NZXT PODCAST - #020 - Jim

Episode Date: December 12, 2019

This week on the podcast Denis and Ivan are joined by NZXT's VP of Products and Customer Service: Jim Carlton. Jim and the crew discuss being a boomer, playing pre-release copies of Doom, and how Half-Life just isn't that great. Follow Jim on Twitter: twitter.com/jcarlton Listen live to the NZXT CLUB CAST on our Discord server at discord.gg/nzxt every Thursday at 10AM PT! Thanks to IBM TrackPoint IV#5211 for the artwork!

to episode 20 of the NXT Clubcast, the official podcast of the NZXT community. This podcast is recorded live every Thursday at 10 a.m. Pacific. Standard Time on the official NXT Discord server and is available to stream wherever you listen to your favorite podcasts. My name is Dennis and with me as always. We have Ivan. How do you do, my boomers?

Hello. Today's special guest is the OG boomerist of the mall. The one and only, he's the guy who gets to work on all of our hardware and products and customer service stuff. is Jim Carlton. Hey guys. How's it going, man? Hey, Jim, welcome to the NZXT Clubcast.

Awesome. I'm stoked to be here. You know I've been lobbying for a slot for a while, so. Yeah, you've asked you be on here more times than Andy, which is a record. No lie, no lie. I love the community. You want to participate. Yeah, and the community loves you, man.

You know, like I was telling, I forgot how I was talking to yesterday. They asked me who's on the podcast, and I was telling him it was you. And they said, well, how is he going to do on there? And I said, he's going to do great. You know, it's like, I can't count the amount of times. I've gone on the Discord server, like, in the middle of the night, like, on a Friday or Saturday night. And then there's Jim in general just, like, talking until, like, three in the morning about just, like, boomer things. It's whatever.

It's whatever. It's great. Yeah. So, yeah, if you guys are listening live right now, get those questions lined up for the end of the show. So you guys can ask Jim. And you can hear it hear it from the voice. Yeah. Or even, like, you know, you guys didn't even wait to like that last part because, I mean, we're probably going to answer 90%.

of the questions you're going to be asking anyway. So if you listen very closely, listen closely with your eyes, you'll see what's up. So Jim, hardware products and customer service. That sounds like a lot. So, yeah,

I get to work on a lot of stuff here. Right. I tell people all the time, I might be the luckiest person you've ever met in your whole life. Just because I've been doing something I love for almost 30 years now. Right.

That's pretty uncommon. Not everybody gets to do that. So I get to touch pretty much all the hardware we build on some level, right? I participate in it, sometimes on the definition side, all the way through to picking colors, right? Sometimes it's just a top level view, but I get to touch everything on a hardware side, which is fantastic. And then I get to work with the CS team who are just amazing right there. I'm going to use the word kick ass and sorry you can bleep it later, but they are amazing. That way.

They kick serious butt. Somebody warned Jim right now. Yeah, exactly. Mute for seven days now, but three days. I'm not sure with Eddie. Chats going nuts right now. But I get to work with them and they're just a fantastic group of people too. Right, right.

You know, like I said, I'm, I'm so lucky. Like this is so much fun. And I think NGST is lucky that, you know, the guy who's in charge of the product stuff. is also in charge of the customer service stuff because I don't know if there's any other company that's set up that way. Yeah, yeah, for sure. You know, I did it before. Yeah, or so there, but yeah. All right. Well, yeah, it's it's right. I've never seen it before at any company I've been at. And, you know, here at NZXT, I think, you know, we really value our customer. So for me, it's, it's really cool to have, you know, not just the customer service team working on customer

service. And, you know, I've told Jim this a bunch of times, you know, customer service is the only service and that's how we treat social media and our community you know we really want to help you guys so super true it's really cool to have a guy like jim here with so much experience um not just with product but with people and you know helping customers and and all that stuff yeah 30 years huh it's 30 years been doing this almost 30 years in the PC space so yeah so yeah let's let's talk about that a little bit uh how did you end up here like what journey did you take to get to nz xx Crazy journey. Crazy journey.

So I was supposed to be a doctor. It was a high major. Pre-med major in college, right? Dang. Realized through some stuff that occurred in my work life that I didn't want to do that. So I... Too many cooties? Kind of.

That's a different story. It's not a podcast story. Whoa. But anyway, it was just a rough thing that I had to. deal with and emotionally and and sort of mentally and it just said doctor's not for me so I had a buddy that um believe or not had taught me to play bridge and we played avalon hill board games quite a bit this was pre-PC days folks um or pre-PC gaming days let's put it that way the server's googling what is bridge yeah exactly what is bridge uh it's a card game folks and we played a lot of avalon hill

board games together and he was uh computer science major and he said hey you know what you're a really smart guy. I'm about to leave school and take a job at Sparer Univac. You don't want to do what you're doing. So why don't you, why don't I teach you how to code and you can take a part-time job that I've got? You can fill in for me. So I went over to his house and over the course of two weekends, he taught me 6502 assembly code. So I started my life as a programmer. What kind of computer were using back? That was on an Apple 2. So that was on an Apple 2. 6502 is a Motorola processor that was in the original Apple designs. So I did that for a while. Then I got, I was outside another part-time job because I was a college student. So I'm sure those of you on the podcast who are college

students empathize. I was also working in a photo lab doing, had a night shift job there doing something called an internegative. So again, something that's very boomerish. Nobody makes anymore because digital printing and all. But anyway, I started doing those things. And they kind of came together in the photo lab wanted to get into computer graphics. So I started messing around with computer graphics in around 84, something like that. And I ended up moving from that photo lab to a software company where I was a, I wrote device drivers. So I wrote printer and display device drivers in 8080 assembly.

And they used to send me out to customers to help troubleshoot stuff. So. It was 84, you said? That was, yeah, around 85-ish, I think by the time I took that, took on the field engineer job. And for field engineering, the sales guys were like, this dude, like, he knows his stuff. He's closing business for us. So they were dragging me to sales calls. So eventually I actually ended up in sales.

So I was a salesman for about two years, two and a half years. So it's so fun, right? Actually, actually, at that time, it was a blast because it was a PC industry, right? So it was just starting up. So it was just starting up and it was easy to sell the software and everybody was making gobs of money and I was traveling the world with a gold American Express corporate card. You know, it certainly didn't suck. So you're balding.

So you're balding. So I was, you know, mid to late 80s having a really good time. And. The movie American psychos based on gym. That may be. I don't know. So I went to Hercules computer technology, which are the guys that actually invented monochrome graphics, right?

So way back in the day, there was this new application called Lotus 123. The first was spreadsheets, the second was database, the third was graphics, right? We put the three in Lotus 123 is what Hercules used to like to say. But monochrome was out. EGA was in, and they weren't doing really well, and they wanted to transition to new graphics technology. So they recruited me. I joined them as their business development manager.

We did pretty well for a while. Got into 3D there. So we did some 3D accelerators for high-end engineering software platforms. So things like Ketia, AutoCAD, stuff, you know, intrograph, things like that, to BDM for them. We kind of consolidated the company. So the company ran out of money. We laid off everybody but six people. The six of us sat in a room and said, what are you going to take?

And so everybody looked at me and said, okay, we're going to leave sales with your, with your boss who is a VP of sales. He's going to run all sales. You're going to take over marketing, product marketing, customer support. Like, all right, give it a shot. So that's where I got my first taste of being in product marketing. And the very first product that I spec out

on a PC magazine editor's choice, which doesn't sound like much today. But back then, that was the most coveted thing you could win. So I launched six more graphics cards with Hercules. least five of which got PCMag editors choices so that was pretty exciting for me a lot of fun doing that and that's where I realized my passion is truly product it really is product and in the basically what I really learned was it's building stuff for customers that's what I really finding the thing that's

going to make them happy delight them excite them be be something they're inspired by that's what makes me go yeah and you're lucky that it's something that you enjoy yeah yeah you're a But you're a hardcore gamer. Yeah. Yeah. So I went from Hercules to Creative Labs to launch their 3D Blaster product line. They had a PM who sort of got the project started and he left. And so they were trying to fill a job.

