the gamer's nexus site so so you're all self-taught then uh pretty much yeah i mean

self-taught in the sense that there's not a lot of formal education um

not self-taught in the sense that the people I've worked with over the years, especially engineers in the industry, are the ones who've actually taught me a lot.

Yeah.

Right.

But nothing formal, I guess, yeah.

And it seems that

something I've noticed with your coverage and actually the surrounding channels is it seems like people in hardware are relatively generous with their time.

Like there are some people who aren't, but like a lot of the scientific people seem very key to and like want to help and make sure there's understanding.

Yeah, I think so.

I think people like the person who comes to mind immediately is Tom Peterson, who currently works at Intel, used to work at NVIDIA.

But he's the type of guy where when you talk to him, you can tell he's not in it because he's trying to sell Intel's or previously NVIDIA's product.

He's in it because he likes the technology.

Right.

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

Yeah.

Which is really cool.

And other YouTube channels as well, Steve like Lewis Rossman, Hardware Unboxed, they seem like very, they want to collaborate, which is really cool.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Rossman and Steve from Hardware and Boxed I've done a lot of videos with.

Yeah.

You're having fun?

Yes.

Because there's a lot of cynicism and kind of depression in media because of the job environment.

There's also, even above that, it seems like just a depression around the work.

But it doesn't, it seems more fun what you're doing.

And indeed, throughout the hardware, people.

I think it's

we, one of the things I kind of really actively spend a lot of time managing is

trying to make sure

there's a cadence to the content.

Where we actually just did this recently.

I kind of look at it and it's like, all right, this is, we've had a lot of heavy stuff recently.

We had tariffs into black market, into Bloomberg, you know, whatever.

And so then we switched to publishing more folks on reviews, methodology.

I ran a review of a Toy Story computer.

Which I have seen and it's insanely cool.

Yeah.

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

It's fine.

It had problems with shipping, but the point being,

you know, we, we do try to

like I try to manage

what the tone of the content is and for how long because

you just you don't want to lose the fun of it, you know?

And so yeah, I would say, I would say, also, even when it is a story that might be more maybe categorized as depressing.

So, like, if you're covering some kind of corruption or something in the industry,

there is still

fun to the

job of covering that thing, where like the fun part is not necessarily the topic.

It's the trying to piece together something that's like really complex and figure out how to explain it to anybody.

I mean, the GPU tariffs, yeah, the tariff swan and the GPU

black market stuff was very

seemed like it probably sucked a little of your soul out, but that looked like fun.

It looked like a fun adventure.

It is.

I mean, the terrorist one, you know, it was, it's a story that there were people we spoke to who were very negatively affected, and you feel for those people.

And that part is sad if you, you know, put yourself in that position.

But then on the kind of keeping it fun for yourself, covering it side, if you really just kind of step back and look look at it, it's like, how fortunate can you be to, for your job,

be like, I'm going to get on a plane in 12 hours, you know, and fly, and then I'm not going to know where I'm going next until I get there.

Like, that on its own is pretty fun.

Yeah.

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

Right.

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

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

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

Yeah, we were speaking with some suppliers, and so we had a price sheet.

Yeah, we went to when we went to China for that trip.

We met a guy we weren't planning to meet.

He was known as Mr.

Five in the video, and he was awesome.

And where do you find these?

Is it people come to you?

Are they connections?

I realize unilaterally you probably can't answer, but

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

Right.

And then it just kind of develops.

So you meet a person,

you hopefully leave a good impression with them.

And then they might say, you know, hey, I know someone who might be interested in talking to you.

And you kind of go from there.

And I think the biggest thing is like,

and this is kind of challenging sometimes, but learning to

kind of roll with it where I operate at a relatively high level of anxiety in terms of preparedness.

Yeah.

You know, and so to have a wrench thrown in where it's like, hey, you might be interested in meeting this guy.

I'm like, well, like, my schedule is really, I have figured it out.

You have to be willing to deviate from it.

Yes.

That's the only way to do kind of any good broadcast work.

Yeah.

And you pulled it off.

It was good.

Nice.

So you've got quite an operation here as well.

Around how many people work with you?

Day to day,

it's

five to five to ten total day to day.

So it just depends, you know, who's doing what each day.

Right.

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

Yeah, a couple editors/slash camera operators.

We have a couple writers slash testers.

So kind of like if you're testing the product, you're probably the one who's going to write the review.

That often makes the most sense.

Not always, but and then editors often will shoot the B-roll they need because they kind of hit a clip, they realize they need something.

Right.

Yeah.

And then we've got

a remote researcher as well who's been contributing to some of the news stories coming up.

Very cool.

And how long does a video take?

Putting aside the obvious ones, like the Terrace one, which I think are a little bit different.

How long does it take to get a review together?

Or like any particular video?

A review of, I can give you the actual numbers, a CPU cooler.

requires 40 hours of testing work where there's some kind of manual involvement from the technician.

So that if we have one cooler, that's going to be someone's job for one week, basically.

Right.

And so right now, that'll be Mike typically running those tests.

And then the actual, so if I write that review, it probably takes me two hours to write it.

You know, it takes me the runtime plus 10 or 20 minutes to film it.

And then

because you obviously have whatever mistakes that you do retakes, right?

So runtime plus 10 or 20 minutes.

And then the editors, I would say they typically take about eight hours to complete a relatively simple review edit

plus some camera work.

So a cooler review, you might be somewhere in the range of 50 to max, maybe 60 hours.

And then something like

the black market video, if you don't count my time, so if my time is zero,

I don't remember exactly how many hours we had in it.

It was.

I know if you count my time, it was over 300 hours.

Jesus.

So cool though.

It might have been more like 400.

And

the ASROC motherboard video we just did on

CPU failures and ASROC boards.

That one was like,

with editing and filming time, I think that was 240 hours.

So that's an example of a content piece that we will lose money on, but it's like, it's subsidized.

First of all, I don't care because I want to do it.

Secondly, you do have to pay for it somehow.

Right.

And so for us, we basically raised so much money from the black market video.

I'm able to go, okay, that's paid for you know walk me through that situation yeah which the as rock the as rock thing so the as rock thing is um they have some kind of yet unknown issue that is resulting in the death of cpus right expensive ones and people don't know exactly what it is they haven't been entirely forthcoming about it it seems like they don't know what the is going on

and uh and so we we got a viewers motherboard that had killed a CPU and did a bunch of diagnostics.

This was one of the instances where we couldn't come to a conclusion and we decided let's just like let's just publish everything and maybe someone can use it.

Has the company been communicative?

Have they been trying to fix things?

They

appear to be trying to fix things just not very successfully.

Right.

I would not say they've been communicative.

Like they haven't, I don't think they've done a good job at telling their customers what's going on.

Right.

So how is your relationship in general with the hardware manufacturers?

You mentioned the Intel.

It sounds like you have some people who are friendly and then others.

Yeah, it depends.

You know, I'm sure you've worked with enough people where the people are often different from the company in terms of the stance.

And it really depends person to person.

