Gamers Overwhelmingly Prefer Fake Resolution - WAN Show February 20, 2026

WELCOME TO THE WANG SHOW. IT'S THE YEAR OF THE HORSE, BABY, AND WE GOT A GREAT show for you guys today. There's big changes at Xbox after nearly 40 years. Phil Spencer is out at Microsoft. So, we'll be talking about that. We'll also be talking about how gamers apparently overwhelmingly prefer DLSS over FSR and in some cases over native. Is that is I could that be right? What else we got today? If you didn't like GPUs being up, if you didn't like RAM being up, well, you're not going to like hard drives being up. Hard drive capacity for Western Digital is sold out for 2026. That's more sold out than Lionus from Lionus Tech Tips. Got them. I don't know. Oh, come on. Come on. There's no way Colton's team has everything sold out through the end of 2020. I wouldn't be surprised if they're closed. There's no way. Don't make me call them. And and uh speaking of No, I don't have a transition for this. Uh Google suddenly cares about IP theft when it applies to them, I guess, and no one else. The show is brought to you today by our when takeover partner Thorum. Do I just say their name more times? Thorum. Thorum. Also, our rap partner, Dbrand, our laptop partner, Razer, and our chair partner, also Razer. That was only three. One more. There's one more. I got to say the fourth time. Laptop chair and Thorum. Thorum again. That's too many. That's seven. That's too many. Take one back. Uh, okay. There you go. There. Fixed. We're back. Contractual. We removed one of the Thorum logos. Now everything's scripture. Speaking of removals. Yeah. Big changes at Xbox. After nearly 40 years with Microsoft, including 12 years leading the company's gaming efforts, Xbox chief Phil Spencer is retiring. Now, before we go any further, Luke, I think, asked the big question on all of our minds before the show started, and I wasn't sure what to say. I don't remember how I phrase it, but like, what do we think about this? Is this good? Is this bad? Are we mad? Are we happy? I I mean 12 years at Xbox oversaw a lot of Xbox. A lot of really good and a lot of really bad. A lot of really really really not good. Unfortunately, mostly really bad. Well, especially if we factor in like the recency bias of it. Yeah, things haven't. That's that's the thing that I'm struggling with. Yeah, things haven't been good lately. But what Halo game came out 12 years ago? But give me a second here. Give me a second here because as much as things have been kind of bad for the last little while. Um, things might get worse. So, let's get through the rest of the, you know, the notes here. CEO Sachin Nadella announced the departure in a memo to all staff earlier today, thanking Phil for his extraordinary leadership and partnership. Uh, Phil Spencer will remain in an advisory role through the summer to support the transition and Spencer's time at Microsoft saw him working on everything from Enarta. Now, that's a name I've not heard in a while. Remember the Encyclopedia on CDROM and MS Works in the early years to the $2.5 billion purchase of Mojang Studios in 2014, which seemed crazy at the time, but ended up being like the smartest thing maybe ever. um and their $75 billion acquisition of Activision Blizzard in 2023. Xbox President Sarah Bond is also leaving the software giant to begin a new chapter. According to Spencer Asha Sharma, current president of the core AI product, will be taking over as CEO of Microsoft Gaming. The look on your face is priceless. You look like you smell a turd. You look like somebody smeared dog on your microphone and you just caught a whiff of it. It's just Chararma left a marketing role at Microsoft in 2013, returning in 2024 and away from Microsoft. Spent time as Meta's VP of product and engineering and later as Instacart's COO. The Verge notes that Chararma is not a gamer like Phil Spencer, but does have consumer experience that should help with leading such a large division of Microsoft. Okay, the memo. Okay, ju just calm down. Calm down. I'm reading the internal memo. In an internal memo, let me let me read the memo. You don't read so good. That is rude. in a tin mist. Sorry, I'm trying to do it like you. Oh my god. In an internal memo, Sharma stated, I got it. I got it. We will celebrate our roots with a renewed commitment to Xbox, starting with console, which has shaped who we are. I assume the console. It connects us to the players and fans who invest in Xbox and to the developers who build ambitious experiences for it. Um, Microsoft's video game revenue dropped by about 10% year-to-year in the December quarter compared to a 17% increase companywide. But it doesn't appear that Chararma will be pushing for a short-term fix, stating, "As monetization and AI evolve and influence this future, we will not chase short-term efficiency or flood our ecosystem with soulless AI slop. Games are and always will be art crafted by humans and created with the most innovative technology provided by us." Matt Bouty, previously head of Microsoft's gaming studios, has been promoted to executive vice president and chief content officer under Chararma. So, huge AI background. I always liked that Phil Spencer was legitimately a gamer. I thought it was good. While I did think there was a lot of missteps, the naming of the consoles was actually so insanely bad that I think it genuinely significantly negatively impacted sales. Um, and and the brand it just makes you look like incompetent dunderheads. Yeah. And like we knew this from Wii U when like a massive percentage of people thought it was just like some add-on thing for the Wii and didn't realize it was a new console. Like you actually need to name things properly and they just didn't forever. which was crazy. The the wildest part is whether it's within the same vertical or even sometimes within the same company when it's so clear by the overwhelming incredible success of simply named products that are easy to understand their positioning within the product stack. C PlayStation 1 2 3 4 5 simple iPhone. Okay. There's been a little bit of confusion in there, but generally speaking, for the most part, they've stayed true. Yeah. We got the 3GS in there and we got the the X10, whatever you want to call that. There's been the the odd weird one. They would deviate a little bit here or there, but they'd come back. But in general, we come back to higher number, more better, easy to understand. And then you'll have Microsoft with just the most basswords naming scheme that I think probably exists in technology. And then even Apple themselves where you have this completely indecipherable iPad naming scheme for instance where we start getting into like you AJ 129 uh model year what just put a number on it. My god just put a number on it please just tell me what generation of product this is. Um, and yeah, sorry I hijacked your point. So, there's been missteps, right? There's been there's been a considerable amount of missteps, but at the same time, it would be really reassuring when like you'd hear that story of people that were like trying to camp him in Fallout 76 and he'd just like fight back like he it was like, okay, I could kind of feel like he's one of us. Yeah. a little bit. And it did feel like while there were missteps, he was probably trying to steer in the right direction. I think maybe I mean there's been some big there's been some really big missteps. Really big missteps. I mean I don't think Game Pass is ultimately turning into what we were sold. We were sold an incredible value and I think what we're getting is you'll own nothing and be happy. Can I make a really weird take here? I mean, I don't think Microsoft intended Game Pass to be what it is now. I think they wanted it to stay cheaper. I think they wanted it to do a lot of things and I think user behavior wasn't exactly what they expected. I think developer behavior wasn't exactly what they expected and I think their franchises didn't do what they expected. Um, that's fair. I think they thought see uh Starfield. Starfield. Like I I looked into you know what game released the year Phil Spencer took over and it was Master Chief Collection. So it's like okay that's not really fair. Terrible, horrible, legendarily bad launch. But the same year he joined. I don't know. The next one was Halo 5 Guardians. It's like I played that here. I don't know if you remember that, but I had to do a controller review of like the first Elite controller, I think. Oh, okay. Yeah. So, I went to Willow and I rented it and then used some Xbox we had here and I played it up in the conference room upstairs over like a weekend just to like play the heck out of the controller. Um, and I remember finishing that campaign and just being like, as like a massive fan of the first three games. Um, Halo died because Bungie left, not Phil Spencer IMO. Sure. If you look back at the history of what happened there, they hired people that didn't like Halo intentionally. Yeah. It's kind of like I mean, and I I I hate to beat this dead horse, but it's kind of like what happened to Star Wars. It's almost exactly like what happened to Star Wars because Star Wars did the same thing. They intentionally hired people that did not like the franchise. They did that because they're like, "We're trying to make something different." That doesn't You can make something different while hiring people that like the franchise. Like, here's my worry here. So, so I mean, Phil Spencer's legacy is absolutely complicated. Very complicated. He oversaw incredible innovation. I mean, like, let's not overlook some of the really cool stuff that Microsoft did. They were at the cutting edge when it came to accessible technology for gaming. like genuinely really amazing controllers. I mean, we I cannot sing Microsoft's praises loud enough for what they did to make