The Interview: Steve Burke of GamersNexus

Summary

Better Offline – The Interview: Steve Burke of GamersNexus

Podcast: Better Offline by Cool Zone Media and iHeartPodcasts
Host: Ed Zitron
Guest: Steve Burke (GamersNexus)
Release Date: October 15, 2025

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Episode Overview

This episode marks the first long-form, in-person interview on Better Offline. Host Ed Zitron visits North Carolina to speak with Steve Burke, founder and host of GamersNexus—one of the most trusted and scientifically-rigorous hardware review channels on YouTube. They explore GamersNexus’s history, the evolution of hardware journalism, the realities of the YouTube platform, industry dynamics, gaming’s future (including topics like AI and Linux), and critical issues in tech advocacy.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Origins and Growth of GamersNexus

• Early Days (02:46-04:29)
  • Steve started in 2008 with game reviews, trailer analyses, and convention interviews.
  • Indie games, especially through Steam’s Greenlight, were a focus before hardware became central.
  • Attending conventions like PAX catalyzed the decision to pursue content creation full-time.

“After I got home from [PAX], I decided this is kind of the only thing I want to do...eventually just dropped out [of college] and started doing more of those.” – Steve Burke (03:56)

• Shifting to Hardware & Scientific Testing (04:29-07:27)

  • Started as a text-based site with PC build guides; YouTube was secondary at first.
  • Initial viral success included a power supply “paperclip test” video.
  • Hardware coverage took off with YouTube’s growth and community demand for in-depth, visual walkthroughs.

• Website vs. YouTube (07:30-10:07)

  • Website mothballed around 2018 due to workload; later revived with help from Wendell (Level1Techs) for content preservation and accessibility.

“We run it without any form of banner ads, which is...true today too. We got rid of the ads when we reintroduced the website.” – Steve Burke (05:14)

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2. Working in the YouTube Ecosystem

• On “The Algorithm” (10:07-11:38)
  • Steve likens YouTube to water—essential but opaque, and not worth “chasing the algorithm.”
  • Focus remains on content integrity, not platform whims.

“It’s kind of a fool’s errand to chase...the algorithm too much because [it] stifles creative focus.” – Steve Burke (10:52)

• Relationship with YouTube as a Platform (12:04-13:22)
  • Direct communication is rare; channel reps are inconsistent and get rotated out quickly.
  • The 45/55 ad revenue split is considered fair due to high infrastructure costs, provided creative freedom is preserved.

“The best I have is a liaison...He’s a great guy...but he does it because he’s a nice guy.” — Steve Burke (13:07)

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3. Monetization and Sustainability

• Revenue Breakdown (15:16-15:49)

  • Main revenue streams: merchandise, Patreon, self-sold ads, and AdSense (YouTube ads).

• Persisting with Writing (15:54-16:06)

  • For nearly a decade, Steve focused on writing, only shifting to YouTube as the main job after about 2018.

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4. Community and Knowledge Building

• Approach to Testing & Education (21:02-26:15)

  • Hardware community is collaborative and science-focused, with engineers like Tom Peterson (Intel) often sharing expertise.
  • Close-knit cooperation exists with other creators like Louis Rossman and Hardware Unboxed.

• Maintaining Fun and Cadence (21:41-23:17)

  • Steve emphasizes balancing heavy investigative stories with lighter, fun content to prevent burnout.

“You just don’t want to lose the fun of it, you know.” – Steve Burke (22:27)

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5. Investigative Reporting & Industry Impact

• Chaos and Methodology in Field Reporting (24:11-26:16)

  • Coverage of hardware black markets and tariffs involved chaotic, on-the-ground reporting—deemed both taxing and exhilarating.

• Testing Rigor (26:25-28:13)

  • Example: A CPU cooler review entails 40–60 hours per product; major investigations (e.g., motherboard failures, black market GPUs) can require 200–400+ hours.

• Manufacturer Relations and Accountability (29:19-34:11)

  • Most hardware firms maintain maturity, accepting criticism; roles like “tech marketing” act as necessary bridges between reviewers and internal teams.

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6. Consumer Advocacy

• Warranty and Customer Service Exposés (33:07-36:05)
  • Notable GamersNexus coverage pressured companies like ASUS and Newegg to address their poor customer support/warranty practices.
  • Steve insists on interviewing true decision-makers to ensure accountability.

“Nothing against you, you’re not the guy. And so they eventually got us to the right guy, which is something I try to remember...go to executive levels if possible.” – Steve Burke (34:11)

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7. Industry Trends and Controversies

Electronic Arts (EA) & Questionable Acquisitions (39:51-45:33)

• EA’s “Getting Worse” (40:07-44:22)
  • Both Ed and Steve voice skepticism about PE and government-linked (notably Saudi and Kushner-managed US PE) acquisition of major game publishers.

“It is just...weird for government or government connected entities to start acquiring video game companies.” – Steve Burke (41:07)

• Data Privacy and Risk
  • Anti-cheat software could, in theory, be misused for surveillance—no evidence it is happening yet, but the possibility is real.

Intel, Nvidia, and US Government (45:46-55:12)

• Recent events saw government pressure, stock turbulence, and government/Nvidia stakes in Intel as part of “national security” strategy.
• Steve expresses confusion and suspicion about the rapid sequence of political and financial machinations.

“I don’t know what’s happening anymore.” – Steve Burke (47:56)

• Nvidia’s Leverage and Business Practices
  • Nvidia uses allocation as leverage over board partners, influencing market behavior.
  • Concerns raised about possible future practices in mobile/laptop market—aligning to Nvidia/Intel’s timing and potential for less competition.

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8. AI and the Hardware Landscape

• On Testing AI GPUs (56:00-58:43)

  • Limited ability to test enterprise AI (H100, etc.) at GamersNexus’s practical scale.
  • LLM and AI workloads are highly variable and difficult to benchmark consistently.

• Views on AI’s Impact (59:06-62:52)

  • Steve sees some value in LLMs for translation and complex phrasing.
  • Expresses deep concern about weaponization: misinformation bots, comment spam, and erosion of knowledge infrastructure.

“The thing that was concerning was...it’s pulling context from the video transcript and forming a sentence that makes sense...to scam someone.” – Steve Burke (62:18)

• Bot Traffic, The "Dead Internet" Theory, and Loss of Knowledge (64:52-66:32)
  • Citing reports of bot traffic making up 50% of internet activity—Steve predicts a coming loss in information quality and accessibility.

“This is like Library of Alexandria is on fire problem...the death of the Internet.” – Steve Burke (65:30)

• Industry Incentives and AI (67:19-68:18)
  • Platforms may not be motivated to curb bots due to inflated engagement numbers or data collection purposes.

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9. Technology, Testing, and the Future

• Limits and Aspirations in Testing (91:04-93:13)

  • Aspires to more granular transient power testing for CPUs/GPUs, but limited by software and data storage/processing.

• Linux Gaming and Microsoft’s Trajectory (93:18-97:45)

  • Linux is becoming a true alternative due to Microsoft's increasing data collection (Windows Recall, Windows 11 telemetry).
  • Thanks to SteamOS/Proton, Linux gaming is nearly mainstream—biggest hurdles are dailies/apps compatibility and driver support.