But

generally speaking,

the companies are able to maintain a fairly open line of communication and be relatively mature about even criticisms because normally

the people actually in between us and their bosses are pretty good at their job.

Right.

You know, so like there's a guy at AMD who he's incredible at what he does because, and I really don't think consumers,

I think a lot of people don't know this job role exists, but it's really important.

And the role is effectively to be like the translator between outside criticism and internal action.

Right.

So not quite a PR role, but like a developer, not quite developer, like it's almost like title.

Like tech marketing, maybe.

Yeah.

But like, they're not really marketing in the traditional sense.

But

so the guy at AMD, he does a really good job because he's told me how if we have a criticism, I asked him, you know, what happens internally?

Yeah.

And he said, well, normally like marketing might go to him and kind of be like, what the fuck?

Like, why did Steve say this?

Or Hardware and Boxed or whoever.

Right.

Which is covered by Steve, I guess.

But they might ask, why did the Steve say this?

And

it's his job to figure that out.

And he was telling me he normally just asks them, well, is it true?

Right.

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

See, this is the thing.

I've run a PR phone, and it's like, when clients come to why'd they say that?

I'm like, and many times said, Why did you do that?

Right.

And they say, Well, it's not a fair.

I'm like, How is it unfair?

Because if you can explain to me, I can go and get this fixed.

Right.

But you have to explain to me.

And it is interesting that that role has to exist.

But yeah, I mean, if it's just a communication problem, right?

If they're like, well,

it's true, but we didn't.

We don't like it.

It's icky.

Right.

So there's got to be a real reason.

But yeah, most of the companies, the relationship is, is fine.

And they generally take criticism well.

The people who interface with us take the criticism well because it's just a job.

The companies don't always.

Do you have any executive exposure?

Do you know if any executives watch?

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

How did you?

At least.

Because it was communicated to me by someone who works with him all bold all caps yeah i was told uh he was not thrilled oh that doesn't that doesn't sound like jensen he's usually such a cool head but do you do you know if i don't even need names but do you know if there's like a good amount of them uh

sometimes yeah i mean we amd we had a

a video where we were basically like begging them to not fuck up the launch of their 9000 series gpus

because their competition like no no one had showed up for the consumer.

Intel, they were kind of there, but they're like not super viable yet.

And anyway,

I know after that video, they had emailed us, and this wasn't a thread I told them was on record, but they'd emailed us and said,

you know, basically their sort of executive marketing team had watched it and they did talk about the problems we raised.

And that's cool.

It seemed like they addressed some of them.

Yeah.

Do you ever try and get interviews with them?

Yeah, occasionally.

I mean, especially if there's

like the ASUS situation with their warranty, ASUS contacts for people has had an ongoing problem with customer support where people who need a warranty filled often end up posting online saying they got screwed.

Is this across the board or with specific things?

Definitely motherboard.

I'm not sure about other categories.

Because I really like the Rog X ally, but have had a few listeners say, yeah, we've got some warranty issues.

And it's actually, I kind of wanted to address that with you in the know.

Well, that one I know a lot about, the allies specifically.

Yeah.

So to like close the loop on the executive question, the ASUS thing,

we published a series about the warranty problems.

We proposed a number of fixes.

And eventually

I really pushed them to let us speak to an executive in customer support.

They put a director of marketing in front of us, very, very nice guy.

Yeah, but not his job.

Right.

And so I kept pushing back on him where I was like, look, man, nothing against you.

You know, you're not the guy.

Yeah.

And so they eventually got us to

the right guy, which is something I try to remember to,

we really try to go to executive levels if possible.

Because if it's just some dude who was told to do a thing, I can't really press him on the decision.

You can't punish him.

It's not really his decision making.

It's not his company.

He doesn't know.

Yeah.

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

So we try to go above that person.

And

we did the same with Newegg.

They sat a room full of like four, I think three or four executives with us

a couple years ago.

Yeah.

So a lot of times they'll play ball, which like credit to them.

Yeah.

But the ASU's ally thing,

the long story short on that is we had

a defect.

I want to say it was like the joystick or something.

We had some kind of defect.

We sent it in for actual repair on our unit anonymously or you know as a as a pseudonym and

they um sent us a photo of the exterior of the chassis where there was a tiny nick like a tiny tiny crater that's basically the size of a pinpoint uh

in the end the edge of the chassis that is purely cosmetic and this is something that like we literally put it under a microscope to see what they were talking about and they said it wasn't covered and they said that they would have to charge us, I forget how much it was, it was like 90 or 180 or something dollars

to repair a problem that was unrelated to this cosmetic thing and was their fault.

And they were trying to use it to charge us for the repair.

Very silly.

Yeah.

So we ran that as a story.

And,

you know, I mean, eventually it was handled, but

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

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

Right.

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

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

Right.

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So, okay, let's change, let's change tag to the industry at large.

And I want to talk to you about electronic arts, this EA thing, because I know you just did a video.

My whole thing was, how does EA get worse?

Because as a company, they've been dog shit for a while, and that's a personal opinion.

I don't know.

I think that's an objective.

Yeah, I mean, look at the Madden franchise.

I think, I don't know.

EA is like bizarre to me.

I don't get it.

I know you can look at their financial reports and whatever, but

the powers at play in the EA acquisition, it's multiple governments through one connection or another.

And

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

Right.

And I personally, like, am very skeptical of it because the U.S.

government in particular has dragged video games at every opportunity they get for decades.

Right.

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

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

Yes.

So it's, yes.

So there's private equity, as you said, there's Saudi money through the PIF.

And then on the U.S.

side, Affinity Partners, which is helmed by Jared Kushner,

to former senior advisor to the president, and I think who he just sent over to

some kind of peace discussion or something.

So he's still involved somehow.

But anyway, so that's the US side where you've got PE money, you have somehow indirectly the U.S.

government, but through a former U.S.

government official.

And then his firm, the Affinity Partners,

has received somewhere around $2 billion of initial investment from the Saudi PIF.

That was a New York Times report previously.

So his fund is funded by the other people invested.

Yeah.

And I think, if I remember the numbers correctly, it was close to $90 million out of their $160 or so million in management fees for the last filing was

from managing Saudi money.

And then you've got the PIF from Saudi Arabia working with this firm to buy EA games.

One of the things we didn't talk about in the video that I just, I hadn't really thought too much about it, and I saw some excellent comments

that made me think more about it, but is that

companies like EA Games

control a huge amount of data that seems inconsequential on the surface?

It's video game data.

What is, okay, so what?

Let's just pretend there's a clean path for the data to exit EA Games and go to the US government or go to the Chinese or the Saudi Arabian government, whatever, right?

Let's just pretend there's a path there.

They can't really do anything useful with your save game file.

But one of the things that does

interest me, and I just want to maybe caution here that this isn't,

I don't think there's anything going on here right now, but I think there is the opportunity

to abuse anti-cheat systems, which are like kernel-level software in most cases that run on the computer.

So if you wanted to deploy

some kind of rootkit with very low-level access to computers, you could do it through anti-cheat solutions.

Now, I don't think this is happening.

Right.

Right.