And I got recruited into there. So I launched the 3D Blaster VL, which was the very first 3D accelerator for the PC. I remember making my dad buy that for me. Well, thank you. Thank you, Dad. Took me to Comp USA. Yeah. Yeah.

Back when Compuosa was a big deal, back when there was still egghead software. Yeah, that's true. Anyway, so I went from creative. I was there for quite a while. And I left creative and did a startup with Richard Branson's Virgin Group, where I worked on MP3 players and audio platforms and stuff like that. Then I went from the startup. We closed that up a couple years after we started it.

And they just, they didn't want to be in electronics. They wanted to concentrate on space. So Virgin Galactic took the rest of our money in Iran. So it probably was a, it was an interesting choice at the time. I think they could have been very successful. How old was Richard Branson back then? Let's see. So that was 2004.

He's like 70 something now. So I don't know, late 50s. And 50s. Partied with him on Necker Island. That was pretty fun. Jim so old. actually knows baby Yoda. I gave, I helped birth baby Yoda I think. I'm not sure. I'm pretty old. So anyway,

did the Virgin startup. We closed that up and went to work at Logitech. So worked at Logitech on digital music platform stuff. So nice. Um, uh, was there when we bought a company called Slim Devices. So I got a chance. They dropped me in. I was the first Logitech person inserted in that acquisition. So I helped kind of do the transition into Logitech. And we did the squeeze box product line. So if you've ever used a squeeze box boom, squeeze box radio, squeeze box touch, or the more modern version of the transporter, those were all my products. Great soundtrack.

Yeah, squeeze box, yes, yeah. That was my intro song. And then got recruited from Logitech to Corsair. Spent quite a bit of time at Corsair. They had... Never heard of them. Yeah. They wanted to transition from a memory company.

other stuff and so they needed a product guy. So I joined, helped with products. So back then they were just doing memory, that was it? They had memory in Flash and they had just started to look at getting into power supplies. Wow, yeah. So they had hired a guy to do power supplies, but he was really just, I mean, he knew his power supply business, but he was not a product guy, but an engineer project manager on power supplies kind of guy.

So they realized they need some help. They had just launched their first one, which was the HX. Around what year was this? I joined in 2008. What's the difference between like an engineer product and like a product guy? So the product marketing guys are the customer facing guys, right? So they're the ones. Product marketing is really the job is to know the customer and know the customer

pain points and then figure out how we're going to solve that. What's that product definition that's going to make that work for somebody? Right, right. So you as a product marketing person, you do a lot of business. business analysis. You look at market sizes, you look at trends, things like that. But you also spend a lot of time on UX user experience, right? PMs are hopefully, you know, the PMM guys are hopefully, and gals, because I have a couple of PMMs on the team who are girls as well. But the, so I use guys sort of collectively. Humans. Lump all humans in that, please.

Except, except melody. No, Melody. Melody's all right. She's Good. But anyway, they are hopefully relentlessly curious, right? You have to be somebody who's always asking what, what could I do or how does that work? Or why is that, why is that problem still there? Why isn't anybody solved that? So they spend a lot of time on the business side, a lot of time on the user side. And hopefully what that turns into is an idea or a vision or a spark, right? Right. And then you start looping other smart people into that discussion. and say, hey, we've got this idea. We're thinking about doing it this way.

And you talk to engineering and you talk to marketing and you might survey some customers and you start to coales that idea into a product. And then we kick that product off. And that's when it goes over to engineers. And engineers execute that vision. Got it. Right. And it's really the best products come from really tight collaboration between all of those teams.

Right. So product marketing kind of touches most of the organizations in a company. Right. and the best product marketing teams do a great job of communicating across there and involving people and bringing those ideas together. But they're also really, really good at saying no. The absolute best thing I tell I tell product marketing people all the time, the best word you can learn is no. Take it out if it doesn't count. Right. Like the last thing, so a lot of product marketing people will come in with a feature chart. They'll compare everybody's competitive products and they'll make

big chart and they'll have 12 things that are checked off for everybody and then they'll have 13 in their column and it's like we're one better right and it's like no no no no no I don't care what anyone else does right like one of the one of the rules is I really don't care what's come before right what is needed right what are we trying to accomplish right what do we want what is our customer want what is the person we're targeting how do we do it doesn't matter what's been done yeah it's great to learn from that it's great to know what's out there But don't think you can don't think that you win by plus oneing somebody else.

You win by understanding your customer delivering something that's awesome for them. And I think NZXT, I met Johnny through a mutual friend. So after Corsair, I did another startup in quantum materials, actually. So it was kind of a really crazy fun, whole new world to go learn about. right. So one of the things that that is a hallmark of product people and something that I've done my whole life is be a lifelong learner. Right. Never stop learning, right? And so. So I told me yesterday it's never stop learning. Yeah, I never stopped learning. I mean, I'm I'm legit boomer, right? I'm at the tail end of the years, but I'm a legit boomer. Right. You guys saw my picture. I'm a gray beard,

right? So I'm an old guy. I probably read more books than most of you guys. I probably read more more non-fiction news articles. It probably, you know, I'm, I broke out my basic electronics book and was brushing up on some circuitry stuff when we were encounter a problem a few weeks ago, right? So I'm a lifelong, don't stop learning kind of person. And so an opportunity after I'd left, Coursair came up to get into quantum materials. I was working with a team of nine MIT and Brown University PhDs on some crazy material. We ended up running out of money, sold the sold,

the technology to Samsung and was looking for my next thing. And a friend of mine said, you know, NST is looking for you. Like they're looking for a product guy, but they're looking for you. You need to go talk to Johnny. So I hooked up with Johnny and Johnny was like, it was really funny because Johnny's the most humble person I think I've ever met in my life.

So Johnny, Johnny Ho is our CEO. And he really legit is probably the most humble person because the first thing he says to me is, you'd come to work for NST. I mean, you were at Corsair. Like, he was just blown away by this idea. And I said, yeah, I was at Corsair and I loved it.

I remember, actually, I remember when NZT hired Jim. It was a big deal because no one could believe, wow, we're getting someone from like a real company to come work here. Because we were, like, so small back then, you know. And like, no one really, I guess, you know, thought that we were like one of the big boys, you know? Right. It was kind of like we were still like, you know,

small timers or whatever but right right um the fact that you know we can get someone with so much experience that was a huge deal and then i also remember um jim you know i'm not i'm not making fun of you because you're old but right it's but when you make fun of myself for being old don't worry about it i was i remember i was like man this is like probably the oldest guy in the company and or one of them what i'm i'm the second oldest employee i won't name the first because that's uncool but yeah i'm number two but not by not by a lot of years not by a lot of years and you know our company is really young. Like I think the average age must be like 24 or something like that. Yeah, yeah, maybe yeah 24 or something right around there.

I used to be one of the oldest people here. I still am, I guess, but you know, it's, you have a lot of experience under your belt. Yeah. Yeah. It's cool that you keep you still, you know, you know, you're not done learning like you said. You're still trying to, you know, figure out what's next and things like that. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. We're very lucky. And I, and I'm still, you know, I think I'm still a high energy guy. I think, you know, I don't, I don't feel slow. I don't feel old. Right. Olds is old. A lot of people say old's in your mind.

I mean, I feel it in my body, but I don't feel it in my mind. I don't feel old in my head. Because it's, you know, the industry is just so much fun to watch and so much fun to participate in. It's crazy, right? Like, it's just changed so much. Yeah, it's wild. I mean, you know, I am legitimately an original gamer. Like, you know.