gaming more accessible for people with physical disabilities and and other challenges. Um, and they they really they really pushed the envelope in a way that couldn't possibly have paid off in in in money. Maybe it was, you know, the cynic in me goes, "Well, maybe they only did it because, you know, they were hoping for the positive press around the brand or whatever." But I don't actually think so because it seemed like a genuine earnest effort to make gaming for everyone. And I just I thought that was so incredibly cool. So, I don't so based I don't want to take anything away. And that cost a lot of money. Oh, real money. Actual real money. Yeah. Um, but then there's no question that they just couldn't. It's like it's it's like they had they hooked multiple franchises. They closed studios that made amazing games. It's like the It's like the It's like the driver was using one of their controllers with with Drift and they just couldn't aim anywhere but down at their own feet sometimes, you know? Like you just they couldn't stop themselves from owning themselves. I'm genuinely not confident that I could get the Xbox models in the right order right now. Really? I'm not 100% confident that I could. I mean, that's not that's not that hard. You've got Xbox Xbox 360. Xbox One. Okay. And then what? Xbox One X. Is that true? And Xbox One S. Okay. And then is it Series? And then you've got Xbox Series X S and Series S. Series S. Yeah. Okay. I I think did I get them all? I think I got them all. I would have forgotten Xbox One, but I mean if I saw the names, I I think I would have gotten that in order if that was correct. Yeah. Like it's comically stupid, but I mean um anyway, so back to your point, as complicated as his legacy is for exactly the same reason that, you know, I don't love non-ST Star Wars people being in charge of Star Wars and and I don't love nonsilicon people being in charge of Intel. Yeah, I don't love non-gaming people being in charge of gaming. And I'm not saying there's no chance. I'm just concerned. Well, it's it's extremely I do really appreciate that one line. Uh, we're not going to fill it with AI slop. Coming from the AI side of things, they needed to say that. They probably got some PR thing that was like, "Hey, you need to say this." But hear me out. In that same sentence, right in that same sentence, and AI evolve and influence this future. No, no, no. Hold on. This No, no. Just this sentence. Games are and always will be art crafted by humans. Okay. Doing really good here and created with the most innovative technology provided by us. What innovative technology? Okay, hear me out. You know, I've noticed a problem. I I like watching a bunch of YouTube and I That one That That one's for the millennials. Yeah. Yeah, that was pretty good. Uh I like watching a bunch of YouTube and I've noticed that especially a lot of history videos have started a lot of AI slop showing up. AI generated picture slideshows with an AI voice and I'll notice like a few minutes in I'll be like there's not really breaks between sentences and like I'm starting to get a little sus because AI voices are are pretty good when they're really tuned in. Um and I'll scroll down into the comments and you try to search like did anyone else kind of pick this up and you control F for AI and you get 10 trillion responses because it's like part of different words and stuff. It's uh I feel like it's convenient that it's just AI. I uh I ended up on Tac Talk Tik Tok Tech uh for the first time in several years because we're doing another trying Tik Tok hacks. Like you saw it like like I saw Tik Toks. Yes, that's what I'm saying. Yeah. Like is that what you're saying? What what are you saying that you appeared on there or you looked at it? No, no, I was looking at it. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So, I was I was uh we were doing another reacting to to Tik Tok tech hacks. And so Adam curated a bunch of like shockingly large popular creators, shockingly popular pieces of content that are just either AI slob with like tens of thousands of hearts, but like bad like wrong advice that you should never follow or people who seem to be just as a as an agent as a human agent for their AI puppet master regurgitating AI garbage that is is stuff that no one should do and and like I I can't believe how how much of it goes to to your point unchallenged or or is not easy to tell that it's fake and that it's just garbage. I an interesting thing too is there was a thread on the for on the Reddit. Um where somebody was like, "Is this true?" I think you got to say the subreddit otherwise you're at risk of sounding like you consulted the Google. Sure. Yeah. Sorry. I don't I don't read it that often. Uh the subreddit I I I only go to ours and it's not even ours and that's confusing and blah blah blah whatever. Old man yells at cloud. Um, but I went to the subreddit and and there was a thread of somebody who saw some article that was like I don't remember I'm going to misquote it, but like HP abandons Windows or something like that and they're like, "Is this true?" And it was like or it was a video or something. I don't remember what it was. Uh, but it was like very clearly AI generated junk. It was not true. And the comments like roasted him for it. And I feel like we're doing the right thing. I feel like we're falling back into shaming people for falling for scams. No, he did the right thing to ask. Yeah, this is the worst memory recollection of all time. Oh, you have you ain't seen nothing. This man can tell me what happened then. Tell me what happened. Huh? Huh? We should get a doesn't remember. Don't Don't touch. I like this one. I like this one. I like doesn't know. Um, but yeah, no, we need to we need to support each other rather than attack each other for seeking truth in a sea of AI slob. So, let's all let's all form an alliance. We'll make a pact that that's how we're going to respond to people asking about AI with kindness and with um compassion. Okay, cool. Good chat. Why don't we jump into another topic? We are we done with this one? The conclusion is basically just I have no idea. We'll see how it goes, but I don't have it. Honestly, there's no Okay. Okay. No, you know what? We're not done because to me, the frustrating part of bringing in a non-gamer is not that I think there's it's a guarantee that they'll do a bad job. Yeah. Um, I'm not a fashionista, but I think that I have done a good job of trusting the team at Creator Warehouse to do a good job of that part of it while also providing the financial backing and creating an environment that gives them the resources to to create quality products. See, I'm more focused on like how long does it last? Can I throw it in the tumble dryer? You know, these things that I know matter to our customers. And then their job is make sure it like looks cool and um is is not going to, you know, it looks professional at the office and and addresses the the little details that I would overlook because that's from my background. But Phil being a gamer theoretically helps him understand what our customers want. You being dialed in with the audience helps you understand what our customers want. I don't know that she is dialed. Maybe she is. I have no idea. But her not being a gamer makes me question if she's dialed into that audience. So, I'm not saying I'm not saying that they're gonna screw it up. I'm just saying would it have been that hard to find a leader who was a gamer? Doesn't feel like it. Like everyone games now. Would it have been that hard to me? Is it the main reason why I cringed when it said like, "Oh, she came from an AI area in Microsoft." is that just seems to be the path now. Like if you're a corporate jockey in Microsoft, you're just getting yourself into some form of AI something because that seems to be the path to everywhere right now, which doesn't seem good. And you know, maybe this is uh pattern recognizing when there is no pattern, but I mean, it seems kind of like a pattern. It seems likely. All right, let's jump right into our next topic here. a sponsor read. Actually, we got to do the sponsor read. You can do whatever you want. Down, down, down, down to the sponsor reads. All right, the show. Oh, no way. Oh, wait. Yeah. No, never mind. Okay, which one? Oh, okay. In 2012, husband and wife Caleb and Steph Martin started a business based on Caleb's passion for making custom rings. And today that legacy lives on as Thorum. They handcraft wedding bands from materials like meteorite, whiskey barrel, dinosaur bone, and more. And Thorum has recently started to make minimalist watches as well with Hawaiian ka wood and California redwood. Don't know your ring size? Thorum has ring sizers that come with a 20% discount code for when you're ready to pop the question. and they have over 10,000 five-star reviews. Whether you need a wedding ring, an anniversary ring, or you just want a ring that looks awesome, head over to farm.com and use code WAN. Speaking of rings, what is happening right now? Does anyone hear that sound? Hello. What is What is going on? What is happening? What is happening right now? Something's happening. I was just handed a thing. This is a Thorum box. This is This is extremely confusing to me right now. I see DMS is here. What do you think is happening right now? I think you're getting married. You are such an observant person. I'm so proud of you. Are you getting married to me? I mean, I wasn't thinking of that. Uh, okay. This has never happened ON WHO BEFORE. NOBODY TOLD ME. I'M SO UNDERDRESSED. UH, where do I go? What do I do? If you guys just scoot your chairs back a bit. I can do that. Watch out for efficient. Oh, she's pretty critical to the process. Yeah. Okay. We need We need the officient. Uh, cuz otherwise it wouldn't be efficient. You not being aware of