And so, I want to make sure people know that because you don't want to sound like some crazy wild conspiracy theory.

I'm just saying it's possible for it to happen.

But I mean, there's probably a trove of data with EAP play or whatever, the horrible cloud services.

Maybe they have chat logs that could be useful to governments, right?

The US government has talked about wanting to bring Gabe Newell in for a testimony of some kind to talk about radicalization of teens who play video games.

Right.

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

They are.

They already did that.

Yeah.

And I mean, if you want to go way back, right, this has been, the circus has been had before.

It was just last time it was with rock music.

Right.

So.

Oh, God.

I just, as I said, it's like, I don't know how EA gets worse, though, because

I don't know if you're a sports fan or anything.

I'm aware of sports.

Yeah.

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

It has got worse while also staying the same.

And I don't know.

I mean, the only way for them to make it worse is to just have it steal your money.

This put just actually go through your wallet.

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

Yeah.

Great.

This is why you should film these too, because your expression wasn't.

Yeah, just the fate, the revulsion.

It feels like you melt it.

And most of the debt, it looks like, is going to, sorry, most of the revenue is going into the debt as well.

Yeah,

I think it was like a $20 billion debt or something

that they have to pay down relatively fast.

I don't remember how much per year off the top of my head, but it's enough where

I'm not sure exactly what the game plan is, but the current CEO who's remaining the CEO, at least right now, I think his name is Andrew Wilson, I want to say,

has stated that they have plans for use of AI, EA, and I think the PIF

as a whole have stated use plans for agents, AI agents.

Oh, the very real thing that exists.

Yeah.

Great stuff.

Oh, fucking EA.

So that's how they do it.

They become EAI and it sucks even harder.

But

let's change topics to another weird acquisition investment.

Intel.

Yes.

How do you feel about this NVIDIA Intel situation?

I think the NVIDIA Intel US government situation,

it's really weird.

I am not, I mean, I don't like it.

I think

I understand the U.S.

government's interest.

I'm sure they look at it as absolutely a national security asset.

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

And so, if for some reason you needed a local resource to do that, Intel is it.

So I get it.

But at the same time,

the way it came about is kind of bizarre to me, where

the timeline of events was

Trump says Intel CEO, Lip Bhutan, is, quote, highly conflicted, unquote.

And that the only resolution to this problem of being highly conflicted would be for him to resign.

The reasoning, it seemed, for that belief of being highly conflicted is past or current investments by Intel's current CEO in Chinese companies, including some which have Chinese military ties.

So that's my understanding of that event.

Immediately following that, within days, well, within one day, Intel responds publicly.

Intel's CEO within days gets on a plane, meets Trump.

Now they're friends.

Trump says, calls him a success.

Right.

And then shortly after this,

you know, you're on this roller coaster.

Intel stock the whole time plunges when he says he needs to resign.

It skyrockets.

And then shortly after all that, the U.S.

government is

effectively acquiring 10% of Intel.

Right.

And yeah, I mean, and then on the NVIDIA side, after a couple of weeks after this stop, NVIDIA is acquiring $5 billion worth of Intel, which I think is around 4% or something, according to Reuters.

So

I just, I don't really know.

I guess my answer is, Ed, I don't know what's happening anymore.

And that's kind of where I've come down as well, because it's not clear what happens next.

They're going to do something together.

Do you think they're going to keep making the Arc GPUs or is that because they haven't said they're going to stop making them?

I think they're at risk.

That was an unintentional pun.

Very few people will get.

No, I loved it.

Nice.

I love it.

I think

there is some risk there.

So like the stated plan is that they're going to work together on x86, which is an ISA and instruction set architecture that is used in CPUs.

And they want to work together on x86 solutions, which there's not a ton of.

There's a lot of ARM, there's Intel, and there's AMD for x86.

For the most part, some VIA.

And

they also are planning to work together on...

NVLink integration, which was NVIDIA's actually effective solution.

Was that they got through Mellanox, that acquisition?

Mellanox is their networking infrastructure, and NVLink is their sort of

onboard, although now it's expanded, but basically PCIe alternative.

Oh, okay.

So PCI Express wasn't doing it for NVIDIA.

This is actually one of the areas where it's not just all marketing bullshit.

Like NVLink serves a real purpose, it does a real thing, and they need it.

And so they were going to work with Intel to integrate this protocol into other products,

which will make NVIDIA's GPUs more deployable on CPUs like x86 CPUs.

Right.

Do you think there could be a good thing about this?

Could there actually be a positive?

It'll definitely be better for NVIDIA's solutions.

I mean, if you want to look at it purely in a vacuum of ignore literally all business and all competition aspects and look at only the product level, their product should be better as a result of it, in

I think there's risk to both AMD and to Intel here.

So, in particular, something that's interesting that a lot of people don't know is the mobile, the laptop side of the business, where

this is another stated goal of NVIDIA and Intel is they want to make laptop hardware.

So, they want to make silicon with RTX chiplets, which is a tiny piece of silicon for the SOC or the CPU.

And

on the laptop side of the business, business, the entire industry aligns to NVIDIA's schedule.

So, if NVIDIA and Intel previously were both launching a CPU, and this just happened at about the same time, they launched a CPU and a GPU between the two of them.

The vendors will align to NVIDIA's GPU, meaning all of the marketing effort, the money, the sampling, the review guidance where they will get in touch with reviewers and educate them on the new architecture.

All of that basically happens around NVIDIA's timing

because NVIDIA sells units.

Right.

And

so, because of that,

if NVIDIA is suddenly,

you know, if they launch a new GPU for mobile right now, Intel and AMD, it doesn't matter which CPU is in it, MSI or Asus or HP or Lenobo or Dell, they'll launch their notebook with whatever CPU, it doesn't matter.

The NVIDIA GPU is the part that matters to them.

If NVIDIA is working with Intel,

then suddenly it would seem that there's motive for them to leverage allocation of GPU silicon

with

the intent being to get more Intel NVIDIA co-branded CPUs deployed in notebooks.

You see where I'm going with this?

Yeah,

this is kind of a long tail thing, but it's like the old MS-DOS situation where OEMs just automatically went with DOT because could NVIDIA push down prices, I assume?

Well, I mean, they historically have been,

I don't know, I guess you'd say maybe revolted against

an EBGA situation, but we've covered plenty of vendors in the past.

I'll just name them now because it's been long enough, but like Asus, MSI, Gigabyte, and EBGA have all told us about times where allocation, which is

the pot of gold, right?

It's how many chips they get,

is withheld.

or is modulated based on their willingness to comply with whatever the current sort of requirements are.

And what would those requirements be?

In the past, it's been stuff like,

well, I mean, on an EBGA side of things,

they

had always told us about being restricted in their ability to design certain high-end boards that might have like overclocking solutions, engineering solutions.

And so there was kind of like a trade behind this.

And how do those restrictions happen?

Do they need something from an NVIDIA side?

Well, sometimes, yeah, but it can be like

we need you to not do that or we need you to sell a certain amount of this price class of card.