What did you start playing games? The first games I played were on a Radio Shack, TRS 80. And I wrote them myself. The chat is Googling a radio shack. Yeah, exactly. TRS 80, holy crap. Just so you know, the way we stored data was with a cassette deck, but you would connect a cassette deck, a cassette recorder to the microphone outjack on the TRS80.

You would press the record buttons and then you'd hit save and it would play the digital data through the microphone to the tape on the deck. What kind of a game is that? There's actually a really great channel called the 8-bit guy or something. And like he shows he showcases like a lot of a lot of old tech and he has the story where he would like steal games by like recording the audio and keeping it on like another device so he can like return it back or something. Yeah. It's really great. It's crazy how that stuff worked. And then.

So I my favorite Avalon Hill board game at that time was a board game called Wooden Ships and Iron Men. So it was you're basically it was a sailing simulator done on a board done on a tabletop. And so I programmed in wooden ships and iron men. I mean, had the rules. So I had to figure out how to how to, you know, program it. So that was probably the first PC game. The first game game I ever played on a computer at all was there was a Star Trek game that ran on old. I think that I think on that one was like a K-E-R-O-N-I-X computer.

And then I also played adventure. And those, we didn't have digital screens. So we had what they call teletype, right? So you had a typewriter typing out on paper. That matrix typewriter typing out on paper. So if you've ever played any form of adventure like Zork or any of those games, you know they're text heavy. So it's the thing of, you read it and you say, go north. That's not like every game was back then.

Yeah. Yeah. So, I mean, I'm legitimately an original gamer. like on as far as computer gaming goes i've been doing it since it was born um he's played every single leisure suit larry i have actually sadly that is true look good old sierra games that long long gone those guys um but yeah it's uh so so you know i've been i've been doing this forever so for me it's so exciting just to be a part of right because i'm obviously i was playing board games right so and learning bridge and college and things like that so gaming is is fundamentally something i love

I'm very, very passionate about. It doesn't matter what the style of it is. So do you still play games today? I do. I do. What are you playing right now? Let's see. So right now I actually broke down and I started, I started leveling my paladin up on BFA,

mostly because my kid is bugging me because I don't tank for him anymore. So I don't tank new content. I tank old content for them when they're doing transmog runs because I've been playing it for so long I can tank all the old content. A lot of newer players can't really tank old content because they never learned all the boss battles and stuff. And now they've scaled a lot of that content. So it's not a face roll anymore, right? So he's bugging me to level up. So I've been leveling up on wow. And that that's pretty time consuming. I did play a little wow classic just to just for nostalgia. How'd you like it? I don't get it, man. It was a grind then and it's the worst

grind now. Yeah, that's a that game is like you have to not have a job, not have a love wow. And Wow classic is like I just don't want to kill another bore like I'm so tired of of killing boars. But back then you know back in the day that was like the game. Yeah. Oh God. Yeah. Well, EverQuest was ahead of that. And yeah, I mean, it was, you know, there were a lot of there.

Everything is built on everything else. That's the one thing that you don't really, you don't really necessarily see unless you've been around like I have since God was basically a kid. You know, it's, it's, uh, you get the perspective that everything's built on something else. Yeah. Besides gaming, you know, what's your day-to-day like now? Like, just work-wise. So I spend a lot of time on Discord. On Discord.

I wish. Actually, I spend as much as I can on Discord because like you said, I love the community, right? And really, I mean, quite honestly, it's a little bit self-serving for me to be there. Because I'm listening for two things, right? Great product ideas, which come from pain points. So as people are talking about their stuff, I try not to ask too many questions, because then people do too much speculation or try and over answer. I just try and attenuate myself to listen really well to what they're talking about is their pain points, right?

Because solving pain points is where great products excel. We need wheels on computers, Jim. Yeah, exactly. And then we have, you know, then the other self-serving part is I want to know how people perceive NZXT, right? How they perceive its products, how they perceive the service, how they perceive the company so that we can help improve. that right so so there's a lot of self-service there but but the people there are great like the community that you guys have built is absolutely remarkable and I think I've said it multiple times I even did an amazing job of starting a community and in the the the mods that we have the

the people that participate are a reflection of kind of what you what you what your vision was for building it right which was NCXT is is a is supposed to be a company that is focused on users, that's focused on giving them value and quality and good service and all of those things. And you took that and embodied that in kind of the tone of our Discord community and our tone of our social media. And that's attracted the same kind of people, right? Because like attracts like, right? You get this sort of community that starts building and they're just, they're phenomenal to help each other. I mean, you know, guys like, Guys like Sweet Hero, I mean,

Sui is just, he's amazing. Like the hours he puts in helping other people is just remarkable. Like just, it's insane. And I'm not to just call him out, but I mean, we have tons of mods who do that.

But, you know, you just see over and over, you know, guys, PSU dude, you know, just getting in there and helping people with PSUs or Polenians with audio.

And, you know, I mean, just all these guys who are out there, putting their own personal time in to help is just, it's super rewarding for me to see, right? I love it. Yeah.

And yeah, it's been, it's been cool seeing the community grow as the company has grown. You know, like we've gone from a small company to a bigger company, the same way our community did like along the way. And we've just been lucky to get good people on both sides, you know,

getting good employees and getting good community members. Right. And I think, you know, if you look at the podcast voice chat, you can see, you know, there's tons of NXC employees.

employees in there. And I think it's because everyone that works at NZXT really, really loves the community and everything we do is for them. And I think the community, you know, feels it. And I think it reflects, you know, like, like you brought up social media. You know, I love seeing people have fun on social media and just not really so much there because, oh, we're promoting something or we want you to buy the latest thing we make. It's not even about. that it's literally like how are we going to have fun today yeah and today you know we're having fun with the podcast so let's go in there and have some fun listen to some fat boys and enjoy ourselves tonight we're having fun right yeah tonight's the banquet yeah yeah that's right we're at our holiday banquet so you know it's true though you know one of the one of the big memes that bounces around is shut up brand right i don't think anyone's throwing that in an nzxte they do but they stop because we clap back at them yeah well the community claps back at them too because they don't look at us as a brand.

They look at us as a community member because that's who we are and how we behave, right? So we're not a brand selling, right? We're, we're, that, that isn't what we do. Like, we end up selling stuff and, and God knows I appreciate that because it pays a lot of people's salaries and, you know, and lets us build new products. I hope. So, so, so I do appreciate people buying stuff. But, you know, our goal actually isn't to sell stuff. Our goal is to make stuff that people want to buy.

And there's a difference between those two things. Right. Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. I think our community kind of shows that too because there's tons of people out there that have NZT stickers on their, you know, whatever brand computer. And to me, that's awesome because we don't really care like what they're playing on. They can be playing on, you know, a PlayStation or whatever. Go buy a Coursair 1 if that's going to get you playing games.

We just want people to play video games. Right. And maybe someday you'll build your own PC in an NXD case. And maybe you won't. And you know what? That's still okay because you're advancing. seeing PC gaming, you're building that gaming community. And that's, we serve that community.

The most important thing, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. The least important thing is power supplies. Exactly. Yeah. So, unless.

Sorry, PSU dude. So you said earlier that. And Luke and the rest of the fanatics. You said earlier that our goal is not to, is not to sell things, but to make things that people want to buy, right? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

What do you do every day that kind of like makes that happen? Um, well, I, I don't really do that. Like, I work with the people who do that, right? So, right? So the product marketing managers are really the front line guys that do that. Right. I'm kind of just there to direct, right? I help them, I help them because of my experience, because of my knowledge, because of the things

I've done, I have a kind of unique perspective, right? So I've, as I like to tell them, guys, every mistake that you're going to make, I've made at least twice. Right. So, and I try and learn and I still make them all twice. So, you know, and ZXT tries really hard to, you know, have a culture where failure is not something to be feared, but something to be, you know, look at as an opportunity to learn. Right. So what I, yeah, exactly.