what was happening was pretty critical to the process, but your business team is amazing. I'll go here. Yes. Okay, I'm here. Does anyone need this? Well, I figured you guys are going to hold on to those for a minute. Here. You want to join us in the middle here? Here. Trying to make some space. A little bit of shuffling. Beautiful. Yeah. Surprise. You're a legal witness. Last for words. All right. All right. Welcome everybody to the marriage today. I I I see it's quite a bit of a surprise. How exciting. But we're gathered at this place to witness the formal joining in the legal state of matrimony of this couple according to order and custom prevailing and under the authority given and provided by me by the province. I charge with you both in the presence of these witnesses that if either of you do not knew or sorry do know of any legal impediment to this marriage, you do now reveal the same. So let DMS repeat after me. I solemnly declare I solemnly declare that I do not know of any lawful impediment why I DMS may not be joined in matrimony to mochi let Mochi repeat after me. I solemnly declare why I mochi mochi may not be joined in matrimony to DMS all right the ideas do you DMS take Mochi to be your lawfully weded wife to undertake and to afford Lord, the love of your person, the comforting companionship, and the patience of your understanding. Oh, I very much do. Do you, Mochi, take DMS to be your lawfully witted husband to undertake to afford the love of the person, the comfort of your companionship, the patience of your understanding? Hell yes. Now you let the couple want to join hands. Repeat after me. DMS, I call on those present I call on those present to witness that I take to be my lawfully wedded wife to have and to hold from this day forward in whatever circumstances or experience life may hold for us life may hold for us. Won't you repeat after me? I I call on those present Mochi take DMS to be my lawfully weded husband Great. In as much of you have made this declaration of vows concerning one another. Let's get the ring, shall we? And the very important rings. All right. So, let Oh, we need to switch because that one's Yeah. Whoop. All good. Let DMS place the ring on the third finger of Mochi's left hand. Repeat after me. With this ring With this ring as a token and pledge of the vows and covenant as as of the vows and covenant of my word of my word. I call upon those present I call upon those present do take thee to be my lawfully wedded wife. All right, let's do Okay, let Mochi place the ring on the third finger of DMS left hand. With this ring, with this ring, as a token and pledge, of the vow and covenant, of my word, to witness that I, Mochi, mochi, do take thee, DMS, to be my lawfully wedded husband, to be my lawfully weded husband. We'd like to just look at one another and repeat both of you at the same time. In receiving this ring, I promise and give I promise I promise and give to you to you. The truth the truth and faithfulness and faithfulness of my life and marriage. Of my life and marriage. Good. Now for as much as DMS and Mochi have consented in legal wedlock have declared your solemn intentions in the company before these witnesses and in my presence have exchanged these rings as a pleasant of your vows and each other. Now upon the authority vested in me by the province, I pronounce you as duly married. You may kiss your bride. Congratulations. Yay! Well, we just met, but congratulations. Congratulations, dude. Thank you so much. And a shout out to you for being a good Wow. Congratulations. Pretty good. Congrats. And to the witnesses. Thank you. You're welcome. We'll get out of your hair. We'll let you resume the show. All right. Congratulations, guys. All right, I'm just going to squeeze around. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. You're good. Oh, I'm taking my box for sure. that actually hold everybody there. Yeah, yeah, sure. Sure, sure. Okay, here. Let me get the chair out of the way. All right, Sammy. Way to go. Sorry, everyone get mad at me. Okay, here. I'll go. Sure. We'll go here. I'm block this. Sorry, guys. All right. Ready? One, two. Thank you. Fantastic. All right. Congrats. Congratulations. Hi. Well, that's a thing that's never happened before. Does that mean we're all invited to the reception? I think that means you're all witnesses. wow. Just so we're clear, like that was very real. Oh, that was 100% real. Yeah. Yeah. Legally blinding. Yeah. We We both just fully attended a wedding. Yeah, that was a real wedding. And so did Dan and so did all of you. Yeah. Everybody here. Yeah. first on W show that um there has got to be a story here. It was so hard to not laugh the whole time cuz I looked over at you and you were I could watch your brain as as every step progressed. You just be like, "Really?" And then I saw at one point in time you were like, "Wait, this is really long for like a bit." And then you're like, "Wait, does that mean it's real?" And then like some step happened. I saw your face just go like, "No way." I was watching this like all this computation happen in Lionus's head and that was what that was so entertaining the whole time. Wow, that's so cool. I um I'm very very honored. I wish I had dressed up a little bit but nobody told me. That was the whole that was the whole point. Yeah. I was supposed to have a dress shirt under my jacket, but then I left it buttoned on the hanger and I and I only had the ad spot to try to get it on. So, I like trying to unbutton it the whole time. I ran out of time, just threw the jacket on. So, this is my undershirt. All I saw I saw Sammy come in. I saw Luke start changing his clothes and I was reading about husband and wife Caleb and Steph and whatever and I thought maybe there was like a funny thing that Luke was going to do that involved him being dressed up. Then I saw Dan whip the zoom for the main camera and I was like, "Okay, what are we doing?" I had so many cues to hit in like 5 seconds. Did you not notice? Was it you on the boom mic, Dan, or was someone else back there? That was uh That was Jordan. That was Sorry, Jordan Blog. Nice. Solid. Did you Did you not notice anything about me? I I mean, I noticed you changing Oh, you're like wearing fancy shoes even. I have cologne on. Yeah, I would never in a thousand years notice something like that. I thought you would have actually cuz I'd never wear it. No. Okay. All right. I thought I was going to give it away the whole time in the pre-show. You know what? You did your hair. So, that was something. But you occasionally do that. So, sometimes I do that. I didn't think the hair was going to get away. Every once in a while it happens. Bearded less often, especially not at the same time. That should have been a clue. Sometimes he'll clean up the beard, sometimes he'll clean up the hair. Very rarely on the same week. Yeah, I was trying to hide. I had like color matched a bunch of things. The jacket was hanging there the whole time and I thought, "Oh, are they still here?" Uh, I think they're busy. I have wedding gifts. Yeah. And I didn't get I get didn't get them anything. The only nice one. Get wrecked. What the heck? Oh, man. I can't believe that just happened. I thought this was Chinese New Year. That's good. That's good. Was that Was that the scam? I don't think so. Like, was that what people Cuz when is Chinese New Year? It's It's soon, right? I think it was this week. Hold on. When is Chinese New Year? Oh, yeah. Yeah, it was It was 3 days ago. It's It's right now. Perfect. Like it's totally it's totally Chinese New Year right now, I think. Right. Uh blah blah blah. Tuesday, February 17th, 2026, and that's the beginning of the year of the Firehorse, which lasts until February 5th, 2027. Um celebrations, including Lantern Festival, typically run for 16 days ending on March 3rd, 2026. So, I was like, "Yeah, this this totally checked out. I just didn't understand." So, this is why you guys were memeing earlier cuz I was all like you you said something to Sammy about how like Yeah. Didn't you set it up? And I was like, "Yo, he's Korean. What the heck?" Mhm. Anyway. Yeah. so does that I actually didn't know that it was Chinese New Year. I just assumed that we just had these. I know the red and white was intentional, but the rest of it like I don't know. Well, I thought the red was because it's Chinese New Year. Like that's the thing. Probably both. Yeah. Um I think that's very funny. So, did Thorum sponsor the wedding? That's cool. That's why it's said your business team did a good job. Yeah. Cuz there's actually been like a bunch of people in the loop on this for like a while. What? Taran Taran knows. I think probably like the whole business team knows. Not everybody at the company. Uh Chewy says, "This may actually be the most genuine that Lionus has been pranked on camera." Every prank on me on camera was genuine. So, it's just whether um you know, it came across in the in the edit or not is basically what it comes down to. Like when Dennis was living in my house multiple times, I did not know. Um I I would never fake a prank. That is that is uh that should be a crime. That should that you should go to YouTube jail for faking a prank. It's like most pranks. Yeah, that's not okay. Uh all right. So, he's still there. I couldn't find him. Uh All right. If you guys want to do another topic, I'll go have a look. Listen, I will never deny getting teareyed at a wedding. It's a It's a very emotional time and I I cannot help but be happy for super cool people starting a life together. That's it's it's exciting and it's happy and uh anyone who thinks men shouldn't cry at weddings can go themselves. Yeah. I don't take for today we can or should say but I'm I'm I'm very happy for them. I think it's their story. We'll let them tell the story in the way that they deem best once they