So as an example, there was a time where we'd reported when multiple sources at EBGA

informed us that the MSRP cards were not actually real, like they were going to exist for a short period for launch to comply with NVIDIA's requirement.

And as soon soon as it was no longer a hard requirement to get the allocation, they were going to kill the product because they didn't have enough margin.

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

Yeah, basically.

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

Jesus.

And that's on a, what, 500?

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

Jesus Christ.

Yeah.

So this is fairly typical for NVIDIA.

Allocation is

their leverage.

Yeah.

It's also how they create internal competition between the board partners.

Now, AMD does this too, and so does Intel.

I think with Intel, the difference is they don't really have anything that...

They've got a ton of leverage at the moment.

Not really.

Yeah.

And AMD, you know, they also play games with allocation.

I think the difference is NVIDIA is just

the difference is if you make NVIDIA products and you make AMD products like GPUs,

You can lose the AMD ones or 10% of the supply or whatever and still be in business.

But if you lose the NVIDIA ones, you're fucked, right?

Like business is over.

So they could use this with CPUs.

That could be a scenario.

That is my concern.

Yeah.

My concern is if they're in mobile with CPU and GPU, now it's not just they're aligning to NVIDIA's GPUs.

There's, again,

there's no evidence they're planning to do this.

But I think I've seen enough historical context to be concerned about a possibility where they say,

hey, we'd really love it if you would put more of the Intel RTX CPUs in your notebooks so that you can get enough 50-90 GPUs.

Oh, so they will, they'll use one.

So, okay, now I understand.

So, it's the leverage with other cards that they'll use to force other things.

Potentially, potentially.

I know that this is,

and this is, they've done this for years.

Yeah, yeah, allocation is a big lever.

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

I don't know.

I don't really talk to

because that would be probably more like Dell, HP, like those big enterprise deployers.

I don't really talk to people there.

I mean, to me, it just seems like this is kind of a company culture thing.

And this is all me speaking from what we've reported on.

You know, we have some facts for some of the stuff where we've covered it like with the EBJ situation.

But yeah, enterprise, I'm not sure how exactly that side works.

So

when it comes to AI GPUs, there a, is it a limitation of your testing as to why you don't look into them?

Because it felt like it's the one thing I'm like surprised that you haven't dug into more with like A100s, H100s and the like.

Yeah.

So there's sort of, there's like two sides to it.

There's testing and then there's just reporting on whatever the news is.

And so the reporting part, we did that with the black market video.

The testing side, I guess,

there's like a couple of things that are nested within testing.

So we've done a little bit of quote-unquote AI testing, and that was on the RTX Pro 6000 Blackwell GPU.

This is something that is still new.

It's not 100% clear to me what is a reproducible, reliable test.

It's part of the problem is if you're testing LLMs or generative AI or whatever, something that makes images.

By nature of the application, it's almost semi, it's different every time.

We'd would also need a massive cluster to really emulate what it is because one A100 or H100 isn't really going to.

Yeah, and that's kind of like you can run those tests,

but and this would be a valid

request from the audience.

I think an audience that really cares about it would be like, okay, cool.

So, like, what about if you have, you know, 10 of them or whatever.

And even then, how do you even practically?

Yeah, and I just, I think we can do it.

And I do think we'll probably integrate some kind of long-term testing for single GPU boards or dual GPU single boards.

But

right now, it's so new that to test it properly requires a lot of research

and a lot of sort of trial and error.

Also, how would you even because

with something like GB200s or GB300s, they've got their own distinct cooling.

You're not going to get a giant rack in wherever you are.

Yeah,

there's definitely a limit.

And what are you testing for?

It's just, I have spoken to a few listeners and they're like, oh, what about AI?

Why is he not?

And it's kind of on some level, what would you even be testing?

Yeah, I think that's a big question for us.

And I think that's where, like, the most immediate thing that would maybe make sense for us would be some kind of consumer level.

I really hate to call things AI, but like AI application.

So maybe that's someone wants to just buy a 50-90 or whatever, use it for gaming, and then at night they're training something on it or they're running some kind of system.

I think that's the most sensible thing we could test.

Anything where you're getting into like actual data center workloads,

it seems like the only real source for that stuff is basically first party at this point.

And semi-analysis to an extent.

Yeah.

Have you spoken with them at all?

Have they reached out?

Not semi-analysis, but I know the work.

Yeah, I mean, it's a good newsletter.

I'm just curious.

I'm surprised they haven't the depth they go into.

But let's talk about AI, actually.

How do you feel about AI?

Like, you've, you don't do a ton about it, which is fine.

It's just how do you feel about it?

And

why haven't you done more?

And I mean that not as a negative.

Yeah, most of the coverage we've done has been

news-based.

So it might be reports, you know, it might be like an investigation or whatever, but

not a lot of, I don't know, like testing, like we were talking about.

The

biggest

problems I have with it right now are,

first of all, I think if we go like really big picture, I don't know, to qualify everything, I think there are use cases for things like LLMs.

The best use case I have that I've actually used is

translation, where I speak other languages and I use Google Translate for most of that because Google Translate is a dumb translator.

It translates the words you type into it.

Sometimes that doesn't work for a colloquial phrase.

So if you take any idiom, it's not really going to do that well through Google Translate.

Something like Chat GPT

makes it a little easier sometimes to search for like really specific

colloquial or idiomatic ways to express something.

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

You can also see down deep down there.

Yeah.

But it is like the specific thing that they're kind of built around, so they do it well.

Um,

I think the

with that qualifier out of the way, the big picture concerns I have with AI

are

uh weaponization of things like LLMs to propagandize.

And so this could be for companies to market products, it could be for governments, it could be for unknown entities, whatever.

But having seen the bot comments on videos, you know, every day.

Is that a consistent problem?

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

What are they doing?

So originally, it started as the really obvious ones.

There were kind of two kinds.

There's the bots that do financial scams where they basically

post

something about like some cryptocurrency, right?

Some scam coin.

The other one would be the bots that have a photo of someone's ass, you know, and then three emojis and some text about whatever.

And that's the more like traditional trying to scam someone into interacting with a fake user that presents themselves as an attractive person.

So, those are the two common types of bots.

Historically, those have been really easy for a savvy user to identify because, yeah, it's like it's always the same language.

It's like the old, old, you know, Nigerian prince email scam.

Right.

Right.

You can read it and you're like, I know this is a scam.

But where it's going now kind of concerns me because there have been times where I'm not sure if it's a bot or a real person.

Right.

And there was one recently I just banned from the channel that

originally I thought it was a user because

I forget what the message was, but it was like, I wonder what Steve and Wendell think about blah, blah, blah.

And it was clearly pulling stuff from the title and or the transcript of the video.

Right.

And then creating a comment.

And I left it alone for a minute to see where it would go.

And there's like replies under the thread where it's a bot replying to itself through different accounts, I guess,

and eventually just tries to send you off site to go, you know, get scammed.

So I banned all those accounts.

But the thing that was concerning was

that it's pulling context from the video transcript and forming a sentence that makes sense.

Right.

And then creating.

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

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

Sorry.