So I work, I work really closely with the PMMs every day to make sure that they're thinking about the right things and that they're putting their focus on the right directions for the product, the right features for the product, the right cost. for the product and the right quality levels. And you know, I'm kind of, I'm not the yes, I'm the ultimate no. Right. So, you know, if my, my rule is pretty easy. If you can't advertise it on the outside of the box, why are you putting money into it, right? If it's not something that's big enough to, to solve a problem, you know, then why are you focused on it? Now, to be fair, we also do stuff like we don't really do a lot of emphasis on our cable management kit, right?

Right. But that's an idea that was born out of the frustration of both being system builders who have to, you know, deal with cables, but also being a product person like me who has to spend $40,000 to $50,000 on a cable management tool every time we build a case. Right. So we solved that problem. We stepped back and we went, wait, let's think about this. So we built Lego building blocks basically of cable management.

And by doing that, we were able to say we're going to invest a lot of time and energy in figuring this out and a lot of cost in the tool originally, but we haven't done. So we've done, let's see, five, six, we've tooled up eight, nine, eight or nine cases now. And when you say tooled up, what does that mean? That means creating steel tools, right? So bending steel, you know, creating the tools that bend the steel. So we tooled up all these cases. We've only tooled up one cable management tool since I started. And that, that's something that, you know, users don't see. But it means that we have. less cost involved in the production of the case. It means we have cheaper parts because we make more of them.

So we pass that on in the form of quality and we pass on the form of cost savings, right? So you get a little extra but you don't necessarily advertise it. That's kind of, that's an important part. But the big stuff you spend money on, I'm always trying to focus the guys on, look, if you want to put two or three or four dollars in the bomb, that's going to be eight or ten or twelve dollars to the end user. Is it worth it? Is it worth it? It may be worth it from a press perspective to check a box, but does a customer get $12 in value out of it?

And if not, let's really think about pulling it out. So I actually spend a lot of time doing that. I spend a lot of time looking at numbers, right? I've got a big budget. I got a bunch of people who work for me. I've got to look at numbers that, you know, make sure that we're still, you know, in line. And I spend a lot of time on customer service too.

And mostly what I spend time there is, same thing. I try and guide the team to look at how they're interacting with customers. What are they doing? How do we do better? How do we answer more questions faster? Not because I'm trying to get more efficiency out of the desk, but because the longer customer waits, the less happy they are, right? And the more we can answer and the faster we can get that answer to them,

and the more accurate that answer is the better we're serving our community, right? So I spent a lot of time on that too. And sorry to cut you off, But one of the things that I really appreciate that you did with the customer service team is, I think it was last year the year before. It might have been two years ago already. I asked you, is it cool if the customer service team helps me with Twitter DMs? Because it's becoming impossible for me to reply to all these people.

And the other part of it too was, you know, I do get some complaints or we do get some complaints on social media. But for the most part, it's fun. But I know the customer service team, they get way more complaints than like, fun stuff. So I wanted them to also have more fun and then you were totally like on board with it. You're like, oh, heck yeah. That's awesome. It's not always easy because, you know, sometimes we'll post a dumb meme and then people would just start spamming the DMs and the customer service team is dealing with like, you know, free PC. We know, we have macros that handle almost all the free PC crap because that was pretty brutal for a while. But yeah, it, you know, it's a and and honestly,

that's a great opportunity for them because that is a thankless job. Like that is, there isn't a tougher job at a company than frontline customer service. Those guys swallow stuff that it's really bad. So, hey, look, listen, if any of you guys are upset, put yourself on the other end of the phone before you start chewing on that customer service person, please. Because those guys, boy, do they get it. They get it from both sides. Now, they also know, one of the first things I told them was, look, if they're attacking

the company, you suck it up. You just suck it up. And you apologize and you take it. it because they paid us and if we screwed up they get every right to insult the company right they insult you personally hang up the phone cut the conversation off i don't care i'll i got your back i will take that and that does happen they can call me yeah they can call me give them don't give them give them give them my name i'll i'll take that phone call i've actually fired a couple customers i've told customers you're not welcome to call customer service anymore and we paid them for paid them for

all the xc gear nzxte gear they bought said you can't if you buy more gear we will not support you are done within ZXT. And I've done the same thing with people we've banned on the server for doing crazy things like posting NSFW stuff after I explicitly told them like three or four times. Don't do it. I warn them and they do it again. I'm like, you know what? I don't care how much money you spent with us. I'd rather not have you be a toxic member of this community than taking your money. So I'm sorry. It has to be that way. But, you know, it is what it is. And then they'll, they'll complain to customer service or even like email Johnny and be like, I'm done with this company.

They banned me or what kind of, how do you treat customers this way? And it's not even treating customers. It's treating people. Like, we're all humans. And the last thing we want is for humans to be toxic with each other, especially through NZXT. Like, you don't want to be involved with that. It's like not worth it.

No, and the great part is we can do that because Johnny wants that. Johnny doesn't want those customers. He's the original customer service rep. He used to be customer service. Yeah. But he doesn't want that. He doesn't want people like that. our community. It's okay for us. It's kind of, it's funny because it's kind of the same reason

we don't do mesh fronts, right? Sure, we could sell a few more cases if we put a mesh front on it. Okay, whatever. Would it be cooler? You know, I can, I ensure you a lot of day that says in stock configurations, are we cool as well as a meshify C for GPU. We don't cool quite as well for CPU a couple degrees off, but, but we want, we have a certain design look we want. We have a certain platform we want. And honestly, there's plenty of mesh cases out there. I know you as a customer might want an NZXT mesh case, but NZT doesn't want to build a mesh case. We don't mesh around. We don't mesh around.

So it's kind of like that. It's like we know what we want to do and we're okay with letting some sales go. We're okay with letting some customers go because it doesn't build our community or it doesn't build our design or it doesn't build what we want to see in the future. So it's kind of a. So I've worked at some great companies. I mean, look, I've worked for Virgin like they flew me to Necker Island and I literally sat in a hot tub and drank with Richard Branson, right?

That kind of stuff happens. And baby Yoda. It's crazy fun, right? And you look at, you look at, you look at a place like Logitech. That's a great company. You know, I had great fun at Coursera. I've had great fun. Creative Labs was amazing place to work, right?

This is Drop Dead the single best job I've ever had in my life. That's a period. Period. It's mutual, man. Period. I mean, I, I, this is, I am so, I tell, I tell, I tell, I tell, I tell, it all the time. I'm the luckiest guy you probably will ever meet in your life. And at the sort of tail end of my career, I mean, I don't plan to be working for, you know, another 20 years, right?

So at the tail end of my career, I actually found my absolute drop dead best job, my most favorite job. What a great way to sort of work towards your retirement, right, is with something you're so happy about, right? So it's fantastic. Yeah, I feel the same way. Before I worked here, I worked at really big companies too. I never worked for a quote unquote small company, but every other company I worked at before here, you know, I had like thousands of employees, never once talked to the CEO. Then the founder never knew I existed. I was never given the freedom to think. It was just like, here's a book, here's what you do, do it, and you get a paycheck. And you hear from this time and you leave it this time, whatever. And then here, it's like the exact opposite. It's like, all right,

Ivan, go for it. Get crazy. What do you think? What do you think? We should do. And then Johnny, I think, believes in everyone. It's not just, you know, me and Jim and Dennis. It's literally like everyone. Everyone has a shot here to make a difference. Everyone does make a difference here. We've had people that start in customer service, for example.