“My biggest concern with Windows is the slow intrusion of spyware.” – Steve Burke (93:33)

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On Chasing the YouTube Algorithm
  “I think it’s kind of a fool’s errand to chase [the algorithm] too much because...you stop producing the content for the purpose it was intended and you start producing the content to be a farm.”
  — Steve Burke (11:05)

• On Bot Comments and the Dead Internet
  “There have been times where I’m not sure if it’s a bot or a real person... it’s creating the appearance of a real dialogue... to scam someone.”
  — Steve Burke (62:18)

• On Scientific Testing
  “If you only knew the name of this thing sooner, you 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.”
  — Steve Burke (81:44)

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Important Timestamps for Segments

• GamersNexus Genesis & Growth
  [02:46] – [06:30]
• Switch to Hardware Testing
  [06:30] – [10:07]
• YouTube as Platform & Algorithm
  [10:07] – [13:45]
• Revenue Model Discussion
  [15:16] – [15:54]
• Community Dynamics & Scientific Testing
  [21:02] – [22:27]
• Maintaining Joy in Coverage
  [22:27] – [23:17]
• Investigations & BN Video Process
  [24:11] – [28:13]
• Manufacturer Relations & Advocacy
  [29:19] – [34:34]
• EA, Data Risk, and Anti-Cheat Concerns
  [39:51] – [43:39]
• Intel/Nvidia/US Government Dynamics
  [45:46] – [55:00]
• Enterprise AI Testing Challenges
  [56:00] – [58:43]
• AI, Misinformation, and Bot Scourge
  [59:06] – [66:17]
• Linux vs. Windows
  [93:18] – [97:14]
• Handhelds & Market Innovation
  [97:45] – [103:27]
• Technological Excitement & GPU Monopoly
  [103:27] – [107:35]

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Flow & Tone

Ed Zitron and Steve Burke share a conversational, candid, and occasionally sardonic tone. They move from lighthearted nostalgia about PC gaming and building (EverQuest, Lemmings) to deep dives into testing methodology, industry politics, and the dangers of unchecked technological progress. The conversation is peppered with both technical expertise and policy critiques, making the episode accessible but richly detailed for enthusiasts and concerned consumers alike.

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Conclusion: What’s Next for GamersNexus?

• Expansion into consumer advocacy content and enhanced methodologies for gaming benchmarks, introducing new metrics like “animation error.”
• Long-term focus on video preservation, rigorous scientific testing, and public-interest reporting.

“We’re taking a moment right now to try and find... is there anything new here we can do?” – Steve Burke (110:46)

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For further engagement with Steve and Ed:

• Visit the GamersNexus website for detailed hardware testing
• Subscribe to Better Offline and Ed Zitron’s newsletter for more tech analysis and interviews
• Join discussions on Discord or Reddit (details at the end of the episode)

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Summary prepared to inform listeners and non-listeners alike, highlighting the episode’s rich exploration of tech industry realities, hardware journalism, and the challenges facing online communities and consumers today.

Transcript

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[Ed Zitron]

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

[Steve Burke]

About 17 years and 5 months.

[Ed Zitron]

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.

[Steve Burke]

Yeah, 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.

[Ed Zitron]

What was Greenlight? Is that like. Is that kind of the early. Early access?

[Steve Burke]

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

[Ed Zitron]

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?

[Steve Burke]

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 is 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.

[Ed Zitron]

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

[Steve Burke]

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

[Ed Zitron]

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

[Steve Burke]

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 start 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 were.

[Ed Zitron]

So you started out writing.

[Steve Burke]

Yeah, exclusively. And then the channel got added in 2009, but it wasn't. You know, YouTuber was not. That's not a job in 2009. Like. Yeah, it's a little before, like you had. Maybe Casey Neistat was at the front edge of that.

[Ed Zitron]

Yeah, I think. I think it was like maybe vine was. Was.

[Steve Burke]

It was still around.

[Ed Zitron]

When did vine pop up? Christ, that was 100 years old. But no back then. So you were just on the fringe of this new content.

[Steve Burke]

Yeah. And it was. I did not start a YouTube channel with the intent of making it a job. Because I don't. If you go on Internet Archive, I didn't actually even remember this until recently, and you look at the Gamers Nexus website and you go to the about page from like 2008 or 9 or 10, you'll see that somewhere in that. There was 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. Right. 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.

[Ed Zitron]

And how did it become a sustainable. How did it become your main job?

[Steve Burke]

Yeah, I think as YouTube grew, basically. So we were kind of in the early. We weren't the first sort of, I'll call it generation of YouTubers who were able to successfully make it a job. But I would say we were maybe in the next generation right after that. And so, yeah, I started publishing more videos alongside the articles. So it really was with case reviews, computer case reviews, where we would originally just focus on only writing a case review at some point. I'm saying we a lot. For a while it was just me and then every now and then be someone to help. But. But we would do case reviews and then I realized this would do well with video because there's depth to it and there's like just a lot of mechanical stuff and. And those videos started doing pretty okay.

[Ed Zitron]

And did you move. When did you move away from the website? Because I know You've come back to it?

[Steve Burke]

Yeah, we probably around 20, I think around 2018 maybe is when I kind of like mothballed it basically for a couple 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.

[Ed Zitron]

Because it did not have a CMS or anything.

[Steve Burke]

It did, but I built it like. Oh, so.

[Ed Zitron]

Right, okay, yes.

[Steve Burke]

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

[Ed Zitron]

Classic CMS shit.

[Steve Burke]

Yeah. And I'm not a professional web developer.

[Ed Zitron]

And don't worry, most CMS developers aren't either.

[Steve Burke]

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

[Ed Zitron]

Yes.

[Steve Burke]

But yeah, we kind of put the website on ice for a while and then it wasn't until Wendell from Level 1 text eventually approached me and he was like, hey, I'm a web developer actually. And he really wanted us to get our content script preserved in article form again.

[Ed Zitron]

Right.

[Steve Burke]

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

[Ed Zitron]

Right.

[Steve Burke]

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

[Ed Zitron]

That's really cool.

[Steve Burke]

Yeah.

[Ed Zitron]

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

[Steve Burke]

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.

[Ed Zitron]

Right.

[Steve Burke]

And so sometimes 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 to skim through and control F than a video. But also just preservation wise, it's easier to preserve articles than videos.

[Ed Zitron]

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

[Steve Burke]

I think YouTube has 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.

[Ed Zitron]

Right.

[Steve Burke]

It's like, how do you feel about water? 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 kind of stifles and takes focus away from the thing that actually matters, which is the content.

[Ed Zitron]

Right.

[Steve Burke]

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. 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.

[Ed Zitron]

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

[Steve Burke]

Right, exactly. Because it. 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, right. About the algorithm and they would probably tell you they don't know.

[Ed Zitron]

And has your experience with them being chaotic, or is it.

[Steve Burke]

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

[Ed Zitron]

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

[Steve Burke]

I think so, yeah.

[Ed Zitron]

That they don't interact.

[Steve Burke]

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 fudged the password too many times. Something stupid like that, I at least have someone I can talk to. Those people were rotated through 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, that program got killed. We don't have a rep now, which is normal. 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.

[Ed Zitron]

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.

[Steve Burke]

You would think that because your talent.

[Ed Zitron]

Your entertainment talent, on some level, you'd.

[Steve Burke]

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 if you need help.

[Ed Zitron]

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.

[Steve Burke]

Well, the revenue share is public for AdSense, YouTube. AdSense. So those are the ads before, after, in the middle, videos, whatever. I think it's 45.55 with them getting 45%. Mm. 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 30% for them. They. For them. Yeah, for them. So, yeah, YouTube certainly benefits. They. To argue in their favor. Hosting videos is unbelievably expensive, so I get it.

[Ed Zitron]

I didn't know that.

[Steve Burke]

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 in 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, 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. Then I'd have a big problem.

[Ed Zitron]

Apple style.

[Steve Burke]

Yeah.

[Ed Zitron]

Is YouTube where you make most of.