Seen these bots on Blue Sky where it's just someone appearing to have a guy.

It's like, wow, I read that from the thing.

What do you think about this?

Right.

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

The way it normally happens, if you go to like CNBC or any finance channel, you'll see these on any new video they post.

They'll talk.

So like CNBC is my favorite one to look at for this because you'll see,

and it's not their fault, fault, they're just the target of it.

But you'll see a bot comment that'll say something like,

I have hundreds of thousands of dollars and I don't know how to invest it.

Right.

Right.

And it's always some ridiculous number.

Yeah.

And then there's a reply to it.

It's like, I had excellent luck with John Smith and John Smith's.

Is this the comments?

Like, yeah, their comments.

I've seen these in Quora.

Okay.

Where it's like, how do I invest $150,000?

It's like, well, I did it on

Oscoin or whatever.

Yeah.

But these, they'll talk about like the name of a person

and have this fake conversation about some financial advisor who doesn't exist.

And then you Google that name, which is fairly unique, right?

So that's the only thing that comes up.

And then it's a website that's a scam.

And they, you know, these quite nuanced compared to the original one.

It's less obvious than

buy

questionable cryptocurrency or NFT on website.

Yeah, and

I don't know how you even deal with this.

I don't know what the solution is other than shutting them all down.

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

You're getting a lot of them on Reddit, too.

I'm seeing.

I don't know if you're active on your subreddit much.

I haven't checked.

Not too much.

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

Sickos, disgusting.

Yeah.

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

Right.

I think that's a thing, too.

I forget who the report was from.

There was a recent report about something close.

Actually, I think I saw it re-reported and fact-checked by Kurtz Gazakt, the channel,

where it was close to like 50% of internet traffic is bots at this point.

Yes.

And that's going to fuck the ad industry.

It's going to be bad for everything because, like, fuck the ad industry.

It's going to be bad for humanity.

Oh, to be clear, I don't care about the ad industry.

Yeah, no, no, no, I'm saying that that's how everything's paid for online.

Yeah, it'll screw that.

It'll screw.

This is like the Library of Alexandria is on fire.

Yes.

Problem.

Yes.

Like, this is like a loss of

knowledge issues.

And I think it's because

there's been a consolidation of sites into media.

forms of media or media for presentation, like videos, Discord, things where it's not well preserved.

And

as those things collapse, because like you said, the ad industry collapses or whatever, there's going to be a loss of information and knowledge.

The death of the internet,

you know,

it's going to happen from

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

Right.

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

Do you think this is going to happen?

I think it's happening.

What I don't know is

are the companies that control the large platforms incentivized to stop it?

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

There might be a tipping point.

Maybe right now it's something they don't really touch.

Like, you know, it took YouTube an awfully long time to start effectively addressing the bot problem.

Right.

And they still haven't really done it.

And so.

And that was just bot commenters or so views yeah well there's that too yeah there's i don't know too much about the views side but the bot commenter side they um

it's hard to know are they dragging their feet on this as a counterintelligence operation if the bots are intentionally really stupid

then they could be useful for trying to determine what are youtube's countermeasures to get rid of those bots so that they can circumvent them right so you maybe if you're playing youtube side of it you know the thought is

we don't want to just ban these because they're going to figure out our mechanisms we use for more important ones.

It's exactly, you know, what I actually buy that theory because that's exactly what they did with SEO.

With SEO, they're just like, well, we couldn't possibly tell you how this works because someone would just do it.

Yeah.

Yeah.

With Google, right?

With Google.

Yeah.

They own YouTube.

So it's like, Jesus fucking crap.

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

Yes.

And bots do that.

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

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

Right.

Yeah.

So, but the end result is there may be a tipping point.

Maybe at some point

human

engagement that's like somehow verified, which is scary for a different reason, but human engagement

becomes almost artisanal.

Like the reason you buy something from Etsy instead of Amazon, you know, some guy made it in his garage.

Yeah.

And And so.

Etsy, full of bots now.

That's full of just automated content.

Do you subscribe to the whole dead internet theory?

Do you think that

I think parts of it are starting to look

practical?

Like Facebook,

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

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

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

and you find the groups that are people thinking they're posting on Facebook group.

And I know there was one of them that has like 10,000 people on it.

And it's people like boomer.

I hate to sound it, but it's like people in their 70s being like, I don't know how the computer works.

And three guys from Indonesia responded, like, I would love to help you.

Here's a number from Indonesia, which is where Facebook support is.

I mean, it's kind of, it is the, the,

basically those investment comments like on CNBC I was talking about where it looks like a real thing.

You know, in this case, it maybe looks like actual Facebook support.

Right.

And the end result is: maybe, maybe it's someone trying to help.

Maybe they're enthusiasts.

You really know Facebook.

Oh, it is.

It's all Indonesian scammers.

Okay.

I've looked through.

I may have spent a few hours of work, like just, I could be doing literally anything else just looking at them.

And it's entirely guys in the global south just defrauding people.

Yes.

And there's whole channels now that are built around scam busting, right?

Like,

I forget the names of some of them, but there's like YouTube channels where they'll

walk through kind of the bot scam link.

I think the AI stuff, the LLMs,

you know, the core question of like, what do I think of AI?

Yeah.

All of those can be tools for good things.

I think the bad things right now are very profitable.

And it's the dumbest bad thing that's profitable is a scam.

But even then, it's not profitable for the AI companies.

It's profitable for the scammers.

It's like the only people making money are Jensen Huang and scammers.

Right, yeah.

And maybe there's, I don't know,

there's probably some

like Fortune 500 company that thinks they're making money on it.

I don't know.

Not that I've found, but no, I, okay.

Maybe there's one.

No, this is like my one hyper focus of like anyone who mentions their revenue with AI, I know.

Well, there was one, wasn't there some report that said,

what was it like over 90%?

95%, no ROI.

Okay.

Amazing report.

Yeah.

Amazing report because you know it was good because immediately people said hit piece.

The moment it says hit piece, you know that it's the truth.

Just people immediately say,

it's a hit piece.

Do you remember who the report was by?

It was by the Nanda lab at MIT.

Oh, wow.

And people got really arsy about it because they said, oh, it's just a bunch of interviews.

That's how they did it.

How the fuck do you think surveys work?

Right.

And so they'd spoke to.

No, they spoke to a bunch of Fortune 100, I think, CEOs.

And people really misread it because they said, oh, it's a learning gap between people using this and not understanding AI.

No, the paper says it's a learning gap because the AIs don't learn, but no one reads.

Okay.

But it's so strange as well because it's everywhere, but it's also nothing.

And I mean, it feels like there is AI within the hardware world with like, I forget the term, the upscaling ones.

Yes.

Do those generally work?

That's actually a really good point.

Yeah.

So.

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

No, that's a really good point.

DLSS and such.

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

It's good.

Broadly, it's effective.

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

DLSS, so there's kind of like sub-technologies they have, but broadly speaking, DLSS originally started as just a stands for deep learned super sampling.

And it started where they would take ground truth images, meaning like basically we're saying this is reality.

Right.