have figured out um you know whatever it is that you know they're doing for for right now that is not in the public eye. No, that's not stop it. No, no, no. I meant you immediately smiled and looked at me. Oh, because I realized because I realized I just meant whatever they whatever they they can talk publicly about their personal lives when they're good and ready. That's what I'm trying to say. Stop it. Yeah, sure, man. That's why they left so fast. They're just really excited to go talk about their the rest of their personal lives. Anyway, EXCLUSIVE I MEAN, IT WOULDN'T VIOLATE any rules of the platform. Technically, no. Well, why do you have to think they'd have to make it artistic? No. No. WHY ARE WE TALKING ABOUT THIS? Because the payment processors. Oh, that's right. Yeah. So, that's that's why lore for some people, that's why for a long time, adult content creators on Patreon would do cosplay. That's why that was so popular for a really long time was because it was considered art if they could put it under the cosplay category. Oh, there he is. There's thing I have things for you. Yeah. I'm gonna I'm gonna come and see you guys. Congrats, dude. Surprise. Yeah. No kidding. Definitely a surprise. Here, give me Yeah. One sec. Okay. They're off. They're off doing stuff over there. Uh, while they're doing that, why don't I talk through the cat patch hoodie or something? Or what? What should I do? Did we do the gamers DLSS topic yet? We did not. We did not. Did we do anything yet? Uh, just the Xbox one. Okay. Why don't I do like a couple rapid fire things while they while they chitchat? Um, Steam Deck is getting pretty hard to get right now. Valve has added a note to the Steam Deck page saying that the handheld will be intermittently available in some regions due to memory and storage shortages. I knew that memory shortages were already having a significant impact on pricing and I knew that storage shortages were coming, but I didn't know how hard the storage shortages were going to hit and how suddenly they were going to hit. Uh, we're working on a $1,000 build video. Uh, and Plof Plof did something that made me very upset that, you know, I worked with him and tried to resolve and couldn't resolve. He used a SATA SSD in a build. I think that's the first time we've recommended a SATA SSD for any reason that in in 5 years maybe because there's no reason why it should be cheaper even because the part that costs more is the the NAND flash but just I guess because the demand is a little lower and the stock is lagging the increases in price or whatever. Right now, SATA SSDs are anywhere from like 15 to like $35 cheaper than absolutely see it making sense. And for gaming, it doesn't really matter. So, our $1,000 build that's coming soon is going to use a SATA SSD. And to be clear, when I say that, it made me upset. I don't mean like PLO made me upset. I mean, he did the reality of the situation made me upset because we shouldn't be in that position. And yet here we are. Crazy. Yeah. For a boot drive. Yes. Scrappy DP. For a boot drive. And I looked at the config with him and I was like, you nailed everything else. And we've got a budget. That's the reality. In a perfect world, would I love to spend another $35 and have an NVME drive? Yeah. But and I' and I've talked about this before. That's a slippery slope logic that takes your $1,000 computer and makes it $1,200. If you spend another 30 bucks on every single component, you're you're not adhering to a budget. And when does that stop? And real people have budgets, and that's just the way it is. So, we have to act like we have a fixed budget. So, that's what we're going to do. It's still not quite $1,000. It's like $1,12 or something like that. But $1,12 is $1,000. $1,040. Yeah. Not really. Yeah. It doesn't feel That's $1,050. That's not That's not $1,000. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Uh, I think if it was over 15, it starts to feel a little weird. Oh, yeah. I think 15 is probably the line. I think you could get away with 15. I think you get away with it, but it starts to feel weird. 18. I think 12 is like an automatic. Yeah. When you hit to when you hit 20, it's like, come on, man. Yeah. It starts to get rough cuz that's like that's like a real bill, you know? Like a $20 bill is like, no, no, I'm not going to put that in my pocket. That one goes in my wallet. You know what I mean? Like $5 bill, like yeah, that could be in my pocket. I might even put that in with the change drawer, you know? $10 bill. We're getting sketchy. $20 right in the wallet. No question. No question. Um, yeah, 20 bucks is lunch for sure. Is this financial advice? No, not financial. Five goes in the car, 20 goes in the wallet. I mean, yeah, sure. Maybe in the '9s. Five does nothing for the car now. No, I think they mean like Oh, I thought like to fill your gas tank. I was like, I read that comment for one, but for two, I think they mean like in the in the like, you know, I get it. In the change pouch. Yeah. No, I thought like I remember when money was tight, my dad putting five bucks in the gas tank and I was like, dude, that was in like 1993. Like, not so much anymore. Yeah, sure. on a motorcycle, Chewy. But that's not what we're talking about. Um, our discussion question for this is, do you think the Steam Machine andor the frame could be delayed beyond Valve's current target of the first half of the year? I heard the Steam Machine was uh, no, no, it was so it was supposed to be early in the first half of the year, but they never actually promised anything other than first half of the year. And yeah, I I do think that's possible. if they can't even get enough stock to make Steam Deck right now, like how are they supposed to launch a new product? Because you're kind of damned if you do and you're damned if you don't. If you delay it, people are going to be upset because you delayed it. But if you launch it and there's no stock and it's a whole scalping situation where let's say the launch price is $9.99 that and they're going for $2500 on eBay because you know at the beginning they will because to someone for whom money is no object there is nothing exactly like the steam machine. Tell me something that completely fulfills the function of the steam machine. Go. I'll wait. Not that I'm aware of. You could you could do it. You could make it yourself. Sure. You're going to go get you're going to go get an IR receiver and you're going to go get like some relay system that's going to turn on your TV and your PC and everything all at the same time. You're going to go you're going to make your own uh Steam controller with the touchpads with um the controller. Yeah. What's uh what was Buddy's name we did that collab with recently? He I mean he made his own Steam controller alike with touchpads. He made his own touchpads. Is the controller tied to the Yeah, I guess the launch of that probably is. Are you going to are you going to work out a way to remotely power on and power off uh all all of the stuff from the controller? Like there's a bunch of work that Valve did on the integration side of things that is completely separate from just how many FPS does it get? And sure, you could you could just roll Xbox or a PlayStation instead, but then you don't have Steam. You don't have, no offense, Microsoft and Sony, but you don't have good pricing on games. So, to me, no, there is absolutely nothing that is what the Steam machine is. It's it's completely unique in the market. And I think that regardless of the performance, there are people who are not going to be playing the most demanding games that just plaining want one and just have more money than cents and are just like whatever, it doesn't matter. Or I shouldn't even say more money than cents. They might just have more money than they care about. and they're just like, "Forget it. I don't care. I will just buy it." I mean, I've bought stuff that's a bad value before. The work that I'm doing on my motorbike is a terrible value. Yeah. I could have bought a brand new motorbike and instead I'm going to be riding around on a 2003 with a paint job. That's insane. It It is. Objectively, it's crazy. Yeah, kind of. But I love the look of it. I have a lot of memories on that bike. It's my first bike. It's still enough for me. It's 650cc. It's really comfortable. And I did the paint job myself, which I think is super cool. So, I'll be like ripping around on my own paint job. Tommy B. It was Tommy B who did that Steam Control. Super cool. sucks. All right. What do you want to talk about next? Should we do the other big headline topic? Yeah, let's hit it. Let's do it. Let's do it. You guys might not like to hear this, okay? But I need you for one moment to just just here. Just just grab that and just what a chill pill. Just take it and calm down. Go ahead. Uh, gamers overwhelm See, I don't even We'll get into it. We'll get into it, but listen to the title. Gamers overwhelmingly prefer DLSS over FSR. In a three-way blind test over six games, German tech publication Computer Bases readers overwhelmingly found DLSS 4.5 Upscaling to have the best picture quality over FSR or native rendering. And that last one, that's the bombshell. The native rendering is the uh the games used for this test was NO17, Arc Raiders, Cyberpunk 2077, Horizon Forbidden West, Satisfactory, and The Last of Us Part Two. Now, that is also another huge bombshell. These are not just like Ashes of the Benchmark or like or even Cyberpunk, like games that are just overwhelmingly optimized for because they're the traditional showcase games. And these are showcasy games, beautiful games pretty much across the board, other than maybe Satisfactory. but these are real games that people are playing. This is not like contrived. Yeah. And all those real games ran at 4K resolution with upscaling set