[Steve Burke]

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, you know, the monthly donations from viewers. And then sort of after that it's like ads we sell and then adsense.

[Ed Zitron]

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

[Steve Burke]

Pretty much, yeah, probably. Probably till, I would say like till 2015. Very seriously focused on only writing. Yeah.

[Ed Zitron]

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

[Steve Burke]

I did several side quests, yes. I would collect side quests from local business owners. You know, like, Greetings Adventurer, I need a local website. Can you build that for me?

[Ed Zitron]

It's a living, as they say in the Flintstones. 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? Were you just naturally interested in this? Was this just a childhood thing?

[Steve Burke]

I guess. 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.

[Ed Zitron]

Hell yes. Hell yes. Humans for me.

[Steve Burke]

Yeah. Yes.

[Ed Zitron]

Like first Lemmings game.

[Steve Burke]

Yeah, yeah.

[Ed Zitron]

Hell yes now. So you were primarily a PC gamer though?

[Steve Burke]

Yeah, for sure. Yeah. So Lemmings and then there's 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.

[Ed Zitron]

Right.

[Steve Burke]

Before that I was playing games like Command and Conquer, Red Alert. Yeah. And things of that nature. On what? You know, this was back when every family had a quote unquote computer room. Right? Yeah. Like there was a room for the.

[Ed Zitron]

Computer or a nook in My case. England's so small, right?

[Steve Burke]

Yeah. But like point being where it's just like this is the dedicated computer area for the computer. This household chairs.

[Ed Zitron]

Yes.

[Steve Burke]

So I played games on that, built a computer early 2000s, the 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.

[Ed Zitron]

Nice.

[Steve Burke]

So I built a web.

[Ed Zitron]

Were you gaming together? Is that.

[Steve Burke]

Yeah, Counter Strike Source, age of Empires 3, EverQuest, things like that. You played EverQuest? Yeah.

[Ed Zitron]

What server?

[Steve Burke]

I think I was on Karana.

[Ed Zitron]

I was on the Wraith.

[Steve Burke]

The Wraith. I think Karana merged into the Wraith.

[Ed Zitron]

I went on Stormhammer as well. I paid the extra on it. Not worth it, man. Oh, good to know. Yeah. Same scars then.

[Steve Burke]

I interviewed Brad McQuaid once.

[Ed Zitron]

I have a long and storied history of being a problem for Sony Online Entertainment. Like the one British journalist who asked any questions about this game. Yeah. I got in a lot of trouble over EverQuest 2.

[Steve Burke]

I remember buying it. When I bought it was when it was sort of demonized in some media. Yeah. And also though, specifically as like the. I don't. There was like some kind of devil worshiping, like whatever. Kind of like DND. Right. D& D got the same treatment.

[Ed Zitron]

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

[Steve Burke]

Right.

[Ed Zitron]

You had to work eight to nine hours a day.

[Steve Burke]

Yeah.

[Ed Zitron]

Oh God. So you had this guild. Sorry.

[Steve Burke]

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. 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 teenagers, losing gaming guides is devastating. It's like you're like my life's work. A guide for how to rush in Age of Empires.

[Ed Zitron]

Yeah. 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.

[Steve Burke]

Yeah, so we lost that and that's when I made a new website and that was the Gamers Nexus site.

[Ed Zitron]

So you're all self taught then?

[Steve Burke]

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

[Ed Zitron]

Yeah.

[Steve Burke]

Right. But nothing formal, I guess. Yeah.

[Ed Zitron]

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

[Steve Burke]

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.

[Ed Zitron]

Right.

[Steve Burke]

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

[Ed Zitron]

Which is really cool. And other YouTube channels as well seem like Louis Rossman Hardware Unboxed. They seem like very. They want to collaborate, which is really cool.

[Steve Burke]

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

[Ed Zitron]

You having fun?

[Steve Burke]

Yes.

[Ed Zitron]

Because there's a. There's a lot of cynicism and kind of depression in media because of the job environment. There's also. Even above. That 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.

[Steve Burke]

I think it's 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, we've had a lot of heavy stuff recently. We had tariffs into black market, into Bloomberg, whatever. And so then we switched to publishing more folks on reviews methodology. I ran a review of a Toy.

[Ed Zitron]

Story computer which I have seen and it's insanely cool.

[Steve Burke]

Yeah.

[Ed Zitron]

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

[Steve Burke]

Fine, it had problems with shipping, but 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.

[Ed Zitron]

I mean, the GPU tariffs, the terrorist one, 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.

[Steve Burke]

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

[Ed Zitron]

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

[Steve Burke]

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

[Ed Zitron]

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

[Steve Burke]

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. 5 in the video and he was awesome.

[Ed Zitron]

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

[Steve Burke]

But normally I, normally I have a source for kind of 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.

[Ed Zitron]

Yeah.

[Steve Burke]

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

[Ed Zitron]

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

[Steve Burke]

Yeah, you pulled it off. It was good.

[Ed Zitron]

So you've got quite an operation here as well, around how many people work.

[Steve Burke]

With you day to day? It's 5 to. 5 to 10 total day to day. So it just depends, you know, who's doing what each day. Right.

[Ed Zitron]

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

[Steve Burke]

Yeah. A couple editors slash camera operators. We have a couple of writers slash testers. So kind of like if. 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. They hit a clip, they realize they need something.

[Ed Zitron]

Right.

[Steve Burke]

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

[Ed Zitron]

And how long does the video take? I. Putting aside the obvious ones, like the tariffs, one, which I think little bit different. How long does it take to get a review together?

[Steve Burke]

Or like any particular video a review of. I can give you 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.

[Ed Zitron]

Right.

[Steve Burke]

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

[Ed Zitron]

Jesus. So cool.

[Steve Burke]

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

[Ed Zitron]

Right.

[Steve Burke]

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

[Ed Zitron]

Walk me through that situation.

[Steve Burke]

Yeah, which.

[Ed Zitron]

The ASRock.

[Steve Burke]

The ASRock thing. So the ASRock thing is they have some kind of yet unknown issue that is resulting in the death of CPUs.

[Ed Zitron]

Right.

[Steve Burke]

Expensive ones. And people don't know exactly what it is. They haven't been entirely forthcoming about it. It seems like they don't know what the fuck's going on. And so we got a viewer's motherboard that had killed the 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 publish everything and maybe someone can use it.

[Ed Zitron]

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

[Steve Burke]

They appear to be trying to fix things, just not very successfully. Right. I would not say they've been communicative. I don't think they've done a good job at telling their customers what's going on.

[Ed Zitron]

Right. So how is your relationship in general with the hardware manufacturers? You mentioned that intel you have. It sounds like you have some people who are friendly and others.

[Steve Burke]

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.

[Ed Zitron]

Right.

[Steve Burke]

There's a guy at AMD who, he's incredible at what he does. 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 the translator between outside criticism and internal action.

[Ed Zitron]

Right?

[Steve Burke]

Right.

[Ed Zitron]

So not quite a PR role, but like a developer. Not Quite developer.

[Steve Burke]

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.

[Ed Zitron]

Yeah.

[Steve Burke]

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.

[Ed Zitron]

Right?

[Steve Burke]

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

[Ed Zitron]

Right?

[Steve Burke]

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

[Ed Zitron]

See, this is the thing. I've run a PR firm 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?

[Steve Burke]

Right?

[Ed Zitron]

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

[Steve Burke]

Right?

[Ed Zitron]

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

[Steve Burke]

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

[Ed Zitron]

We don't like it.

[Steve Burke]

Yeah, it's icky, right? So there's gotta be a real reason. But yeah, most of the companies, the relationship is fine, I would say.