And I think they were 16K resolution, they're ridiculously high resolution.

They would train on all these images and then use that data game by game to

be able to upscale from a lower native render resolution to a higher, I'll call it projected resolution to the viewer, to the user.

And that was the original implementation.

And it is pretty good now.

Like it's actually, if you need to run at 1080p native so that your video card can handle the game at a good frame rate,

but make it look higher resolution, a lot of times it works.

And actually, to NVIDIA's credit, DLSS in some situations can be better than native, which shouldn't be possible in theory.

But because of the way they've actually integrated the deep learning on it now, which has been rebranded these days to AI,

but was called deep learning.

Because of the way they've integrated it, it can sometimes reconstruct details that should be there, but are not.

And we've done some videos on that.

But yeah, that's a use case of deep learning.

And that's completely different to the world of large languages.

Yeah, it's not an LLM.

Yeah, it's like it has a singular purpose, right?

Make the thing look better or generate frames to insert to smooth it over.

And that's overall not bad, also.

There's places it's really useless.

Yeah.

But I think also, though, the difference is when that technology is useless, it's not really harmful.

Whereas when an LLM is useless, it is harmful because it's putting bad information out.

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

That is a great point as well.

Has any of your stuff been plagiarized for the models?

Do you know?

For models?

Well, I know I did a, there was a great one where I did a Google search and

I searched for the release date of a product

and, you know, Gemini spat out a year and it was wrong by two years.

And I was like, what the fuck?

And I clicked to see what its sources were.

And one of its top source was us.

And I was like, what the fuck?

Did we screw that up?

Yeah.

And what ended up happening?

So I went to our own article and it was a revisit we had published two years after the original product came out.

And we made that clear in the article.

But it's just looking at the published date and mapping it to the product name.

And it decided this is the release date two years later.

And so like

it learned or took from our content,

misrepresented it, and then credited the incorrect information to us.

So now it also makes it look like I got it wrong.

Right.

So everyone loses, including the customer.

Yeah.

It's a shame, though.

But I mean, I feel like in the whole AI generative world,

your stuff is more valuable, the very hands-on, very specific work and the very hardcore testing you do.

It's also, we're fortunate that it's kind of at the front end of like, if we're reviewing products, then

someone who's an enthusiast trying to decide on a purchase is still coming to us before it's useful in training.

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

Not really.

Yeah, you can't really like generate a review.

You know, it would be obvious.

And also, you have these massive machines for testing stuff here, which are insanely cool.

And actually, that's a good question.

How do you source this kind of stuff?

Do you buy from industrial?

Because you have like pressure testers.

Well, actually, maybe you could speak to some of the machines.

Run through it.

Yeah.

So, yeah, we have a hemianecoic chamber, which is a sound chamber, an acoustic test chamber.

We have

a laser scanner that does 3D scans of like

products and converts them into 3D models.

We have pressure testers, we have fan testers, cooler testing, and then more traditional power supply testers, stuff like that.

And so,

yeah, generally, the way we go about it is

we identify a problem.

Typically, this is kind of the part of the business I work on the most personally is like basically test engineering or design.

So we identify a shortcoming, which is like this product is claiming this thing.

We are not able to validate or invalidate their claims because we don't have the tool to do it.

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

And so I went through this with current clamps, which is just a clamp you put on a wire to read the current going through it.

A long time ago when I started this, I didn't know that was a tool that existed.

And it's like magic because you put a wire through a clamp, a plastic looking clamp.

And then through the magic of electromagnetics, it tells you what the amperage is.

And when I found that, you know, early,

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

And all of your testing is effectively new to you.

You've had to kind of build it and learn it yourself with help from

with a lot of expert help outside.

And

yeah, I would say sourcing it mostly comes from either just doing research or we tour a lot of factories and engineering facilities and make videos on it.

And normally when I'm there,

I do my best to talk to the actual people who use that equipment.

And

that's kind of how we learn that it exists.

You know, like I did a tour recently of a facility where they showed us something that they had built for a client for testing cooling products.

And when they were done explaining it, so I could talk about it in a video, I said to them, Can I buy one of those?

Would they?

Would they sell it to you?

Yeah,

they sell it.

That's so cool.

And do they come and train you to use it?

Sometimes

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

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

Generally, either I'm the first one to learn how to use it, or someone specific on the team might be one of the first ones to learn how to use it.

So, like, we had

for the laser scanner, it was Patrick on the team who ultimately, in that case, I had tasked him with learning how to use it.

And he went through, he documented it, you know, and now anyone can use the SOP.

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

in the cooling.

You explain

I'm doing a terrible job.

No, you're pretty much right on it.

I mean, it's, yeah, a cool end product has a flat surface that needs to contact a piece of silicon.

And what we're looking for is, okay, the performance is really good or really bad thermally.

And we can't look at it and figure out why.

Maybe if we scan this at a microscopic level, it'll reveal something.

And so sometimes it'll reveal that there's these like deep pits in the surface of the metal that you can't necessarily see by eye and can really affect the cooling performance.

Other times you might see a curvature to it where

maybe externally it's not obvious, but actually when you install it on the silicon product, say only two-thirds of it are contact in the metal.

And so this laser scanner scans the surface with the laser and then makes a 3D model.

And we can use that to inspect the problems.

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

They do that all the time.

We reject all of it.

So

because it's too much, there's a lot of reasons.

The core of all of it is it's too much conflict of interest.

Right.

Where

let's just like, let's just say it's possible to take a testing job, a private testing job, and do it with absolutely zero bias.

towards future reviews.

We'll just accept that premise for a second.

Even under those conditions, I still don't like it because

now I'm put in a weird spot where when that product launches, it's going to be hard for me to review it.

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

I've seen it and I might have provided input on it that they paid for if I'm involved, right?

So, so now, like, let's say I'm not happy with their execution.

Am I going to go say I told them so, right?

Like,

how much can you reveal?

And even then, I imagine the trade secrets aren't brilliant.

You probably end up under an NDA.

The best approach to that would be to recuse yourself from reviewing it at all.

But then the problem is, like, now I can't do my job for consumers.

Yeah, how good is the money on it?

Yeah.

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

Right.

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

I would think so.

And also,

it's just, yeah, you're taking the thing that made you desirable to do the testing to begin with.

You're doing it privately, so it's not public.

So the desire to have you do the private testing reduces.

Right.

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

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

Most of the people think it's cool.

Right.

You know, I think

I'm sure a lot of them don't care.

I know that

some of the company representatives have told me how they'll be more careful with how they market certain things if they know we're going to inspect it.

That rocks.

I actually genuinely love that.

Yeah, so, and that's not just us.

You know, there's other reviewers who also do an excellent job.

And because the review community, people kind of specialize in different areas, I think it just sort of collectively keeps companies somewhat on their toes.

But obviously, you know, the company is going to company.

Yeah, they will shit about regardless.

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

I would say

probably the,

well, so there's one we can do, but it's not really practical.

And that would be basically more frequent transience testing.

So there's something with power delivery, which I know you've been studying lately,

where there's transient spikes.