to quality. Videos were played to were played to readers in Nvidia's Icat player showing game clips rendered in DLSS 4.5 uh FSR and natively side by side. This is the it's a video. It is. But if anything to me that is a disadvantage to DLSS. It could be because DLSS when you're actually using it, remember we're talking DLSS upscaling, not DLSS frame gen, right? So there's no latency drawback of DLSS upscaling. If anything, the latency will be better because you will be running at more FPS because you're rendering at a lower resolution than upscaling it through machine learning. It's just it's a it's just a weird note. Uh respondents could indicate whether they preferred or answer equivalent. So they could be like, "Yeah, they're all the same." Uh DLSS won in every game with an overall result of 48% of votes from a pool of 6747. Native rendering was also preferred over FSR in every game with 24% of the overall vote to FSR's 15. that doesn't uh so 15% of people preferred FSR or 15% of votes were for FSR, 24% of votes were for native and 48% Oh, there it is. 12.8% of the responses were equivalent between the three categories. So, just don't care. One out of eight gamers was like, eh, whatever. Whatever, dude. Responses weren't ranked. Respondents only voted on what they thought was the best video. Now, if these were closer, okay, if it was like, you know, 20 Yeah, the 48 to 24% gap, 25 and 25. Like, I'm looking at it going like, okay, well, you've obviously got a bunch of normies who literally can't tell the difference and then a bunch of other normies who literally can't tell that FSR doesn't look as good as native, right? I I' I'd be I'd be ready to be pretty dismissive of it, but the sheer volume of voting and the overwhelming preference for DLSS is kind of minding right now. Like seriously, there is a lot of variables at hold. It was a video that was played, all that kind of stuff. But are you surprised by the results? No. Yeah, that's the that's the spicy part of this I was waiting for. Uh is is we we can nitpick how the like, you know, how the how the thing was done. We can nitpick the science. Um and I'm sure there's lots to be done there as there is with everything. Um but I'm not particularly surprised by the result. Have you tried it yet? Is your gaming machine up and running? It is up and running, but I have not tried 400. You're on 4000 series, right? Yes. Yeah. So you can run it. I think you have a 4080. Yeah. Okay. You should try it like immediately. Are you afraid to like it? M a little bit. I was too, but not not because of like external perceptions. Like it's kind of like the the first time that you you know try it with No. How? No, I don't I don't think at all. My my thing is that I'm worried about Oh, I guess you knew you'd like that. Yeah. Uh my my thing that I'm worried about is what this will do to multiple industries. Oh, which industries? What? Hit me. Hit me. I'm ready. Gaming and hardware. I'm ready. I mean, the hardware, it's already happened. Like Nvidia set this course years ago, not just when they launched the 20 series. They set this course when they started developing the 20 series. So this was like 8 years ago or like 9 years ago or something in video. That's really fast for this level of impact. It is. Eight or nine years for this level of impact is wild. Like it's actually very wild. you look at look at almost any other comparative industry. However, it's also like damn near clairvoyant when it comes to seeing where the where the winds are blowing within the tech industry and getting it this right when when it was in such early stages of development at that time when the hardware didn't exist, when the software tools didn't exist, when it hadn't been embraced by game developers. You got to give them credit. They nailed it and now everyone else is playing catch-up. Whether you like fake frames, whether you don't like fake frames, AMD and Intel are all in on upscaling and frame gen. Now, the the warden is kind of getting to my point. How are you fellas going to pivot when consumer computing is completely gone in 5 years? Um, this is kind of what I'm talking about is like the and it's not even just the work, right? we can actually do a lot of different things. Um, oh yeah, where's a lot of the revenue coming from these days? That stuff. Uh, so like, you know, that's of course that's a little bit of it, but I'm worried about the hobby I've had for literally my entire the the memories that I have of my entire life is being interested in this hobby. From before I was interested in this hobby, I don't remember anything. Like there's there's like it's been forever. And then there's what this will continue to do to the gaming industry. Um, gaming industry is in a really weird spot right now and I think this doesn't necessarily help. So, um, hear me out. We've had this conversation before, but it always felt kind of like, eh, sci-fi and maybe someday and blah blah blah blah blah blah blah. And it always seemed kind of easy to dismiss, but I feel like it's time to have it again. M if someone say Microsoft built a gaming experience that simply wasn't possible with many clients all over the world connecting to a central server to exchange game data. if they built a gaming experience that could only run on the big iron and that you remote into and it beams frames to you like a like I know we've had massively multiplayer worlds, right? But I'm talking like a massively multiplayer world where it's just it's just not even possible to run it on the client side anymore. Could you be convinced in this in this hypothetical you know universe scale game uh where you know everything is physics based and everything's persistent man what happened to physics in video games anyways that's a different topic but keep going but but let's say let's say that by that by having like enormous banks of AI servers and crap they could they could model and simulate the world in a way that just wasn't possible to render locally. Yeah. I mean, the more interesting part to me is the the anti-cheing that comes with that. Could you be convinced to cloud game to play that? Like, let's say it was it was a game that had a moment like Arc Raiders is having right now. Would you just be like, "Let's go." Would you be sad? Like, tell me. Walk me through. So far, I've resisted. I haven't joined any of the subscription things. I haven't joined Oh, because you know it'd be a subscription. Yeah. Oh, yeah. Cuz you're running on their hardware at that point. Yeah. I'd like have to be. Y um so I Yeah. I haven't joined Xbox Game Pass or or the Ubisoft service or EA's thing or or anything like that. Uh even even when it like probably made sense when I'd be like, "Okay, there's some new shooter coming out." Uh maybe it doesn't even have a single player or I don't really care about the single player for this one. And you know, I know my friends are only going to play for like two weeks, so like whatever. really every single time if I'm going to play that game, I've bought it. I have not joined the subscription services. I don't know at a certain point when there is no longer an option, which is the reality you're describing. Um I don't know necessarily what I do there. Um I think there's definitely a lot of interesting aspects. The anti-che is very interesting. Would you still be able to cheat? Absolutely. But the level of cheating would decrease and at least at the beginning the barrier of entry would increase. Um like using using machine vision to read a screen and literally a robot arm to move a mouse and operate a keyboard. Oh, you can still digitally send inputs. There's nothing. I I just mean that that's sort of the that's sort of the the ridiculous lengths to which we could go and people have and people have gone to make something that is completely undetectable by software. But you could say Yeah. Yeah. Cuz you could still read a screen and then snap to a head, but then like you said, still detectable by things, etc. Yeah. So, so like you will never be able to completely eliminate people who are determined not to play the video games that they pay for, but I think it would make it so that it's not like one per freaking lobby like some games are right now. Um, so like that's that is kind of exciting, but I I don't think I'm romanticizing this. I think I'm always going to have a computer. There's like I I spent the long I I It's kind of funny. During the Rena, I spent the longest period of time in my life since I touched a desktop without touching a desktop because at work I had a laptop. And I would take that laptop home to I mean most of the time continue working. But also like if I play games or whatever, anything I did on a computer was on a laptop for a while. And then I got my desktop back and it like shouldn't matter when you're connected to a dock. Like it does and I don't know why. does. They're just not that fast. I don't know like what it is. I like I daily a laptop right now for work. I don't have a work desktop right now and I haven't for like 6 months and there's just there's just something about it being a big box on a desk and I don't know why. No, they're just they're just I don't know. They just Ivonne desktops just feel like they work better. Ivonne always uh would talk to me about this like and I kept telling her it was her imagination because it doesn't make any sense, but she'd be like, "Yeah, no laptops wear out. they just like don't work as good after a while. I'm like that doesn't make any sense because anecdotally it's like it just kind of seems to it just kind of seems to happen whether it's the way that these mobile chips have a tendency to to be very bursty in their performance or whatever it is like they just ah man I don't get it. I don't get it. Um right now it's an Elite Book X. Yeah, an Elite Book X G1A. It's a