[Ed Zitron]

And they generally take criticism well.

[Steve Burke]

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

[Ed Zitron]

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

[Steve Burke]

I know that Jensen Huang once watched at least part of one of our videos, at least, because it was communicated to me by someone who works with him.

[Ed Zitron]

All bold, all caps.

[Steve Burke]

Yeah. Was told he was not thrilled. Oh, that doesn't.

[Ed Zitron]

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.

[Steve Burke]

Sometimes, Yeah. I mean, we amd. We had a video where we were basically like begging them to not fuck up the launch of their 9000 series GPUs because their competition, like no one had showed up for the consumer intel. They were kind of there, but they're like not super viable yet. Anyway. I know after that video they had emailed us and this Wasn't a threat. 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.

[Ed Zitron]

Do you ever try and get interviews with them?

[Steve Burke]

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

[Ed Zitron]

Is this across the board or with specific things?

[Steve Burke]

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

[Ed Zitron]

I really like the ROGX 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.

[Steve Burke]

Well, that one, I know a lot about the Ally specifically. Yeah. So to, like, close the loop on the executive question, the ASUS thing, 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 nice guy. Not his job. And so I kept pushing back on him where I was like, look, man, nothing against you. You're not the guy. And so they eventually got us to the. 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.

[Ed Zitron]

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

[Steve Burke]

It's not his company.

[Ed Zitron]

No.

[Steve Burke]

Yeah. And he's not paid enough to, like, deal with it, you know, so. 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. That's great. A couple years ago. Yeah. So a lot of times they'll play ball, which, like, credit to them.

[Ed Zitron]

Yeah.

[Steve Burke]

You know, but the ASUS 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. As a pseudonym. And they 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 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.

[Ed Zitron]

And they said it wasn't covered and.

[Steve Burke]

They said that they would have to charge us. I forget how much it was. It was like 90 or 180 or something dollars.

[Ed Zitron]

Goodness.

[Steve Burke]

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.

[Ed Zitron]

Very silly.

[Steve Burke]

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.

[Ed Zitron]

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

[Steve Burke]

Right.

[Ed Zitron]

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

[Steve Burke]

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

[iHeart Podcast Announcer]

Right.

[Steve Burke]

So there's no trace because I like that thing.

[Ed Zitron]

But now I'm like regretting that's a good device. But it's like, hopefully it doesn't break.

[Steve Burke]

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

[Ed Zitron]

So I'm a big fan of quints. I've been shopping with them long before they advertise with the show. And I just picked up a bunch of their Pima cotton T shirts after they came back in stock, as well as another overshirt because I love to wear them like a jacket over a T shirt. Talking of jackets, I'm planning to pick up one of their new leather racer jackets very, very soon. Their clothes fit well, they fall nicely on the body and and feel high quality like you get at a big nice department store. Except they're a lot cheaper because Quince is direct to consumer. And that's part of what makes Quince different. They partner directly with ethical factories and skip the middlemen so you get top fabrics and craftsmanship at half the price of similar brands. And they ship quickly too. I highly recommend them and we'll be giving them money in the future. Layer up this fall with pieces that feel as good as they look. Go to quince.com beta for free shipping on your order and 365 day returns. Now available in Canada too. That's Q-U I N C E.com better free shipping and 365 day returns. Quints.com beta still jumping between tools just to update your website. Framer unifies design, CMS and publishing on one canvas. No handoff, no hassle. Everything you need to design and Publish in one place Framer already built the fastest way to publish beautiful production ready websites and it's now redefining how we design for the web. With the recent launch of Design Pages, a free canvas based design tool, Framer is more than a site builder. It's a true all in one design platform. From social assets to campaign visuals to vectors and icons, all the way to a live site. Framer is where ideas go live, start to finish. It's a free full feature design tool. Think unlimited projects, unlimited pages, unlimited collaborators, and all the essentials. Vectors, 3D transforms, gradients, wireframes, everything you need to design. Totally free. Ready to design, iterate and publish all in one tool. Start creating for [e-mail] design and use the code offline for a free month of framer pro. That's framer.com design and use the promo code offline. Framer.com design promo code offline. Rules and restrictions may apply. Mint is still $15 a month for premium wireless. And if you haven't made the switch yet, here are 15 reasons why you should. 1. It's $15 a month.

[iHeart Podcast Announcer]

2.

[Ed Zitron]

Seriously, it's $15 a month. 3. No big contracts.

[iHeart Podcast Announcer]

4.

[Ed Zitron]

I use it.

[Steve Burke]

5.

[Ed Zitron]

My mom used to say, are you, are you playing me off? That's what's happening, right? Okay, give it a [e-mail] Switch upfront.

[iHeart Podcast Announcer]

Payment of $45 for three month plan. $15 per month equivalent required. New customer offer first three months only, then full price plan options available, taxes and fees extra.

[Steve Burke]

See mintmobile.com hey, it's Ed Helms. And welcome back to Snafu, my podcast about history's greatest screw ups. On our new season, we're bringing you a new snafu Every single episode.

[iHeart Podcast Announcer]

32 lost nuclear weapons. You're like, wait, stop. What?

[Steve Burke]

Ernie Shackleton sounds like a solid 70s basketball player who still wore knee pads. Yes, it's gonna be a whole lot of history, a whole lot of funny, and a whole lot of guests. The great Paul Scheer made me feel good. I'm like, oh, wow, Angela and Jenna, I am so psyched you're here.

[iHeart Podcast Announcer]

What was that like for you to soft launch into the show?

[Ed Zitron]

Sorry, Jenna, I'll be asking the questions today.

[iHeart Podcast Announcer]

I forgot whose podcast we were doing.

[Steve Burke]

Nick Kroll. I hope this story is good enough to get you to toss that sandwich. So let's, let's, let's see how it goes. Listen to season four of SNAFU with Ed Helms on the iHeartRadio app. Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.

[Ed Zitron]

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

[Steve Burke]

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

[Ed Zitron]

Yeah, yeah. I mean, look at the Madden franchise, I think.

[Steve Burke]

I don't know, EA is like bizarre to me. I don't get it. I know you can look at their financial reports and whatever, but the, the powers at play and the EA acquisition, it's. 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 US government in particular has dragged video games at every opportunity they get for decades.

[Ed Zitron]

Right.

[Steve Burke]

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.

[Ed Zitron]

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

[Steve Burke]

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

[Ed Zitron]

So his fund is funded by the other people invested.

[Steve Burke]

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 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. Right. 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 I. 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.

[Ed Zitron]

Right.

[Steve Burke]

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 like some kind of rootkit with very low level access to computers, you could do it through anti cheat solutions. Now I don't think this is happening. 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.

[Ed Zitron]

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

[Steve Burke]

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

[Ed Zitron]

Right. And they're doing that with the Discord CEO, I think they are. They already did that.

[Steve Burke]

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.

[Ed Zitron]

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.

[Steve Burke]

I'm aware of sports.

[Ed Zitron]

Yeah. I say this is the 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 at this point, just actually go through your wallet. I just don't. Have they spoken of their plans for the company other than using. Yeah, great.

[Steve Burke]

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

[Ed Zitron]

Yeah, just the, the revulsion.

[Steve Burke]

It feels like you melted.

[Ed Zitron]

It's just. And most of the debt it looks like is going to. Sorry. Most of the revenue is going into the debt as well.

[Steve Burke]

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.

[Ed Zitron]

Oh, the very real thing that exists.

[Steve Burke]

Yeah.

[Ed Zitron]

Great stuff. Ah, 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.

[Steve Burke]

Yes.

[Ed Zitron]

How do you feel about this Nvidia intel situation?