And so on a GPU or a CPU, this would be a

basically a microscopic spike in the current or the power consumption for really like normally like 100 microseconds or something.

We can test it.

We've done it in the past.

But because if you're capturing data for seconds at a time down to scales of 30 microsecond gaps or whatever, the amount of data is enormous.

It's really hard to process it.

It's just like a storage and processing problem.

Yeah, it's a major processing problem.

And what would you want to be...

So is that if there are, what would those spikes mean?

It would help us to

stay on top of, especially GPU manufacturers, but also CPU, if...

if there's sudden spikes that might take a system offline.

So as an example, this happened with a previous generation of both NVIDIA and AMD GPUs, but where they would have large spikes in power draw that deviated from the nominal draw.

So, if you're at 450 watts and there's a spike to 1100 watts for 100 microseconds or something, this might be enough to trip over current protection on the power supply

and just shut the computer off.

And then the end user is like, what the fuck?

My power supply is enough to handle 450 watts.

Right.

So I don't shut off.

And this happened?

Yeah.

We saw this with, I I want to say it was the 30 series, the RTX 30 series.

And like

it was a problem that doesn't show up in normal power testing, but with an oscilloscope, you can see it.

And

again, credit to NVIDIA

for

the problems we point out.

On the positive side, they did actually fix this problem in the 40 series.

Yeah.

So

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

Linux gaming.

Yeah.

Are you actually, do you think this is a viable alternative to Windows with windows 10 kind of dying or being killed in the bag yeah i think i think microsoft is the best marketing that linux has ever had i go on yeah my biggest concern with windows is not like the death of 10 ongoing security support uh it is

the slow intrusion of spyware Go on.

Well, like recall.

Oh, yes, of course.

Yeah, where recall is marketed as this secure, locally saved,

encrypted reel of your information.

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

Yes.

And we've done some testing.

It's not published yet, but

it'll do some dumb filtering.

So if it sees the word password on the screen, it won't take a screenshot.

Right.

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

Right.

Maybe you have some accounting documents open, you know, and what, and it's information that's sensitive, but recall doesn't know it's sensitive.

And it's stuff like that that concerns me where

it's breachable and exploitable because it exists, not necessarily because there is an exploit.

Right.

And

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

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

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

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

Right, yes.

Because now it's like, yeah, go ahead and steal it from us.

Like, we're going to just take all your data, and that's how we make the money anyway.

Horrifying.

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

I think as a gaming platform specifically, specifically, I think it's becoming a lot more viable.

So thanks to Valve and the Steam Deck and Steam OS,

and it's pushed for Proton as a translation layer between the application and the operating system.

And what is that?

Just for

Yeah, so Proton is

a translation layer, which means it's working to effectively interpret the code that is that the game is built with to run

with better performance or at all on a different operating system, in this case, Linux or Steam OS specifically.

And so,

because of Valve's work on that to make games more compatible,

run smoother,

deliver consistent frame rate and pacing of the frames, because their work there,

in some instances, it actually has better performance than Windows.

The limiting factor is still sometimes it just simply doesn't work.

But that has become a lot less the case than what it was, say, 10 years ago.

It's not a fix for everybody.

There's still times you're going to try and run a game and it's not going to work and that's going to suck.

And how's the driver support, for example?

Hit and miss.

So we're really early in this testing.

But

as an example, I know Intel recently laid off a bunch of their teams that maintain various Linux drivers for different hardware.

Yeah.

And so it's kind of, you know, we don't really know what happens there.

Maybe the community picks it up, I guess.

I hope so.

But

Valve will.

Yeah, yeah.

It depends also.

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

Yeah, and if it's even an open source driver to begin with.

So, yeah, it's hit and miss.

But I would say that the biggest limitation of my experience with Linux, and I am not an expert in Linux, there's going to be people in your audience who know they email me whenever I say alternative OS.

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

Oh, no, no, no, no, no, no.

They will will be up my ass.

Arch, by the way.

But

yeah, I think the um

I'll get emails.

I think the biggest

limiting factor is compatibility with things like daily applications.

So the tools we use for video editing generally just don't work on Linux.

We'd have to use something else.

Yeah.

And that's a problem.

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

Handhelds are really cool.

I think there's faster innovation happening in handhelds than most other places.

Are there any you really like?

Because I know Azus

has been on the naughty list a bit, but I like the Steam Deck personally, but like, do you have it a favorite brand?

The Steam Deck and the Ally are both pretty cool devices, despite the Ally's

warranty issues.

Like, it actually is a cool piece of hardware.

I thought the Lenovo Legion Go, the original, was a really unique and innovative gimmick.

And I don't use that word to like degrade.

What is the gimmick?

The gimmick was the controller's detached.

Oh, okay.

Kind of like the Switch, yeah.

And then

the Steam Deck is,

it was just kind of the first in the new round of handhelds.

You know, GPD existed before them, and Ionio and those guys.

I respect GPD.

They're weird, but they're trying something.

Yeah.

GPD and Ionio both are weird, but trying something.

Yeah, I appreciate it.

You don't don't have American manufacturers doing.

Actually, that's good.

Are there American manufacturers trying weird shit like that, or is it predominantly?

I guess it depends like how

you define American here because, you know,

design,

yes.

Like who?

Depends on how you count Lenovo at this point.

I don't know if you count them as American or not.

Right, but they're trying weird shit.

They are doing weird stuff.

And

they certainly have large U.S.

headquarter offices.

I don't know where their design happens.

It's probably they have a Beijing, I think, office.

It's probably there.

But

Valve is definitely the coolest in terms of

they set the tempo for this to reignite.

Like, they're the ones who made handhelds interesting again.

And everyone else jumped in and started doing stuff.

And that's pretty cool.

And Valve also said, you know, we're going to make Steam OS available to other handheld manufacturers if they want to use it.

I don't know if there's a license or not, but like it's available.

And has that been picked up?

I know you can kind of sideload it.

Yeah, you can definitely sideload it.

I think officially,

I want to say Lenovo might have been the first one to actually offer it.

Right.

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

How do you feel about the Xbox Rogue Ally?

I think there's a lot of confusion around it in the more mainstream audience.

I've noticed comment threads where people think it's going to be required to play what you would consider an Xbox game,

but it's like basically a PC.

It's a hand.

It's just a ROG X ally with Xbox branding, right?

Basically, yeah.

And I'm sure there's some software games.

I wonder if it works because that's not big.

I love my ROG ally, but the fucking software that pops up really gets in the way of gaming.

Yeah, I don't really know what Microsoft is doing with Xbox.

It just seems like

they're not sure what to do with that brand right now.

I was going to ask, what do you think Microsoft's deal with gaming is right now?

They seem almost like they don't want to do it.

It's weird because

they were so committed to locking people into the Xbox for like a generation or two.

And then at some point, my

memory of it is they kind of realized like, wait a minute, as we move to x86 architectures,

for consoles,

PC gaming kind of works on both these devices.

So we don't really care if they buy it on PC or on Xbox as long as they use our device.

And they raise the price on Game Pass as well.

Yeah, and games.