stricks halo. So, it's uh it's like a $4,000 laptop that I would never buy because there's like things about it that are like like broken level of stupid. Like it has by default the the screen ships at 40 Hz. Yeah, I know, right? You can turn it up to 60. What is it? An engineering laptop or something or like what? Like an engineering sample. Why would No. Why would it have a stricks halo and a 40 Hz screen? Is it It's a It's a work. considered like a workstation cuz it can be configured with up to 128 gigs of RAM like Stricks Halo, you know, tends to do. I was trying to figure out like what what what configuration ever would someone buy that thing in when it's 40 Hz. And then I was like, okay, maybe it's just for CAD or something and maybe they don't care. I'm not sure. Maybe they do care. Like I feel like if I was an engineer, I'd be kind of annoyed that my screen's running at 40. It can do 60. It can do 60. But it's like super dim. Like it's not like you compare this to like a like a top top end MacBook right now and you're yeah yeah not good not good but man that stricts Halo but yeah I I feel like I'm always going to have a desktop and if I'm the dude running a desktop off I can only keep it alive through secondhand hardware cuz literally no one makes this stuff anymore. I feel like I'm going to be that guy. And does that mean I'm just aging poorly or whatever? Maybe maybe when I'm 70 and I'm still keeping my desktop alive, I will be seen as aging poorly, but I don't think I care. I like my spot. I like having a desktop. I like how it works. And if that's the equivalent of having a Windows 98 machine now, I think that's still fine because I think having a Windows 98 machine now is pretty cool. Yeah, I don't think it's going to go away. go away because you're not going to be the only millennial left in, you know, 30 years from now. So, I won't be 70 30 years from now. Well, I will. Right there, buddy. Um, yeah. Like, I don't I don't I'm just saying like and and I'm I'm I'm giving a theoretical scenario, right? And there's whether it happens or not. And I and I think that especially with how diverse the game development industry is even now and I think we'll become. I mean that's something you've talked about a fair bit. This this splintering off that's happening right now from the big studios. You're going to have a lot of people who in much the same way that game developers are spreading up who are nostalgic for the rich singleplayer like pixel art um RPG experiences of their youth or whatever it is, right? and are are trying to make that but better and more modern. I think you're going to have people making games that are designed to be played from the client side. There's always the indie space. Yeah. But and and and by and always, yeah, sure, always is a huge word. Very loaded. Maybe it won't always, but in our lifetimes, I don't see the desktop completely going away. It might take on a different form. The the kind that we use now might not make sense anymore. We're already seeing soldered memory make its way to the desktop, not because it's being crammed down our throats, but because it runs faster. Like the fact that framework went that route was pretty mind-blowing to me. And the first thing I told them was like, hey, like this is not that modular. And they're like, look, AMD literally like worked with us on this. You cannot build stricks halo with with memory modules and maintain the performance. And it's not that it needs it for the CPU, it needs it for the GPU. And the and and the GPUs becoming integrated the way they are in a really weird way that happened. We went from that conversation, right, where Intel started talking about, you know, the iGPU on the CPU becoming like very powerful and an important part and AMD with their Fusion way back in the day and the CPU and the GPU becoming integrated and we all went, "Yeah, but IGPUs are so crap. They're so bad." I feel like it just kind of everyone was talking about it and it like definitely wasn't going to happen. And then there was a period of kind of quiet and then it just happened. Happened. Here's a really how fine is the soldering on soldered RAM. It's not that bad. Yeah. BGA BGA RAM can be upgraded. A lot of the time the issue around both that and NAND comes down to like like firmware handling the firmware. M uh but no one is going to build a motherboard that is designed to have the RAM desoldered and resoldered onto it willy-nilly. And so because of that, you're never going to get friendly firmware even from companies that do have the best intentions. And you can make there are boards that allow BGA chips to just be like like like bolted onto them, but they're for engineering. It's not practical. The interface is way too expensive and bulky. Just trying to think like is it possible that's the return of like repair shops basically is Oh yeah. Oh 100%. It might it might not even be upgrading but it might be replacing fixing stuff like that be kind of neat. 100%. Um, right. The other thing I was going to say is I think Stricks Halo is just the beginning, too, because one of the things that was most exciting to me about Panther Lake was not and and this is why I think our Panther Lake coverage back at CES was so different from everyone else's because I was moderately excited to see Intel return to competition in terms of battery life. Um, put out a really good iGPU. Okay. You know, I was more than moderately excited for the iGPU. Uh moderately excited for the performance gains and they moved some caches around and all that kind of stuff that they tend to do as they make a new chip. But what I was really excited about was the modularity of the underlying platform. Like they've got all of this stuff that they were talking about for years. Like Fovaros is like working. It's in shipping silicon right now. We can just like take out and they talked about using third party vendor IP. So, the idea like, holy crap, of getting something like the SoC on the Nintendo Switch, right, with like an Nvidia GPU, but like an x86 CPU and then like some custom, you know, AI tom foolery over here and whatever they want over there and having like a like a mega chip on something like a framework desktop, like a really compact desktop form factor. That's that's exciting. That's cool. And if they're able to do that, not on a monolithic die, right, but through packaging, then the yields might actually not suck. And the performance benefit of having it all tightly integrated might be worth the cost. Maybe. Here's a here's an interesting comment from uh Fart Muncher 69420 in floodplane chat. Fartmuncher69_420 says, "I think enthusiasts will change to running servers inside their house instead of desktops." In my opinion, this is a really interesting comment because we've talked about that before. First of all, we have. Second of all, in my opinion, if you look at like tech media, what is the only thing that like really feels like it's growing right Building like local AI crap. Homebrew. Or home lab. Yeah. I don't know why I said homebrew, but yeah, home lab like and and doing things like that. And that's a big part of the reason why I think it's growing. But also, people are looking at like, oh man, like I I been mulling over this this this particular thought in my head for a while now. It's it's this like, you know, I'm not trying to be I'm not trying to be a gray man. I'm not trying to gray man. Yeah. Where you like blend in with the crowd and like you're you're you're you can't like you're you're all tactical but people can't tell. I'm not trying to do that. I'm not trying to like hide from the the government, whatever. But there's also like, you know, I don't take a picture of my junk every time I go to the washroom and send it to you. So, why should I share all my private things with Google and everybody else? Right. Right. So, like there there's people that are like, "All right, there's a certain level of invasion of my privacy that is just like, dang, dude, maybe back off a little bit." Right. So, I think people are trying to split off from certain major services, not out of paranoia. Oh my god, I need to be ultra tactical, but it's just like, wo, like this is actually too much. I should probably own a little bit more of my data. I think these two things are happening at the We did an AMD Ultimate Tech upgrade. Uh, I guess we shot it a couple of weeks ago for Nate, one of our guys at Creator Warehouse. Did I talk about this last week? Okay. So, so we shot an AMD Ultimate Tech upgrade and one of the things that he wanted was a NAS, which is like, yeah, you know, that's a thing that comes up on these AMD Ultimate Tech upgrades. But the difference is that Nate doesn't really do any video editing, doesn't really uh want a Plex server. He doesn't do the stuff that we typically think of people wanting NAS for. And this was really cool. and very exciting investment disclosure in Asht. But they have gotten to the point where what he was after was quite literally a matter of like maybe 10 clicks to get image set up on his remember hexos is based on trunaz. So the underlying the underlying system is Trunaz ZFS. Good stuff. And he was able to get it set up with their pretty dashboard, get image installed and syncing from his phone in like I kid you not about 10 minutes. Nice. With no trial and error and no BS. And that was what he wanted it for. He had a kid recently and he just doesn't want to upload to a cloud service. Yeah. because there's just there's a freaking limit. Yeah. Like it's it's really not um it's not edgy like like you hear these story it's oh man this is going to make conspiracy theorists like so I'm not going to say the word for it but wet in the panties. Yeah I guess. Yeah. But it's it's not it's not uh why why are they feeling like that? It's not fear of the unknown. It's