[Steve Burke]

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 US Government's interest. I'm sure they look at it as absolutely a national security asset. Right. 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. And. 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 responded publicly. Intel CEO within days, gets on a plane, meets Trump. Now they're friends, Trump says, calls him a success. And then shortly after this, you're on this rollercoaster. Intel stock, the whole time plunges. When he says he needs to resign, it skyrockets. And then shortly after all that, the US 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 stuff, Nvidia is acquiring $5 billion worth of intel, which I think is around 4% or something, according to Reuters. So I just. I don't really know. I guess my answer is, ed, I don't know what's happening anymore.

[Ed Zitron]

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 making them?

[Steve Burke]

I think they're at risk. That was an unintentional pun. Very few people will get.

[Ed Zitron]

No, I loved it.

[Steve Burke]

Nice. Thanks. Yeah, I think there is some risk there. So like the stated plan is that they're going to work together on x86, which is an ISA 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.

[Ed Zitron]

Through Mellanox that acquisition.

[Steve Burke]

Mellanox is their networking infrastructure and NVLink is their sort of onboard, although now it's expanded, but basically PCIe alternative.

[Ed Zitron]

Oh, okay.

[Steve Burke]

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're gonna work with intel to integrate this protocol into other products which will make Nvidia's GPUs more deployable on CPUs like x86 CPUs. Right.

[Ed Zitron]

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

[Steve Burke]

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 theory. 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 things. 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, 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 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, if they launch a new GPU for mobile right Now, intel and AMD, it doesn't matter which CPUs in it, MSI or Asus or HP or Lenovo or Dell, they'll launch their notebook with whatever cpu. It doesn't matter. The Nvidia GPU is the part that matters to them. Right? 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?

[Ed Zitron]

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 or.

[Steve Burke]

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

[Ed Zitron]

And what would those requirements be?

[Steve Burke]

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

[Ed Zitron]

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

[Steve Burke]

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

[Ed Zitron]

So they effectively had to release something that made them no money.

[Steve Burke]

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

[Ed Zitron]

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

[Steve Burke]

I think that was like a $300 something board.

[Ed Zitron]

Jesus Christ.

[Steve Burke]

Yeah.

[Ed Zitron]

So this is fairly typical for Nvidia.

[Steve Burke]

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

[Ed Zitron]

Not got a ton of leverage at the moment.

[Steve Burke]

Nah, not really. Yeah. And amd, 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.

[Ed Zitron]

So they could use this with CPUs. There could be a scenario.

[Steve Burke]

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 5090 GPUs.

[Ed Zitron]

Oh, so they'll use one.

[Steve Burke]

So.

[Ed Zitron]

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 they've done this for years.

[Steve Burke]

Yeah. Allocation is a big lever.

[Ed Zitron]

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

[Steve Burke]

I don't know. I don't really talk to. Because that would be probably more like Dell, hp, 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. We've covered it like with the EVGA situation. But yeah, Enterprise. I'm not sure how exactly that side works.

[Ed Zitron]

So when it comes to AI GPUs, is 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 a 1/ hundreds, h1 hundreds and the like.

[Steve Burke]

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 things that are nested within testing. So we've done a little bit of 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.

[Ed Zitron]

Right.

[Steve Burke]

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.

[Ed Zitron]

Well, you'd also need a massive cluster to really emulate what it is because 1A 100 or H100 isn't really going to.

[Steve Burke]

Yeah. And that's kind of like you can run those tests.

[Ed Zitron]

But.

[Steve Burke]

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.

[Ed Zitron]

And even then, how do you even. Practically.

[Steve Burke]

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

[Ed Zitron]

Also, how would you even. Because with something like GB2 hundreds or GB3 hundreds, they've got their own distinct cooling. You're not going to get a giant rack in wherever you are.

[Steve Burke]

Yeah, there's definitely a limit.

[Ed Zitron]

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

[Steve Burke]

Yeah, I think that's a big question for us and I think that's where 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 AI application. So maybe that someone wants to just buy a 5090 or whatever, use it for gaming and then at night they're training something on it or they're running some kind of system. I think that's the most sensible thing. We could test anything where you're getting into actual data center workloads. It seems like the only real source for that stuff is basically first party.

[Ed Zitron]

At this point and semi analysis to an extent.

[Steve Burke]

Yeah. Right.

[Ed Zitron]

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

[Steve Burke]

Not semi analysis, but I know the work.

[Ed Zitron]

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

[Steve Burke]

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're talking about. The biggest problems I have with it right now are first of all, I think if we go 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.

[Ed Zitron]

Right.

[Steve Burke]

Sometimes that doesn't work for a colloquial phrase. Right. So if you take any idiom, it's not really going to do that well through Google Translate. Something like ChatGPT makes it a little easier sometimes to search for really specific colloquial or idiomatic ways to express something. So I would say that's like a real use case.

[Ed Zitron]

That's pretty deep down there.

[Steve Burke]

Yeah. But it is like the specific thing that they're kind of built around so they do it well. I think with that qualifier out of the way, the big picture concerns I have with AI are 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 every day, is that a consistent problem? It is a very consistent problem. And they're getting Better.

[Ed Zitron]

What are they doing?

[Steve Burke]

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, 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 it's always the same language. It's like the old, old Nigerian prince email scam. 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. 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, 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.

[Ed Zitron]

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?

[Steve Burke]

Right.

[Ed Zitron]

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

[Steve Burke]

The way it normally happens. If you go to like CNBC or any finance channel, you'll see these on any new video they post. They'll talk. So like, CNBC is my favorite one to look at for this because you'll see and it's not their fault. They're just the target of it. But you'll see a bot comment that'll say something like, I have hundreds of thousands of dollars and I don't know how to invest it. Right, Right. And it's always some ridiculous number. Yeah. And then there's a reply to it that's like, I had excellent luck with John Smith and John Smith.

[Ed Zitron]

Is this the comments?

[Steve Burke]

Like, yeah, they're comments.

[Ed Zitron]

I've seen these in Quora.

[Steve Burke]

Okay.

[Ed Zitron]

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

[Steve Burke]

Right offscoin 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.

[Ed Zitron]

Compared to the original one.

[Steve Burke]

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

[Ed Zitron]

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

[Steve Burke]

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

[Ed Zitron]

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

[Steve Burke]

Not too much.

[Ed Zitron]

Yeah, I. I'm in mine too much. But I do catch someone occasionally who is just an obvious bar sickos. Disgusting. But I just. I ignorantly just assumed that they were being annoying and they were there to sow discord rather than send me to something to buy.

[Steve Burke]

Right. I think that's a thing too. I forget who the report was from. There was a recent report about something. Actually I think I saw it re reported and Fact checked by Kurtgesagt. The channel where it was close to like 50% of Internet traffic is bots at this point. Yes.

[Ed Zitron]

Yeah. And that's gonna fuck the ad industry.

[Steve Burke]

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

[Ed Zitron]

Oh, to be clear, I don't care.

[Steve Burke]

About the ad industry.

[Ed Zitron]

I'm saying that that's how everything's paid for online.

[Steve Burke]

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

[Ed Zitron]

Yes.

[Steve Burke]

This is like loss of. Of knowledge issues. And I think it's because, you know, 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. 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.

[Ed Zitron]

You think this is going to happen?

[Steve Burke]

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?

[Ed Zitron]

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

[Steve Burke]

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

[Ed Zitron]

And that was just bot commenters or so views.

[Steve Burke]

Well, there's that too. Yeah. I don't know too much about the views side, but the bot commenter side, they. 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.

[Ed Zitron]

They can circumvent them.

[Steve Burke]

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.