And like Harry, you know, starting customer service, went to the camp team. And now he's literally managing the entire warehouse full of like builders and logistics. Like it's crazy like the opportunities people can get here. Sure. It's awesome to see you for real. Yeah, no, I think it's great. I mean, I think, you know, people should, people should be challenged to do the right thing and then let them go and do it, right?

So. And fail. And fail. I mean, look, failure is part of learning, right? If it doesn't kill you outright, it's going to make you stronger as long as you learn from it, right? So, so that's a great part of the culture here, right? Take notes, Dennis. Yeah.

I'm doing it. Yeah. So we, oh, so by the way, do we figure out what we're doing to give? this stuff away are we going to do it post podcast or we're going to do it live on the podcast live because why don't we give something away why don't we tell the what you grab something I'll tell a story about it and then we'll keep right up already how about the first thing the give away is the the or do you want to make that the last thing because I honestly I think that's the coolest thing here but I mean I think we should know it's it's totally I you guys pick what do you have here

Jim let's see all right so so so I haven't just grabbed the three and a half inch discette so this is this is heretic so so it's software id software was created to do the Commander Keene franchise originally. Side Scroller. Fantastic fun side scroller, right, John Carmack. Founded IT software in the channel, by the way. If those who want to see what it looks like. So it was originally just a game developer.

And Heretic is an application they did where they became a publisher. So they were working with a company called Raven Software. So I happen to go way back with folks. And I'll tell the story after we give this away. But I go pretty far. back with with id software and i've worked with them across multiple companies and and i'll tell you the story of the first person in the world whoever got doom induced motion sickness sadly he passed

away from brain cancer a few years ago but he was a good friend of mine and it's a great story but heretic was the first application that id software published i believe i'm pretty sure so i have the original version 1.0 discets that were sent to me they're not the production discets they are the production copy but they're not the boxed set these are the ones they sent out to that's literally worth like the partners or less that's awesome man it's like i don't remember the last time i seen these three and a half inch yeah so it's kind of a cool little piece of of pc gaming history like all this stuff is just stuff that's in boxes in my garage i'm gonna ask you where was all i have so many boxes of crap it's amazing so i'm starting to give away right now

I'm going to say, and if you guys agree with me on this, cool. If you're not listening, if you're not in the channel, you don't get a chance to win. So we're throwing out the giveaway bot right now. And it should be ready to go on the giveaway channel. So go ahead and react for your chance. If you're not in the voice channel, listening to the podcast, you don't get it. Get in there quick. Your prize for admission is listening to a boomer story.

That's right. That's right. So while people are doing that, I'll tell the story of the doom story. So back in the day at Hercules, we had a card based on a Seng Labs. And it's T-S-E-N-G for those of you who are Googling rapidly. At Seng Labs, they're gone. They're based, I think, in Pennsylvania. We had a VGA card that was an enhanced VGA card that had an ET-4,000 chipset on it.

And the ET-4,000, the unique part about that was it had a hardware bit blit engine. So bit-blitting is basically being able to take a small chunk of, of data and plug it into memory very fast in any location within your your your V-RAM at the time your video memory right so so on board the card I think we called it G-Ram back then graphics RAM but on the on the card we had a hardware bit blit engine a great name for a rapper by the way so John Carmack yeah so John Carmack reached out to sang labs and said John Carmack is the programmer who wrote Commander Keene who wrote Doom who wrote

who wrote the Quake engine, who kind of, you know, spawned so much of what goes on here, right? Yeah. So he and Tim Sweeney are really the founders of 3D gaming. So Tim Sweeney is epic. Yep, he's epic now. And he's, he's at Comax actually. Is he Oculus? No. Yeah, he was at Oculus. Now he's off building spaces, I think. And crazy cars. Well, he, I think he's out of his crazy car phase. He's building rockets now. It's, you know, he's gone next level. He's like, he's like Elon status. Yeah, exactly. So, um, he's, he's, he's out of this crazy car phase. He's building. He's building. He's building. He's, he's Exactly. So anyway, John reached out to the guys at Seng Labs and said, hey, I need these because I'm writing this application and I need a hardware bitblit engine. So they sent him over to us at Hercules. And we started providing him with our VGA cards, right? And we, you know, they're not. We just, we gave him a handful like maybe five or six cards. So he and the rest of the team could program and test, right? And so maybe about four months later, we did a discette. in the mail.

Right. And it's Doom. And it's the first kind of working copy of Doom, the first one that he's willing to send out to people. He said, hey, check out what we've done. And I still remember my CS manager at the time, give me a call. He goes, you got to come see this. So I go down the hall to the CS room. And he's like, watch this.

So he's standing in the end of a hallway and he's got a rocket launcher. And he shoots a rocket down the hall. And the rocket lights up the hallway as it comes down. The lighting, yeah. And I swear to God, I almost explode. My head almost flipped off my shoulders. Like, it was crazy, amazing. We'd never seen anything like it.

And what he was doing was he was using the BitBlit engine to take these pre-rendered light maps and put them down the hallway. So fast forward about three or four months. And so we're getting disk. We get a disc, and I get a call for my CS manager because he's doing the testing, right? He calls me up, he goes,

it has networking. I'm like, what? He goes, it has multiplayer networking. I'm like, oh my God, you're kidding me. So that was a Friday morningish, right? So by Friday at two, there was no work getting done, right? The other cool thing too was that you can mod it. Yeah, well, not then you could.

Oh, no, not that one? Yeah, no, this was, this was pre-released stuff. This was way early. So it was, we were getting it from John to test, basically, because we had some other hardware that wasn't ready to go out. So we were sharing back and forth, right? So he, um, so he sends us his test code and it, it's networkable now and you can play co-op or you can play head to head. Um, and so we start playing and we, we started playing around lunchtime. We figured we'll we'll stop and finish our work. Well, we called Conrad about four o'clock and said,

you have to come to the office. So Conrad comes. We were gaming. Conrad arrives about six o'clock after work. We're still, we're still gaming. About. 11 or 12 we order pizza about Saturday about three o'clock in the afternoon Conrad stands up grabs a trash can and heaves into the trash can right because they've been playing this 3D game for so long on these little monitors he actually got motion sickness and so that as far as we know is the first I mean someone at Id Software may have gotten it before him but but we played we played until we passed out Saturday night, you know, Saturday somewhere in the wee hour, or Sunday in the wee hours of the

morning. We played it straight. We probably played it for 30 hours straight at least. It was crazy fun. And, you know, that was when I knew PC gaming was going to be absolutely huge. It's literally the moment where I went, this is going to destroy arcades. This is going to destroy consoles. This is crazy. Yeah. Like, this is just amazing. stuff. It set the tone for, I think what gaming is today really. Like before Doom,

I mean, there was really, I mean, you had a Wolfensstein obviously, but it didn't look like Doom and it didn't play like Doom. Well, you couldn't multi-play on it. And it didn't have the graphic.

I mean, you look at Doom graphics today if you're, if you're somebody, you know, like my kid is like, you played that. I'm like, you have no idea, man.

Yeah. Like the first 3D, the first true 3D game ever played was Microsoft Flight Simulator, right? And I played it on a CGA card. Look that one up. Three colors.

You could have yellow, green, red. Yeah. Or you could have white, cyan pink. So imagine you're flying a plane, right? Over terrain through buildings, landing on land on your runways in three colors. But it was three dimensional. You had, you were Z space, Y space, X space, right? So that's the first 3D game.

And now you look at Microsoft flight simulator. And the new one that they're coming out with, the 2020 one uses Google. Google Earth data. You're flying over actual terrain. Like it looks super cool. Just think about that. So that was the early 80s to the 90s now. It's literally you're flying over the world in real time with real weather, with real lighting, with real everything that's going on, right?

And that's that's that's, you know, I, again, I'm the luckiest guy you meet because I was there at the start. And I sadly won't be around for the finish, right? Because nobody lives forever. but, you know, I've gotten to witness just the most amazing transformation in how people interact with that PC and how immersive they can make fun.