knowledge. Did they see someone who's proconsumer? Jesus Christ. Uh Jesus can't help you where we're going, brother. It's not It's not fear of the unknown. It's knowledge of what's happening widely, right? Like you you this is an old story, but you hear about the Tesla stuff where they were like sharing videos from inside of people's cars for fun on their Slack. Like this is happening. We have accepted that even if a company is like morally perfect, well, they're gonna get hacked anyways. Like it's if your data is is is just publicly out there, people are going to get it. People you don't want to have it will have it eventually. It's just like, okay, realistically, most people probably not that important. Yeah, but but it kind of doesn't I still don't want someone seeing it. Maybe that just sucks. Yeah, maybe that's actually an irrelevant part of this conversation. And maybe we could just not that cuz I know that gets brought up too. And it's just like, dude, whatever. That doesn't mean I want Yeah, I don't know. Just owning your own stuff, I think, is shifting from paranoid people and hyperenthusiast land to normies, too. This is actually just kind of normal now. Dude, I I think that as cool as it was investing in Framework and as many good business decisions as I've made for LMG and mistakes, um the investment in Asht and the timing for Hexos is going to end up seeming like clairvoyant when they get their product out of pre-release. And like dude, the timing like I think they're aiming for Sorry, I'm going to jump in while you find that. Uh, dark guy said AI being trained on your junk for AI porn. See, this is part of my problem, though, is like you hear stuff like that and it's like, okay, maybe I think he's probably joking, but I've I've heard more recently that apparently one of the ways that they prey on women is they look for when you delete a bunch of selfies because it shows like a a low self-esteem moment and then they'll target you with ads for like makeup and cosmetic surgeries and stuff like that. Seriously. Seriously, that is so like maybe I'm just going to host my own photos and you can actually off. I just don't actually want you involved with this at all. So, there's a certain level where it's like uh yeah, you're doing stuff with this information that is just not okay. And like like that's, you know, self-esteem issues in in men and women are are a problem. But I think it's pretty well known that like negative emotions and negative thoughts and self-esteem issues like that are much more heavily present on wi with with women and it's just like I don't know get out of here. So if I can help solve that by like hosting it myself. Yeah. Okay. Maybe I'm going to do that now cuz I'm tired of this stuff and I think a lot of other people are tired of this too. I think Instagram was doing that too. Yeah. I don't I don't necessarily know. So here it is. Q1 of 2026, by March 31st, 2026, we will have 1.0 of Hexos, uh, which will include the local UI that people were rightly upset wasn't initially planned, uh, for for the for the launch, um, Q1 of this year. Yeah. And like that's that's awesome. And if you don't want to go that route, there's tons of other routes as well. Yes. Lots of other options. What I love about this one is the philosophy of making difficult and secure and robust simple. But if you decide you're going down this route regardless, you can go that route and skip the steps or there's a massive extremely vibrant community around doing it for free as well. Um, level one forums is really good for it. Uh, there's stuff on I mean there's stuff on the line executives forum, lots uh there's stuff on Reddit everywhere. There's tons of YouTube creators. There's tons of people all over the place that would be more than happy to help you solve these things. Um, the Discord age verification thing, people are posting about that as well. Like this is Yeah, this is just another example of like this to me is very clearly uh within the law mass data harvesting. And it's it's just everywhere now. And it's just too much. Just tired of it. I think uh I don't have much more to say on top of that. I think I think having your own NAS is going to go from a thing that weird pirates do to a thing that just is like a normal thing that people should do if they care about their privacy at all. I wouldn't be surprised, maybe maybe I'm being too in our own bubble about this, but I wouldn't be surprised if if in a certain amount of time it's like weird if you don't have some form of your own owned large storage. I mean, it's going to get hard with what was it? What was was it WD who said all of their 26? Yeah. Hard drive. Yeah. You know what? Let's jump right into this topic then. Hard drive capacity for Western Digital is sold out for 2026. WD CEO revealed during a company earnings call that they're pretty much sold out of HDD production capacity for all of this calendar year with firm purchase orders from their top seven customers. WD has also signed long-term agreements LTA's with two customers that extend into 2027 and one into 2028. This demand is driven driven almost entirely by AI data centers. Cloud revenue now accounts for 89% of WD's total revenue while consumer revenue has shrunk to just 5%. Let's take a moment and wrap our brains around that. And obviously it doesn't quite work like this, but at the Western Digital Factory, okay, as the drives are rolling along the conveyor and dropping into the bucket at the end of the conveyor, those drives, they're all done now. One out of 20 is destined for a consumer. What? 19 out of those 20. So for every hard drive you see in a consumer system shipping today, 19 more are going elsewhere with 18 of them headed to the data center to the cloud. Hard drive prices have already surged nearly 50% in the last 5 months according to Tom's hardware following a similar pattern to RAM and NAND which are also in shortage because of the current AI buildout. Yeah, I figured this out unintentionally. I was trying to help someone configure a build and the performance like was not very important. So I I actually recommended the the the the core most important thing was hard drive. So I recommended to get a hard drive. We checked the used market because of course and I was like oh everything's really high. I feel like these are just like people expecting too much value cuz like the used market around here is not I know what I got is not Yeah. The used market around here is not always super vibrant for everything. So, it's like, okay, let's let's jump on stores cuz I've seen literally during Scrapyard Wars. Where it's actually cheaper to just buy a new drive sometimes, which is whack, but like that has happened. Um, so like, okay, let's just jump on the stores. Then I was like, what is going like why are the hard drives so expensive? And then I started diving into things and I was like, oh no, it's coming again, isn't it? I found three WD greens, two terabytes each from um just to give you some idea of how old they are. They have archived footage from when we were at the Langley house on them. They were the old cold storage drives. So each of them only has I think around a few dozen power on and off cycles and like a couple hundred power on hours. I bet those are worth close today to what they were worth then, which is so messed up. Completely whackadoodle. Dan, chime up. Say it. Yeah, sure. I didn't want to interrupt. No, but yeah, my uh my NAS is they're nearing their 5year kind of scary age. Oh, and I have five 15 terabytes in there. O, I'm gonna be poor. How much is that going to run you right Oh my god, Luke, please check. I'm working on it. I have a A WD Green is worth 80 bucks for a two TB. That's nuts. Okay, so no, they're not as bad as they would have been like 12 years ago or whatever, but that's too much to be paying for a two terbte drive. You said 15 terabytes, Dan. Seagate Barracuda is what I have in there right now. or Exos, something like that. Oh god, they might be the same. Exoses were like kind of cheap for a bit. Okay. Okay. In fairness, 4 TB drives are around the same price. Here's one from Seagate for 90 bucks. No, he needs 15s. Sorry, I'm just talking about those stupid greens. Is this a phase where you would expect to upgrade? Are you looking for 20s? if there's 20s. I didn't do the math recently because power on hours weren't getting too crazy, but like I got to think about it. I was looking at SSDs and reorggaging my left kidney. Yeah, that's uh so yeah, 18s for like a Red Pro Naz drive is $400. That's probably cheaper than it used to be. I'm seeing I'm seeing four to4 to $700 depending on the models. Yeah, that sounds about the same. But I'm also not seeing 15s. The sweet spot seems to be a little higher than 15 right now. The 2020 the 20 terabyte is 420. Nice. Okay. So, I'm fine then. Sick. You're fine. Oh, really? You're good. You're buying 15. How many five of those? I mean, that's still That's still two grand. And this is US dollars, sir. Okay. That's cuz I remember paying about 400 bucks a drive 5 years ago. Yeah. Sorry. Canadian. I'm seeing on the Canadian site, I'm seeing Iron Wolf Pro 20 TB for 600 bucks. Okay, that's not that far off. He's getting 30% more capacity for about 30% more. It's not better. It's not like it used to be too. It's not like it used to be. The price was always the same where the price would always go down per gigabyte. But we talked about this. It keeps coming back to that bloody video I made where I was like YouTube premium should cost more money or whatever. What what what did I what was the premise of that title? But basically I was like hey look you got to understand Mo's law is dead. The law of storage being cheaper is dead. This platform costs more and more and more and more to maintain the more people use it. Something's got to give. Well, it