[Ed Zitron]

It's exactly. You know what, I actually buy that theory because that's exactly, 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.

[Steve Burke]

Yeah, yeah. With Google.

[Ed Zitron]

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

[Steve Burke]

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.

[Ed Zitron]

Yes.

[Steve Burke]

And bots do that.

[Ed Zitron]

Well, I mean, they did that with. By combining Gemini with Google Assistant, and they had 300 million, I think, weekly active users or some.

[Steve Burke]

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.

[Ed Zitron]

Yeah.

[Steve Burke]

And so Etsy, full of bots, now that's full of just automated content.

[Ed Zitron]

Do you subscribe to the whole dead Internet theory? Do you think that?

[Steve Burke]

I think parts of it are starting to look practical, like Facebook.

[Ed Zitron]

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

[Steve Burke]

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

[Ed Zitron]

Hey, it's Ed Helms.

[Steve Burke]

And welcome back to Snafu, my podcast about history's greatest screw ups. On our new season, we're bringing you a new snafu every single episode.

[iHeart Podcast Announcer]

32 lost nuclear. Nuclear weapons. You're like, wait, stop.

[Steve Burke]

What? Yeah. Ernie Shackleton sounds like a solid 70s basketball player who still wore knee pads. Yes. It's gonna be a whole lot of history, a whole lot of funny, and a whole lot of guests. The great Paul Scheer made me feel good. I'm like, oh, wow. Angela and Jenna, I am so psyched you're here.

[iHeart Podcast Announcer]

What was that like for you to soft launch into the show?

[Ed Zitron]

Sorry, Jenna. I'll be asking the questions today.

[iHeart Podcast Announcer]

I forgot whose podcast we were doing.

[Steve Burke]

Nick Kroll. I hope this story is good enough to get you to toss that sandwich. So let's see how it goes. Listen to season four of SNAFU with Ed Helms on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

[iHeart Podcast Announcer]

Run a business and not thinking about podcasting. Think again. More Americans listen to podcasts than ads supported streaming music from Spotify and Pandora. And as the number one podcaster, iHeart's twice as large as the next two combined. So whatever your customers are into true crime, sports, comedy, culture, they'll hear your message. Plus, only iHeart can extend your message to audiences across broadcast radio. And all this reach means everything. Just think about the universal marketing. The number of consumers who hear your message times the response rate equals the results. Now let's get those results growing for you. Think podcasting can help your business? Think iHeart streaming radio and podcasting. Let us show you at iHeartadvertising.com that's iHeartadvertising.com or call 844-844-IHeart one more time, call 844-844-iHeart and get podcasting working for you. Welcome to Decoding Women's Health. I'm Dr. Elizabeth Poynter, Chair of Women's Health and Gynecolog, the Atria Health Institute in New York City. On this show I'll be talking to top researchers and top clinicians, asking them your burning questions and bringing that information about women's health and midlife directly to you. 100% of women go through menopause. It can be such a struggle for our quality of life.

[Steve Burke]

But even if it's natural, why should.

[iHeart Podcast Announcer]

We suffer through it? The types of symptoms that people talk.

[Steve Burke]

About is forgetting everything.

[iHeart Podcast Announcer]

I never used to forget things. They're concerned that one they have dementia and the other one is do I have adhd? There is unprecedented promise with regard to cannabis and cannabinoids to sleep better, to have less pain, to have better mood.

[Steve Burke]

And also to have better day to day life.

[iHeart Podcast Announcer]

Listen to Decoding Women's Health with Dr. Elizabeth Poynter on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you're listening.

[Ed Zitron]

What's up everybody? This is Snax from the Trap Nerds podcast and we're bringing you the horror every week all October long.

[Steve Burke]

Kicking off this month I'll be bringing you all my greatest fear inducing horror games from Resident Evil to Silent Hill. Me and Tony bringing back Fireteam on Left 4 Dead 2 and we just gonna be going over some of the greats. Also in October we'll be talking about our favorite horror and Halloween movies and figuring out why black people always gotta die first. The Umbral reliquary invites any and all.

[Ed Zitron]

Fulu brave enough to peruse its many curiosities.

[Steve Burke]

But take heed, all sales are final. Weekly horror side quests written and narrated by yours truly with a full episode read and a commentary special.

[Ed Zitron]

And we will cap it off with Horror movie Battle Royale, Jason versus Freddy, Michael Myers versus the Alien thing with.

[Steve Burke]

The little Tongue Monster.

[Ed Zitron]

October we're doing it Halloween. Listen to the Traverse Podcast from the Black Effect Podcast Network on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast or wherever you get your podcast. 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 Boomerang. I hate to sound but it's like people in their 70s being like I Don't know how to compute work. And three guys from Indonesia responded like, I would love to help you. Here's an. Here's a number from Indonesia, which is where Facebook support is.

[Steve Burke]

I mean, it's kind of. It is 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 it's someone trying to help. Maybe they're enthusiasts. You really know Facebook.

[Ed Zitron]

Oh, it is. It's all Indonesian scammers.

[Steve Burke]

Okay.

[Ed Zitron]

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

[Steve Burke]

Yeah. 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. They'll walk through kind of the bot scam link, I think the AI stuff, the lms, you know, the core question of, like, what do I think of AI?

[Ed Zitron]

Yeah.

[Steve Burke]

All of those can be tools for good things. I think the bad things right now are very profitable. And it's the. The dumbest bad thing that's profitable is a scam.

[Ed Zitron]

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

[Steve Burke]

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.

[Ed Zitron]

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

[Steve Burke]

Well, there was one, wasn't there? Some report that said. What was it like?

[Ed Zitron]

Over 90%, 95%, no ROI.

[Steve Burke]

Okay.

[Ed Zitron]

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 saying it's a hit piece.

[Steve Burke]

Do you remember who the report was by?

[Ed Zitron]

It was by the NANDA lab at mit.

[Steve Burke]

Oh, wow.

[Ed Zitron]

And people got really arcy 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?

[Steve Burke]

Right.

[Ed Zitron]

And.

[Steve Burke]

And so they'd spoke to.

[Ed Zitron]

No, they spoke to a bunch of Fortune 100. I think CEOs and people really miss Reddit because they say, 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. No one reads.

[Steve Burke]

Okay.

[Ed Zitron]

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.

[Steve Burke]

Yes.

[Ed Zitron]

Do those generally work?

[Steve Burke]

That's actually a really good point. Yeah.

[Ed Zitron]

And that's different to large language models, different to transformable.

[Steve Burke]

No, that's a really good point.

[Ed Zitron]

DLSS and such.

[Steve Burke]

DLSS is like a real thing that works and does stuff and it's good. Broadly, it's effective and that's when it.

[Ed Zitron]

Fills in the frames.

[Steve Burke]

Right, dlss. So there's kind of like sub technologies they have, but broadly speaking, DLSS originally started as just a. Stands for Deep Learn Super Sampling. And it started where they would take ground truth images, meaning like basically were saying this is reality. And I think they're a 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.

[Ed Zitron]

Right.

[Steve Burke]

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, of course, but was called deep learning because 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.

[Ed Zitron]

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

[Steve Burke]

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, but. 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.

[Ed Zitron]

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.

[Steve Burke]

That is a great point as well.

[Ed Zitron]

Has any of your stuff been plagiarized for the models?

[Steve Burke]

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.

[Ed Zitron]

And what ended up happening?

[Steve Burke]

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 it learned or took from our contented it, misrepresented it and then credited the incorrect information to us. So now it also makes it look like I got it wrong.

[Ed Zitron]

Right. So everyone loses, including the customer.

[Steve Burke]

Yeah.