That's awesome. I mean, this is just crazy. I think the second luckiest guy is going to be the guy that wins this. I think actually some of the other stuff is the one of people are really waiting for because they're more, this one's really abstract for people because, you know, Heretic is gone, right?

Yeah. But, you know, the half-life stuff, the rainbow's history. And whoever wins all... All this stuff here. We'll make sure we throw in some other goodies in Z-T goodies in there with it. So speaking of winners, Bugsie Wugsy won the first one. Yeah. So yeah, he's a defender in the discord from Germany.

Yeah. You know, our buddies from Germany. We have a lot of German fans on there. So congratulations. I'm going to write that name down. I know who you are. DM Dennis. Yeah.

After the podcast. Don't DM me now. Or DM me now. Who cares? I don't care. Yeah. So, yeah. So cool.

Cool. I wonder if anyone could actually still play this. I you know the discs have been stored pretty safely so there's a chance there they're still readable there's a um there's actually a website where you can download like a like a doth emulator yeah because that runs on dots right yeah if they've got it if you can get a working three and a half inch disk drive that very well may be playable you can just download it I mean like I'm pretty sure that there's a there's like a lot of like a lot of websites are people just like archivaled games that like don't work anymore you can use them in an emulator so like you don't even need

to pop the disc in but I mean if he wants to You gotta get that experience. You gotta try it. It's a key. Plug it in and type all the, you know, run, whatever, whatever. What should we give away next, Jim? Why don't we give away one of the T-shirts? Pick one.

Oh yeah, we got some T-shirts here. Yeah, so we're put in the, why don't we do the Star Trek one first? All right. Let's see. Let me throw a photo in the chat with that one. That's the other black one. Yeah. So sorry, folks, you don't get choices.

I'm an extra large, broaden the shoulder. So this one, so this one's my buddies from Berkeley Systems, Flying Toaster Company, if any of you remember that? I took photos yesterday. So you did a Star Trek Screen Saver. Star Trek The Screen Saver. The Berkeley Systems was famous for the Flying Toaster Screensaver. They were the inventors of the flying toasters.

Actually love that. Heroes of Technology. The back of the shirt says Heroes of Technology. Copyright, 1992. Yeah, exactly. So Hercules was based in Berkeley when I first joined them. And I met the Berkeley Systems guys in the original Pete's coffee shop. Wow.

The first Pete's? So, that's funny. Here's something cooler. Hercules owned an old carpet factory on Parker Street in Berkeley. And that was the building that they were in. But they only used half of it. And the other half, they leased to Pete's coffee roasting. So every morning, the coffee roasters would give us a pound of freshly roasted Pete's coffee.

And if you've never had coffee that the beans are still hot, not warm. hot out of the roaster and you grind that up and make coffee it's like i like pete's i think pizza's the best uh piece is pretty good fast food coffee chain up there well so pete's was pete's was actually roasting for starbucks back then really yeah so starbucks wasn't a roaster they were actually buying pete's um peat's um they had a cafe down the street and i met the berkeley system guys there jim where they're hanging out with the grateful dead yeah well kind of it was actually right across the street from fantasy records building at berkeley which was creedans clearwater revival uh record label, right?

Jesus. Jim's like, guys want to go see Jimmy Hendricks played in that? I plan it to fill more. Anyway, so giveaway is live right now. Go ahead and go to the giveaway channel.

So if you're a Star Trek fan, this is pretty cool. Or if you're a size extra large fan. Yeah, exactly, exactly. Excel, believe. Yeah, Excel. 50% cotton, 50% polyester. There you go. Classy.

Speaking of Credence. It's actually funny. It's actually kind of a meme right now on like TikTok. I don't know if you watch TikTok, but I do some Not as much. I don't learn as much from it. This song comes up a lot. It's actually funny how like that app and like how people are using the memes have like brought back a lot of old songs.

Like wow, like I'm surprised at like these zoomers know all these old songs. I think that's so great. I did. One of the greatest albums of all time. Oh yeah. Absolutely. I think so. CCR is one of the best, one of the most interesting bands of all time.

They've done just a crazy range of stuff and Cosmos factory. Yeah, Cosmos Factory. Absolutely. It's a, it's brilliant. Right. So yeah. Yeah, it's a, I mean, look, I think a lot of the zoomers are feeling kind of that same, some of the angst from the 60s, right? So in the 60s, there's a big push for ecology.

There was a big push for equality. There was a big push for a lot of social reform, right? Yeah, social reform, right? And then we kind of, the boomers who kind of partied through the 60s and pushed that turned into kind of the old white dudes that are running the country now, right? You're running the world economies now. And I think, you know, it's their kids and their kids' kids who are now turning and going, hold on a second, you know. And I think there's a vibe of the 60s that lives in today's 20s, right?

For sure. And I think that old music, especially guys like CCR, who were so much out there protesting all of that saying, hey, people need equality. People need freedom, but they need support. They need equality. You treat people the same regardless. regardless of what their skin color might be, or whether a boy or a girl or whatever,

it doesn't matter because. Whether they're on console or on PC. If, you know, I liken it to, you know, when I was a kid, you know, everything was very secular, really small community oriented, because there was no internet connecting everybody. Right, right. So I didn't really grow up until I got into the industry

and I started traveling the world. Right. So I've been all around the world. I've been everywhere. I mean, it makes sense, right? It's like the more people you experience, the more you kind of learn about just life in general. We're all the same. all the same.

Yeah, we all have different interests and different skill levels, but, you know, fundamentally, you peel off the outer layer of your skin that shows your color. Right. You take away your gender. There's no differences. We are not. I mean, we are all cuddle. Yeah.

So, yeah, exactly. We're all cuddled. We are. And so, you know, but the internet now lets you be worldwide. Yeah, yeah. Right. So. Yeah.

So, uh, congrats to double A batteries, which is a hilarious name. That's awesome. Yeah. Double A batteries won the Star Trek T-shirt. So make sure you do send me, uh, me, Den, ZXT, a DM. and we'll make sure and let us know what you won and then we'll get you in there. Fantastic. Do you want to do another one?

Yeah, why don't we do a piece of hardware? All right, which one you want to do, Jim? The hardware. There's only one. Oh, yeah, let's do that. So we have a Microsoft. I believe this is a sidewinder. This is no, this is the sidewinder pro.

This is a better photo of. Yeah. So this is the sidewinder pro. This is the joystick that ended all joysticks, right? This was, if you were a gamer, if you were a flight sim guy who was flying fighters, you bought Thrustmaster. You had a Thrustmaster F-16 Mark 2 joystick, or Thrustmaster Mark 2, which was the F-16.

And you had there what they called the hot-ass, the H-O-T-S hands-off throttle and stick set up with rudders, that stick, and a separate, basically, throttle and gun control, a bunch of buttons. Everyone else, everything else, was all Sidewinder Pros. That was the joystick. So this is an original vintage Sidewinder 3D Pro.

So I think I remember playing with this joystick. I remember playing not flight simulator, but it was either Tie Fighter or X-Wing. Yep, my favorite game of all time. Tie-Fighter. Was X-Wing. Tith fighter, yeah. Yeah, those are some fun games, man.

Star Wars, yeah, X-Wing versus Ty-Fighter is my favorite, favorite, favorite game. because I was a, at the time, I was very into the flight sims and especially the battle flight sims. So, you know, 1940, 1941 Battle of Midway or like 1942, maybe Battle of Midway. I can't remember the exact title. I played that the heck out of that. But I had the hands off throttle and stick. And I was deadly an X-wing tie fighter. When you have hands off throttle and stick and rudder pedals, you can fly in three dimensions,

especially because there's no gravity, right? So you can put your ship in any position so fast it's ridiculous. So people who were playing keyboard and mouse or joystick had no chance against a hot-ass player. If you had a hands-off throttling stick set up, you were deadly. You were just king of the hill. Have you played the new elite dangerous yet? I haven't. You haven't?