looks like I'm not as um homeless as I thought it was going to be. just a little bit. John McGee 1996 asks, "Is this going to get worse or is there any indication of balancing out type of situation?" Hold on, just give me one second. You can't see it, but this is my Just going to polish my ball here. Going to gaze into it. Consult the orb. Going to We're going full gaze here. I thought you were going to give some whole impassion speech about trying to tell the future and stuff and then I don't know that was that was good. Like and the thing is I like obviously like I was kicking myself for not just stockpiling a bunch of DRAM, right? But I've been in this industry for so long. Do you know how many times I've heard the DAM's going up? it's going up in like what for for a month or two it'll trend up for a little bit maybe for a quarter or two but it always it always comes back down because at the end of the day you know it's people who you know they earn their money working on all the forecasting for all this crap years in advance that mostly have done a pretty good job over the years of predicting where demand and supply is going to go and making sure that they're striking a balance between maintaining the profitability of their fabs and also uh not over supplying or not under supplying the market making sure that they can supply all their their big customers including direct to consumers and I don't think there is a precedent for them it up this badly. Nobody saw this boom coming and there is no quick fix. There's no like, oh well, let's just uh, you know, I'm trying to think of a game where you were built. Yeah, ano. There's no ano just plopping down a new fab and then you just run a little road to it and now the supply chain is fixed. It just doesn't work like that. So, I don't I don't know cuz the the bubble could pop and if the bubble pops all these purchase orders just be sitting there. They, as far as I can tell, they they like, "What do you what are you gonna do?" Like, what's that um what's that famous saying? If you owe the the bank $1,000, you have a problem. If if you if you owe the bank if you if you have a loan from the bank for $20,000, that's a you problem. If you have a loan from the bank for 20 billion, that's the bank's problem. Yeah. And not the exact quote, but something like that. It's something along those lines. And in the same way, like I if if this whole thing just crashes, there's literally going to be no one to, you know, fulfill this $1 trillion RAM order or, you know, whatever whatever magic on on paper money has been exchanged in advance or whatever commitments have been made. So, if anything, there will be a huge crash in the pricing of this stuff and it'll be it'll be a free RAM for all. Um, but when that will happen, I have no way of knowing. If any like from my point of view, and I'm just I'm not a finance guy, right? Like I'm I'm I'm a tech nuts andbolts guy. From my point of view, we should have all figured out that this is not going to result in the kind of uh the kind of revenue generation that would justify the investment that's going into it ages ago. We should already be there. So, I'm just sitting here going, well, can I stay solvent longer than the market can stay irrational? The answer is no. Yeah, Dan, check your email. Full pin chat's cooking. Oh, are they finding him deals? I think I actually four. I think I might actually just need four, which is kind of nice. Sick. Oh, get shucked. Um, seems like a great idea. Mega Cool asks, "Hey, question. Are tariffs responsible for this consumer hardware shortage at all, or is it really just because of stupid AI?" Just AI. Um, tariffs aren't helping. Uh, yeah, but it it's a shortage globally. So, like tariffs are not helping. No, I can tell you that much. But the shortage is a is a much more macro problem that is not to do with a tantrum that a particular world leader is having at a particular moment. Does this affect you guys as a channel? Absolutely. Absolutely. In like so many ways. Constantly. and every day. This hobby has never been more difficult to get into. Uh, no, I actually wouldn't say that. Ring true. It's never been more frustrating to participate in. I'll say that. Yeah, it was definitely a lot more difficult to get into in the like much more further past in the AT days. Like where would you find resources to to learn to build? I mean, there was laptops that were $3,000 in like the early '90s. Yeah. you go way back to like the hobbyest days. And I mean, so never mind. Ignore that part. Even from a pricing standpoint, sucks right now. You can still buy a sick I mean, I told you we've got that $1,000 gaming PC video coming. You can still buy a sick gaming PC for $1,000. We went to uh David and I this video is coming out really soon. I talked about this one. We went to Costco and we brought a we bought a great computer for like 1250 US or something like that. A very capable little gaming machine. AM5 like like modern platform gaming machine with uh what was it 9600 I think it was the I think it was the XT 9600 XT perfectly chromulent gaming card. I played some Expedition 33 on it and I was like yep this is a gaming PC and and that's really great. It's really amazing that you can you can get into it like that. But it's also really frustrating um that we had it so good for so long and it's been it feels like it's been torn out of our fingers and the reason the reason is the hard part. Like if if Moore's law was just dead and everyone was doing their earnest best to overcome it and the answer was fake frames, I think everyone would go, "Okay, sure." But not everyone, but I Yeah, not everyone. But you I think you get what I mean. Yeah. Yeah. But if the reason that this stuff is not affordable and the reason that we're going the direction that we're going is because you know, I don't know, you Sam Alman needs more RAM, then I think that's a lot harder to swallow. It's a lot harder to be passionate about, to get excited about. I also think that I mean if you know if if companies like WD are having 5% of their revenue be consumer um and you see more patterns like what Micron did happening where these where these traditionally known in the western market brands that's how I'll say it um start kind of exiting I'm not saying western digital is exiting but Micron for reasons that Western Digital is experiencing. So, it wouldn't be unreasonable to see other brands do a similar thing. Um, I think maybe in a really weird way, one of the saviors of the desktop PC market might be China. because there is a consumer market. Yeah. Oh, yeah. Definitely. So, like if certain brands are just going, "Well, all the money's in data center." Well, that's not true. It's just there's a crazy amount of money in data center. So, like, uh, I don't know, somebody's going to step in and there's a lot of very hungry Chinese companies trying to get into computer components. So, like um I think it was a hardware unbox that made a video on um one of the Chinese DRM companies hardware unboxed CM or CX rather. Hold on. CXMT XMT YMTC. I think one of them did a uh 32 gig King Bank KFRW DDR56000 CL36 soreblade CXMT review hardware unboxed. Uh and it was like fine. I guess that could help, but I I don't think they have a ton of capacity. At least not right now. Not right now. I'm not talking about right now. But that's the thing about China is how how how long did it take them to build hospitals during co like days or something? Um China builds hospital in 10 days. That was nuts. That is nuts. That is nuts. And this is a different type of scaling and a different type of building and all that kind of stuff. But if there's opportunity there, somebody's going to chase it. And if the traditional brands are going data center, I that doesn't mean consumers are out of the market, right? Like it's we're still here. There's still a big market. We're still hungry. We're interested in things. There's still billions of dollars to be made selling to consumers. And I think consumers are probably less loyal than data center is. If data center uses something and it works. Oh, dude. It's great. That's where you have all those quotes of like nobody was fired for buying IBM. Yeah, dude. AMD has been Well, okay. It's not as cut and dried as AMD has been better than Intel in in server for years, but they've been a very compelling option compared to Intel for for years and years now. And how slowly that market share shifts compared to consumers who just seem to be able to are willing to pivot a lot faster. It's not it's less relationship and contract forecasting driven. It's more like I go and I see what's what's good right now. It's like recommended by my enthusiast buddy. I want more FPS, you know, like it's a very different decision-m Uh, SuperWisk says, "How long until Nvidia just gives up on GeForce?" I don't think they will. And my reason for that is largely geopolitical. Uh, really, I think they are much more geopolitical than a lot of the other brands. I think I think in my opinion Nvidia is extremely invested in Taiwan's market dominance and wants to hold themselves there. But why do they need gaming for that? Cuz I think they would take anything they can. And if they can take data center and gaming and anything else, I think they'll grab it and hold on to it. I think they will continue to make gaming GPUs, but for a different reason. I think that for many years, the gaming R&D fueled the data center products, and now we're seeing that kind of flip around where the data center R&D on things like machine learning is fueling advancements on the gaming side. Um, but I I I think it's less about geopolitics and I think it's less about Taiwan. And for me, I think it's more about tradition. I think there's at least as long as Nvidia's…

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