[Ed Zitron]

That'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.

[Steve Burke]

It's also we're fortunate that it's kind of at the front end of like if we're reviewing product, then someone who's an enthusiast trying to decide on a purchase is still coming to us before it's useful in training.

[Ed Zitron]

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

[Steve Burke]

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

[Ed Zitron]

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 test it? Well, actually maybe you could speak to.

[Steve Burke]

Some of the machines run through it. Yeah. So yeah, we have a hemianechoic 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. Right. 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.

[Ed Zitron]

Yeah.

[Steve Burke]

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.

[Ed Zitron]

Right.

[Steve Burke]

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

[Ed Zitron]

Right.

[Steve Burke]

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

[Ed Zitron]

Right.

[Steve Burke]

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.

[Ed Zitron]

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

[Steve Burke]

Yeah, with help from 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 learned that it exists. 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. So I said to them, can I buy one of those?

[Ed Zitron]

Would they, would they sell it to you?

[Steve Burke]

Yeah, yeah, they sell it. That's so cool.

[Ed Zitron]

And do they come and train you to use it?

[Steve Burke]

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

[Ed Zitron]

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

[Steve Burke]

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.

[Ed Zitron]

Use the SOP and the laser scanner you were describing to me earlier, it's. You use that to see if there's divots.

[Steve Burke]

Yeah.

[Ed Zitron]

Like in the. In the cooling.

[Steve Burke]

You explain surface.

[Ed Zitron]

I'm doing a terrible job.

[Steve Burke]

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

[Ed Zitron]

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

[Steve Burke]

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.

[Ed Zitron]

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

[Steve Burke]

I've seen it and I might have provided input on it that they paid for if I'm involved. Right. So now let's say I'm not happy with their execution. Am I going to go say I told them so? Right.

[Ed Zitron]

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

[Steve Burke]

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.

[Ed Zitron]

Yeah. How good is the money on. I Like, yeah.

[Steve Burke]

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.

[Ed Zitron]

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

[Steve Burke]

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.

[Ed Zitron]

Right.

[Steve Burke]

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

[Ed Zitron]

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

[Steve Burke]

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.

[Ed Zitron]

That rocks. I actually genuinely love that.

[Steve Burke]

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

[Ed Zitron]

Yeah. They will shit about regardless. Hey, it's Ed Helms.

[Steve Burke]

And welcome back to snafu, my podcast about history's greatest screw. On our new season, we're bringing you a new snafu.

[Ed Zitron]

Every single episode.

[iHeart Podcast Announcer]

32 lost nuclear weapons. You're like, wait, stop. What?

[Steve Burke]

Ernie Shackleton sounds like a solid 70s basketball player who still wore knee pads. Yes. It's gonna be a whole lot of history, a whole lot of funny, and a whole lot of guests. The great Paul Scheer made me feel good.

[Ed Zitron]

I'm like, oh, wow.

[Steve Burke]

Angela and Jenna. Jenna, I am so psyched you're here.

[iHeart Podcast Announcer]

What was that like for you to soft launch into the show?

[Ed Zitron]

Sorry, Jenna, I'll be asking the questions today.

[iHeart Podcast Announcer]

I forgot whose podcast we were doing.

[Steve Burke]

Nick Kroll. I hope this story is good enough to get you to toss that sandwich. So let's see how it goes. Listen to season four of SNAFU with Ed Helms on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts.

[iHeart Podcast Announcer]

Run a business and not thinking about podcasting, Think again. More Americans listen to podcasts than ad supported streaming music from Spotify and Pandora. And as the number one podcaster, iHeart's twice as large as the next two combined. So whatever your customers are into true crime, sports, comedy, culture, they'll Hear your message. Plus, only iHeart can extend your message to audiences across broadcast radio. And all this reach means everything. Just think about the universal marketing formula. The number of consumers who hear your message times the response rate equals the results. Now let's get those results growing for you. Think podcasting can help your business? Think iHeart streaming radio and podcasting. Let us show you at iHeartadvertising.com that's iHeartadvertising.com or call call 844-844-IHeart. One more time, call 844-844-iHeart and get podcasting working for you.

[Ed Zitron]

What's up everybody? This is Snax from the Trap Nerds Podcast and we're bringing you the horror every week all October long.

[Steve Burke]

Kicking off this month, I'll be bringing you all my greatest fear inducing horror games from Resident Evil to Solid Hill. Me and Tony bringing back backfire team on Left 4 Dead 2 and we just gonna be going over some of the greats. Also in October, we'll be talking about our favorite horror and Halloween movies and figure out why black people always gotta die first. The Umbral reliquary invites any and all.

[Ed Zitron]

Foolish brave enough to peruse its many curiosities.

[Steve Burke]

But take it all sales are final. Weekly horror side quest written and narrated by yours truly with a full episode read and a commentary special.

[Ed Zitron]

And we will cap it off with Horror Movie Battle Royale.

[Steve Burke]

Jason versus Freddy, Michael Myers versus the Alien Thing with the Little Tongue Monster.

[Ed Zitron]

October, we're doing it Halloween style. Listen to the Trapper Nurse Podcast from the Black Effect Podcast Network on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast or wherever you get your podcast.

[iHeart Podcast Announcer]

Welcome to Decoding Women's Health. I'm Dr. Elizabeth Poynter, Chair of Women's Health and Gynecology at the Atria Health Institute in New York City. On this show, I'll be talking to top researchers and top clinicians, asking them your burning questions and bringing that information about women's health and midlife directly to you. 100% of women go through menopause. It can be such a struggle for our quality of life.

[Steve Burke]

But even if it's natural, why should.

[iHeart Podcast Announcer]

We suffer through it? The types of symptoms that people talk about is forgetting everything I never used to forget. They're concerned that one they have dementia and the other one is do I have adhd? There is unprecedented promise with regard to.

[Steve Burke]

Cannabis and cannabinoids to sleep better, to.

[iHeart Podcast Announcer]

Have less pain to have better mood.

[Steve Burke]

And also to have better day to day life.

[iHeart Podcast Announcer]

Listen to Decoding Women's Health with Dr. Elizabeth Poynter on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you're listening.

[Ed Zitron]

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

[Steve Burke]

I would say the. Probably the. Well, so there's one we can do, but it's not really practical and that would be basically more frequent transients 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 basically a microscopic spike in the current or the power consumption for 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.

[Ed Zitron]

It's like a storage and processing problem.

[Steve Burke]

Yeah, it's a major processing problem.

[Ed Zitron]

And what would you want to be. So is that if there are. What would those spikes mean?

[Steve Burke]

It would help us to stay on top of especially GPU manufacturers, but also cpu. If there's sudden spikes that might take a system offline. So as an example, this happened with a. 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 overcurrent 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.

[Ed Zitron]

So I don't shut off and this happened.

[Steve Burke]

Yeah, we saw this with. 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.

[Ed Zitron]

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

[Steve Burke]

Yeah.

[Ed Zitron]

Are you actually. Do you think this is a viable alternative to Windows? With Windows 10 kind of dying or being killed in the Bag.

[Steve Burke]

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

[Ed Zitron]

Go on.

[Steve Burke]

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

[Ed Zitron]

Go on.

[Steve Burke]

Well, like Recall.

[Ed Zitron]

Oh yes, of course, yeah.

[Steve Burke]

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.

[Ed Zitron]

Yes.

[Steve Burke]

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

[Ed Zitron]

Right.

[Steve Burke]

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

[Ed Zitron]

Right.

[Steve Burke]

Maybe you have some accounting documents open 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.

[Ed Zitron]

Right.