It's pretty good with a stick and a... Oh, man, I don't have my setup. Do you ever remember playing... I forgot the name of it. It was a Star Wars flying game, but in an arcade. And it was just... Oh, yeah. It was just green.

Yeah. Yep. Yep. Yes. Just real quick. Third giveaway is underway, guys. React now if you are paying attention. Check out the giveaway channel.

When a piece of hardware gaming history that you probably won't be able to plug in. From Jim's garage. I remember doing the drivers for the choice. It actually uses a joystick port. Oh, really? Yeah. This is, this goes into a joystick port. I'll tell you what.

Whoever wins it, I'll go look and see I may have a C. H. Systems joystick pro controller card that would work in a system. So if you are, If you win it and you're planning to build it into an old system, ISA-based bus architecture, if you can find a working one, let me know. And I will,

I promise I'll dig around. And if I have it, I'll make sure you get that joystick card so you can rock this controller for real. No, so it's not VGA. It's a different port. No, no,

that's a joystick port, it looks like it might be, but yeah, no, like I remember we used to have all kinds of old peripherals with my dad's all set up. And yeah, like those, those ports are so annoying to use. Yeah. They're like the molex of controllers.

Yeah, pretty much. Yeah, we still use molex. Nobody uses joystick ports anymore. Unless. Just make a joystick with the molex port. Here we go. Someone just linked the computer hardware chart with hard drives ports, CPU sockets. Yeah, this is like some old stuff.

Yeah. Yeah, too funny. Too funny. Yeah, if anyone has any questions for Jim now it's a time. Yeah, fire away. Yeah, right away. Start dropping them in there. And we could do more giveaways, if not during the podcast, even after the podcast,

just on the server in general. We have a lot of, Jim brought a lot of stuff. So thank you, Jim. Yeah, no, no worries. This is, we're not even touching on much of it. But why don't we do after you close up that one, we'll give away the black t-shirt over there. And I'll tell the story of how I got my gamer name. Is it true that your wife just wanted you to clean the garage?

No, my wife is. Get this out of me, Jim. Now, we have a lot of my mother-in-law's stuff. stored in the garage so my wife doesn't get to doesn't get to fight with me as much about my collection of crud because I have her mom's crud too so so we're sort of balanced in that sort of stuff no honestly I mean it's it's all up in boxes in the attic

truthfully so you know not the discette stuff that's actually in that's actually stored elsewhere but the you know all the hardware stuff is literally up in boxes in the attic have you always lived in that area of California no no I've I've I grew up in Southern California. Oh, that's right. That's right. By the beach,

born in Northern California, grew up in Lagoon de Gal, just a couple miles from the beach. Was it, grew up a surf rat. Did you ever kick anyone off your beach? So, no, no,

I wasn't, I actually was kind of a nerdy kid, so I wasn't really with the total in surfer crowd. So I, I didn't, I was not one of the pit rats, which was what they called themselves. The pit rats were the guys that ran Salt Creek Beach,

which was the main surfing beach. Like a movie point break was, yeah. So I stopped being a surfer, went to body surfing and then switched to wind surfing pretty early on. So didn't board surf after I was about 12 or 13. I just wasn't cool enough. Truthful, that was kind of a, I was always on the edge of cool. I mean, I was, I played sports and stuff, so I was kind of cool, but I was also super into nerdy stuff, like tearing apart things and building, you know, building electrical circuits.

and so I kind of hung and I got into D&D and you know that stuff the stuff sort of back then took a little bit of the cool shine off so yeah I was I was always I was always I crossed a lot of clicks but I wasn't I never made it really in that that surfer cool click right that just wasn't my I think it all worked out anyway I'm not happy with it but yeah so no I didn't get to kick people off the beach I kind of got kicked off so we should kick someone off the beach so what do we do want to give away something else next yeah why don't we give away the the black t-shirt. So the black t-shirt is, Quake. Well, kind of. Actually, you kind of really want this shirt. It says Quake on it and it has the Quake logo in red.

And it says the Bloodbath begins Gotham 91996. That was the kickoff party for Quake World, which was the multiplayer servers that went out there. And it is the start of the clans and, you know, gaming clan. I'm actually super jealous that I'm not going to be able to win this one. Because I, like, Quake is like, to me is like such a special. game to me. Yeah.

So, yeah. So this was a launch of kind of the team-based quake-based quake world

spawn team fortress, for example. The fact of the shirt has a bunch of logos. It has creative labs until, is that S2 or S-S-S?

That's S2 multimedia. Unidial communications and Nitronet Corporation. Yeah. So we were all the sponsors of the Quake World launch party.

So the Quake World launch party was 24 hours of team-based competitive quake play. And so there are a bunch of plans who came by and competed.

And it was, so 919 was, I believe, a Friday night. So it was now Saturday, probably about two or three in the morning. And it had gotten pretty thin in terms of people playing, right? So John Romero, who is the level designer and one of the key artists for Quake. And a lot of ID software, he went on to found the company that did Dave X, right? and that kind of stuff. So John Marrow looks over and he grabs me and goes, he says, get off my beat.

Gosh, damn it. Yo, not exactly that. Used a couple of other expletives, but said, get your ass on here and play. So I said, he said, we need some fresh meat in here.

So I sat down and the first screen that comes up is enter your gamer name. Right. So I didn't have one. So I just grabbed fresh meat. So I was fresh meat. And that was how I jumped into the game. And I kept that handle through all my CSGO or CS play. So my counterstrike handle, we had a counterstrike team at Creative and the chairman of the board of creative chairman and founder and CEO and president, et cetera.

It's a guy named Sim Wong Hu. He goes by Mr. Sim. So we were Sim. So we had square bracket, SIM, closed square bracket. So I was Sim fresh meat. And you will still occasionally see a SIM fresh meat log into CSGO. That would be me. Everyone's looking for you on Steam right now.

Yeah, well, I'm not, I'm not on Steam as Fresh Meat. I'm on Steam. You can find me on Steam, it's my name actually. I'm so OG that I have my name on almost all social media services. It's, you know, my, you gave you my Twitter handle. It's Jay Carlton, right? I mean, I'm Jim Carlton on a bunch of other places because, you know, when you, when you, years old as me and you've been around as long as me you're there when these things start so your name's

probably available so it's true yeah i was actually interviewed by jim carleton though oh really yeah so there's a jim carleton who wrote for the wall street journal and he covered he later became kind of the the the the authority on apple and he's written a couple books on apple but um my PR manager um at the time thought it would be really funny to just schedule a meeting with the wall street journal and so and she thought it would be funny not to tell him or me. So we walked in and I introduced myself, hi, I'm Jim Carlton. He looks at me, he goes, I'm Jim Carlton.

I looked over at her and I'm like, nicely done. They're both right and spider well played. And she's like, pointing at each other. Yeah, and she's like, Jim Carlton pointing at Jim Carlton. And he was like, that's good.

We got a good chuckle out of it. But yeah, it was funny to be interviewed by the other Jim Carleton in tech. So, wow. Yeah, crazy stuff. Dennis? Cool VG one actually. Big fan.

All right. And this shirt's also an Excel. They're all X-Ls. Dude, I mean, that's, you know, broad shoulders. That's what I wear. That's true. Dennis, do you want to go through some questions? I don't know if anyone, any one's pinning them.

Hold up. Moderation stuff. You know how it is. Okay, we'll grab a few. Yeah. People get a little too trigger happy. Yeah, do you want to give away anything else? We answer questions?