Oh, of course.

And also the Xbox.

Yeah.

And then, you know, surprise to Pikachu face when they raise the price on games and then they raise the price on Games Pass.

And then everybody cancels it.

Well, they lost so much.

I read something they lost like...

$100 million or something, even more because they put Call of Duty on Game Pass.

Yeah, I'm sure it was.

Genius fucking move, lads.

It really is, it's a shame as well, because when you get past all the horrible menus, it is kind of cool that you can just plug a game controller.

I don't know.

I've been playing PC games long enough that I was excited when you could just plug a controller in, and it wasn't some sort of nightmare.

Yeah, yeah.

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

Yeah, it's gotten a lot more accessible.

But I think the handhelds are pretty cool.

There's a lot of focus there.

I'm not sure when Valve's going to do it.

I really want them to bring Steam OS to desktop properly because it's not currently officially released for desktops.

But they've done so much optimization work there where the coolest thing that gets probably the least coverage outside of our space is

they've really tuned the pacing of delivery of frames.

So if you have 60 FPS,

60 frames per second, and it's delivered at an inconsistent interval, So you have a frame delivered in 16 milliseconds, and then the next frame is delivered in 100 milliseconds,

and that repeats.

That's going to feel really bad despite being 60 FPS averaged over the period.

You might have some that are four milliseconds, some that are 16, some that are 100.

I never thought that FPS could be a marketing term.

Now I finally, oh, Jesus.

Yeah, and so like the work they've done to optimize for the frame delivery is great, where they sometimes have better frame time pacing than Windows.

And I would like to see that come to desktop.

So, as we wrap up, what are you excited about?

What in tech, in hardware, and whatever is actually like kind of bringing you cheer?

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

Yeah, how

you would think that it's like a pretty answered.

I mean, it's all thermodynamics, which is well documented.

Right.

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

getting an affordable, like good-looking design that actually has a lot of function to it.

So, over the last six or seven years, they really switched to focus on cooling performance and then cooling performance that still looks good.

And so, that's it's exciting to see that.

And what does that edit?

Does it, the cases get smaller?

Are they just

better thermal management?

Better thermals as a result of that, maybe lower noise.

The computer just looks cooler.

The smaller boxes have gotten a lot more viable.

So if you want to build something that you take from, I don't know, like if there's a

kid who travels between a college dorm and home in summer, you know, having like a small

mini ITX box is pretty appealing and those have gotten really good.

Yeah, the mini ATXs are always so interesting to me.

I love the idea of kind of like an Apple tv sized one that's a pipe dream but still it's not hard to do it's yeah i mean they've gotten easier but the other thing i mean i think coolers are also pretty exciting right now a lot of really neat um technological development on cooling products uh gpus

i think are probably the the biggest hang-up for people where the pricing has just gotten kind of stupid for consumer market GPUs.

And yeah, I think that that's the one that's kind of like

kind of a bummer, I guess.

Yeah.

And I mean, do you see any viable competitor to NVIDIA and AMD at any point?

Do you think that there's any chance of any smaller competitor?

The only one is Intel,

which I never really answered your question on Arc.

I think right now, Arc is going to stick around, but right now it only goes up to like $250.

And after that, it's all AMD and NVIDIA.

And AMD,

you know, part of it's their fault.

They need to really want it and compete.

And they they just aren't.

Like the products are okay, but they keep doing the stupidest things with their prices and their marketing.

And

I think part of it is they sell every epic CPU they make.

So they allocate all the wafer supply to that and GPUs are kind of backburnered.

But you know, the end result is we just end up in this stalemate we've been in forever now.

What about combined GPUs and CPUs?

Is that something you're seeing much growth from?

Do you think that that's going to be a focus or is that kind of just a CPUs, basically?

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I mean, the entire handheld market is that.

Yeah.

So there's a lot of success there.

And they're clearly good devices now for that.

They're not good enough for like high fidelity, high-resolution, high-graphics quality gaming on a desktop.

But yeah, mobile devices are great.

For their faults, upscalers like DLSS and FSR

do make it more viable to run an integrated graphics solution and actually have a decent experience.

Can't get close to a dedicated GPU, but

they're good.

They're in the same spot they've been in for 15 years where

it's not really a replacement for a hundred dollar GPU is going to be better, probably.

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

Or it becomes a problem of ballooning the die area because you have to allocate some amount of your silicon to the GPU and the CPU.

And so if you give more to the GPU to make it more powerful, you're making your CPU weaker.

And the only real way to solve that is to put more silicon on the product, which is expensive.

So, yeah.

So a couple of questions before we wrap up.

Who are your favorite creators at the moment?

Because

there seems like a good kind of solidarity between them.

But who do you watch?

What do you

think historically, like going back, the large influences were

Tech Report, Scott Wasson specifically.

If I remember correctly, he was involved in the early days of Ars Technica also.

Early, early days.

I'm not sure.

I'll have to look up.

And so Scott Wasson did a lot of excellent

test design work.

Ryan Schrout was part of his kind of era.

And the two of them with Tom Peterson from Intel Now

worked on frame time testing.

So their publication set the framework for modern benchmarking with frame times.

And that was, you know, I still reference those content pieces.

Anon tech, I think, is well respected, but has been shut down by, I think it was Future bought them.

Yeah.

Yeah.

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

shuttered it.

Just didn't do shit with them.

Yeah.

But who do you watch right now?

Now, for I like the work that

Jared's Tech does on laptops.

So he's an excellent laptop reviewer, does really good work there.

We've

helped

just Josh Tech, who's another laptop reviewer with some of his test methodology.

And I think they've been doing good things to really try to advance on that.

They're still relatively new to testing, but they're really trying.

I think

Jay's Two Cents with his recent changes to testing, he's really kind of...

put in a lot of effort to overhaul it.

And then the hardware unbox guys are also awesome.

But yeah,

I hesitate to start naming channels because there's a lot of channels

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

No, I know what you mean.

I wasn't trying to single anyone up.

It's just, I think that especially in my own work, I could be quite critical.

So it's good to just focus on the things you actually like.

Yeah.

So as we wrap, what's next for Gamers Nexus?

What do you want to do next beyond testing?

Is there a vertical you want to move into?

I know you've got the other channel going.

Yeah.

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

So I'm sorry.

So I'll have to

get recommendations from you.

Leave.

Okay.

Don't go.

Where the airport is.

Yeah.

Yeah, I think that we have some a relatively large focus in that channel, which is like looking at some more consumer advocacy topics.

On the testing side,

the biggest thing we're doing right now is overhauling our gaming benchmarks.

So we're working to introduce some new types of charts and metrics that don't exist right now in reviews

called animation error.

And just trying to basically we're taking a moment right now to try and find,

you know, okay, we've been representing things a certain way in charts forever as a review community.

Is there anything new here we can do?

And that's kind of what we're trying to research.

So that's the immediate focus.

Well, Steve, it's been such a pleasure to come out here.

Thank you so much for your time.

Thanks.

Thank you for listening to Better Offline.

The editor and composer of the Better Offline theme song is Matt Osowski.

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