[Steve Burke]

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

[Ed Zitron]

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

[Steve Burke]

Yeah. Everything that there's so much data harvesting. This is why I think Microsoft hasn't really cared too much in recent years if you don't license Windows. They used to really care about that, right?

[Ed Zitron]

Yes.

[Steve Burke]

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

[Ed Zitron]

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

[Steve Burke]

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

[Ed Zitron]

And what is that just for?

[Steve Burke]

Yeah, so Proton is a translation layer, which means it's working to effectively interpret the code that the game is built with to run with better performance or at all on a different operating system, in this case Linux or SteamOS specifically. And so because of Valve's work on that, to make games more compatible, run smoother, 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.

[Ed Zitron]

And how's the driver support for example?

[Steve Burke]

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 and so it's kind of. We don't really know what happens there. Maybe the community picks it up I guess.

[Ed Zitron]

I hope so.

[Steve Burke]

But.

[Ed Zitron]

Valve will.

[Steve Burke]

Yeah, it depends.

[Ed Zitron]

Also it really feels bad to just be like who's going to take responsibility for this thing we need.

[Steve Burke]

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.

[Ed Zitron]

They email me whenever I say alternative os.

[Steve Burke]

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

[Ed Zitron]

They will be up my ass.

[Steve Burke]

Arch, by the way. But yeah, I think the.

[Ed Zitron]

Oh get an emails.

[Steve Burke]

I think the biggest limiting factor is just 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 and.

[Ed Zitron]

That'S a problem well adjacent to this Linux conversation. How are you feeling about handheld gaming?

[Steve Burke]

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

[Ed Zitron]

Are there any you really like? Because I know Asus has been on the naughty list a bit but I like the Steam Deck personally. But like do you have a favorite brand?

[Steve Burke]

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

[Ed Zitron]

What was the gimmick?

[Steve Burke]

The gimmick was the controller's detached. Oh, that's 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 Ayaneo and those guys.

[Ed Zitron]

I respect gpd. They're weird but they're trying something.

[Steve Burke]

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

[Ed Zitron]

Yeah. I appreciate you don't have American manufacturers do it actually. That's good. Are there American Manufacturers trying weird shit like that, or is it predominantly.

[Steve Burke]

It depends, like, how you. 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.

[Ed Zitron]

Right. But they're trying weird shit.

[Steve Burke]

They are doing weird stuff. And. And they, you know, they certainly have large US 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 gonna make SteamOS available to other handheld manufacturers if they want to use it. I don't know if there's a license or not, but, like, it's available and.

[Ed Zitron]

Has that been picked up? I know you can kind of sideload it.

[Steve Burke]

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

[Ed Zitron]

How do you feel about the Xbox Rog Ally?

[Steve Burke]

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

[Ed Zitron]

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

[Steve Burke]

Basically, yeah. And I'm sure there's some software gimmick, you know, but I wonder if it.

[Ed Zitron]

Works because that's not. I love my Rog Ally, but the fucking software that pops up really gets in the way of gaming.

[Steve Burke]

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.

[Ed Zitron]

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

[Steve Burke]

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, you know, as we move to x86 architectures for consoles, PC gaming kind of works on both these devices, so we don't really Care if they buy it on PC or on Xbox, as long as they use our device.

[Ed Zitron]

And they raised the price on Game Pass as well.

[Steve Burke]

Yeah. And games. Oh, of course. At the same time.

[Ed Zitron]

And also the Xbox.

[Steve Burke]

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

[Ed Zitron]

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.

[Steve Burke]

Yeah, I'm sure it was genius.

[Ed Zitron]

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

[Steve Burke]

Yeah, yeah.

[Ed Zitron]

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

[Steve Burke]

Yeah. It's gotten a lot more accessible and. But I think the handhelds are. Are pretty cool. There's a lot of focus there. I'm not sure when Valve's gonna do it. I really want them to bring SteamOS to desktop properly because it's not currently officially released for desktops. Right. But they've done so much optimization work there where, like, the coolest thing that gets probably the least coverage outside of our space is they've really tuned the pacing of delivery of frames. So if you have 60 FPS, 60 frames per second, and it's delivered at an inconsistent interval. So you have a frame delivered in 16 milliseconds and then the next frame is delivered in 100 milliseconds and that repeats. That's going to feel really bad. Despite being 60fps averaged over the period, you might have some that are 4 milliseconds, some that are 16, some that are 100.

[Ed Zitron]

Never thought that FPS could be a marketing term. Now I finally. Oh, Jesus Christ.

[Steve Burke]

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.

[Ed Zitron]

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?

[Steve Burke]

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.

[Ed Zitron]

Yeah.

[Steve Burke]

How you would think that it's like a pretty Answered. I mean it's all thermodynamics, which is well documented.

[Ed Zitron]

Right.

[Steve Burke]

It's not like silicon engineering, but they're still, 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 the focus on cooling performance and then cooling performance that still looks good. And so it's exciting to see that.

[Ed Zitron]

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

[Steve Burke]

They can, yeah. For 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, if there's a kid who travels between a college dorm and home in summer, having a small mini ITX box is pretty appealing. And those have gotten really good.

[Ed Zitron]

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

[Steve Burke]

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

[Ed Zitron]

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

[Steve Burke]

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

[Ed Zitron]

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 science?

[Steve Burke]

APUs, basically, yeah. Yeah. I mean the entire handheld market is that. 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, they're great for their faults. Upscalers like DLSS and FSR do make it more viable to run an integrated graphics solution and actually have a decent experience. 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 $100. GPU is going to be better. Probably.

[Ed Zitron]

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

[Steve Burke]

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 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.

[Ed Zitron]

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

[Steve Burke]

I think historically, like going back, the large influences were Tech Report. Scott Wasson specifically, if I remember correctly, he was involved in the early days of Ars Technica. Also, like early early days, I'm not sure.

[Ed Zitron]

I'll have to look it up.

[Steve Burke]

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

[Ed Zitron]

Yeah, I mean anyone who's worked at Future knows what happened, which is that Future bought them and then shattered it. Just didn't do shit with them. Yeah, but who do you watch right now?

[Steve Burke]

Now 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 to. I think Jay's 2 cents with his recent changes to testing. He's really kind of put in a lot of effort to overhaul it. And then the, the hard run box guys are also awesome. But yeah, there's, there's. I like hesitate to start naming channels because there's a lot of channels, you know, that I, I like or we talk to at shows and I hate to leave anyone out.

[Ed Zitron]

No, I know what you mean. I wasn't trying to. To single anyone out. But 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.

[Steve Burke]

Yeah.

[Ed Zitron]

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.

[Steve Burke]

Yeah, yeah, I have to go to the UK for that. I'm sorry. So I'll get recommendations from you.

[Ed Zitron]

Leave.

[Steve Burke]

Okay.

[Ed Zitron]

Don't go where the airport is.

[Steve Burke]

Yeah, but yeah, I think that we have a relatively large focus on 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. 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.

[Ed Zitron]

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

[Steve Burke]

Thanks, Foreign.

[Ed Zitron]

Thank you for listening to Better Offline. The editor and composer of the Better Offline theme song is Matosowski. You can check out more of his music and audio [e-mail] m a t t o s o w s k-I.com you can email me at ezeteroffline.com or visit betteroffline.com to find more podcast links and of course, my newsletter. I also really recommend you go to chat where's your ed to visit the Discord and go to R betteroffline to check out our Reddit. Thank you so much for listening. Better Offline is a production of Cool Zone Media.

[Steve Burke]

For more from Cool Zone Media, Visit.

[Ed Zitron]

Our website coolzonemedia.com or check us out.

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On the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcast.

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