No, let's answer a couple questions. I'm totally cool with that. All right, awesome. Let's see here. So first question we have, oh, this is actually kind of a intriguing. Favorite processor? Favorite processor. From happiness hurts.

Probably the AMD, Athlon XP. Those athons are really fire. At the time, because you could have overclock the living snot out of them and get great value for them. I mean, honestly, to this day, I think that was probably one of the best designed processors bang for your buck ever. So Athlon XP would probably be my call. Is that just because of the overclock ability of it? Yeah, I mean, by then I was in the industry, so I wasn't paying retail for much.

But I could appreciate from my early days when the only way to get performance, you know, was to buy the cheap stuff and figure out how to overclock it. Right. You know, I just, if you could mention Mike a little bit closer. Oh, sorry. It was just a really, it just was a great processor. Performance value, temperature, all of that stuff. Right.

You know, relative to the day. You know, it's, I still think it, you know, it holds up if you keep it in the context of the era. Right, yeah. Right. So the trick is to do this kind of like pivoting around the mic like that. I want to look over because I don't want to be staring at all. Oh, no, yeah, yeah. That's a note for next time, Evan.

Bevan, T. Ben wants to know, what are we getting an 8, 710 with a mesh front panel? Kitty cat emoji. So, so. I got laugh too. Yeah. Don't ask me. Ask Johnny. Get off my beach.

So one thing that the company is really good at is we have a design function. And the product team works with the designers, but we don't control the designers. The designers don't control the product, but we all work together. And our design language, we call Modern Technica. We actually have a book on our design language. Mesh is not included. So the answer to that question is, until we change our design language, never. Yeah, actually.

But I wouldn't say never because I qualify that. You never know what's going to happen. We may change our design language and adopt that. Right. I remember when I had my 1v1, and I call it a 1v1, not a 1-1-1. I had a 1-V-1 with Johnny, I think two weeks ago, some of it, three weeks ago. And I asked him, like, you know, like questions about design stuff because I was really

interested. And he's like, we have this book that we printed out and bound and everything. And it explains why we do the way we do things. Yes. And it's a really, really interesting book. Yes, I have one. It's thick. Actually, it's really cool.

You can't see it if you're not in the company because it's a confidential stuff. It's kind of like it kind of... Yeah, there's future products that are in there and stuff like that. That, you know, we've sort of thought ahead and expressed what these things might look like. So, yeah, and unfortunately, I mean, I'd be more than happy to give my copy away, but I can't. Yeah, yeah. It's literally like the secret sauce, right? It's like, I don't know, it's like the...

The Bible. KFC herbs and spices, right? No one's supposed to know what it is. I think it's really important for companies to understand who they are. Yeah. And it is a big part of our DNA design is. And so it is who we are from a visuals perspective. Right, yeah.

Not necessarily from a functional perspective, but from a visuals perspective, it's really clear. It gives us, it gives a product team clear, really clear guidance on what we can ask for and what we can't ask for, right? And so I think it's a really good tool. And I appreciate the effort that Johnny and the design team put into creating it a lot. That's really cool. So he's saying basically never. Basically. Until we change design.

Cuddle doesn't have a question, but he has a comment. If you read this, Jimmy, I love you. I love you too, Cuddle. I really, what you bring to the community is absolutely amazing. So thank you every day for that. And he also wants to know, how do you feel about me using that exact joystick five or six years ago to play Microsoft FSX? I think it's fantastic. I mean, look, gaming is gaming.

I don't care how you do it. I don't care if you do it on a controller. I don't care if you do it on a joystick. I don't care if you do it on a keyboard. I don't care if you do it on a competitor's computer. Makes no difference to me. Grow the community. But more than that, were you happy playing it?

If you were happy playing it, then I'm stoked for you, dude. Because that's what matters. Yep. Internal intern, aka Mike the intern. I don't know if you got a chance to meet Mike. I didn't meet Mike. Yeah. Well, I had an intern in my or.

at the time. So I met all the interns that way. AMD or Intel or AMTel? You know what? I'm very agnostic to that. Like I don't really care. It's the same kind of thing. Why would I care? As long as you're playing games and kicking butt with it makes no difference to me whether it's Intel or AMD. I think a strong AMD is a really positive beneficial thing for the industry. I think it's really good to have Intel be challenged. I know a lot about the internals of Intel and I know I know why they're doing some of the things they do. And I can't share that.

But I have a huge amount of respect for both companies. Right. I mean, I know people are down on Intel, but I see a lot more of the inside of Intel. And I wouldn't be as down on them. There's some really smart people doing really great stuff there. But yeah, right now, if I were building a system and, you know, when I was paying retail for stuff, I'd probably buy a Risen. Yeah. Andy, if you're listening, get Lisa Sue in the podcast next week, please.

Yeah, they're like BFFs. Yeah, yeah. Dark X mindset, you work in products, right? Why was the H400 discontinued? Honestly, because what we found was the size of the mid-tower compact ATX cases is so close that the majority of the buyers for that, you know, the mini-ATX form factor, micro or micro atX form factor it's mini ITX sorry micro ATX form factor we're just buying compact midter our ATX so they could upgrade in the future yeah so the sales were just disappointing right

I mean we we had to do it to learn but we realized this is just not a it's not a long-term viable product it's just we don't sell enough everyone goes big or small and the one goes like right in the middle yeah it's hard to be a tweener I warn product people all the time be very careful of being a tweener but I all yes I agree but I also feel like micro ATX is the most underrated form factor. No, I don't disagree. Absolutely. I don't disagree.

Well, I kind of do because I, you know, I'm a big fan of the H-200. I'm a big fan of small cases, small form factor stuff. Because I used to be a fan of big cases because you needed that space because you had so many disc drives because there was no storage space. You had so much cooling needed because everything ran at a billion plus degrees, right? It's hot as the surface of the sun inside of some of those. bloody computers. So you needed size, right? Everything's gotten so efficient. Everything's gotten so dense in terms of memory density and storage density and and performance per per slot and performance per watt, right? You can shrink everything down now and I just love how adorable the H200 is or 210 now.

It's a it's just, it's such a cute, perfect size case. Now I have a 700 that I do as my as my kind of base work a day system because I'm swapping stuff in and out all. the time and that is the one drawback to the small form factor cases is you don't want to be going back in and out of them all the time even though it's pretty easy to build in the h210 it's not as easy as it is in an h 700 that's the easiest case to build in that we've ever made yeah the 700's fantastic it's just it's roomy it's easy to organize your cables it's easy to put stuff you get plenty room for everything so so you know i do a lot of you know future product testing so i get a lot of stuff and it's it's really you know I so my work a day is the 700 but but my wife has a has my

H-200 that she fell in love with so she got that and and you know I use a couple other cases on my desk when we bring it back to Manta never sorry guys sorry folks never I mean we're not bringing back the phantom either we're not bringing back the guardian we're not bringing back the tempest all the time too like we remember the six something we loved that those Those were expressions of who the company was at the time. Yeah. What we wanted out of our design. We wanted to deliver.

But it's like, when are you going back to your mullet? And when are you going back to your jorts or whatever? I mean, we all evolve and change. So tonight actually at the holiday. But I mean, we all evolve and change, right? So the company's evolving and changing. And we understand that disappoints some people, right? Yeah.

But they should also be excited to see that the company's trying these things and trying to grow. And hopefully they'll, they'll find, if they don't find it from us, they'll find that case that they fall in love with from someone else, right?

And I'm okay with that. Like, we're okay. And me as a, just as a consumer, not even as an employee, I love the fact that I can go on the NZT website and just see like small, medium large. I don't have to see like a hundred cases or whatever.

Like, for real, like if you go on other companies websites, they'll have hundreds of cases. And what's a difference between them? I have no idea. I don't even know how they, describe them like what does an ultra mega tower or whatever they're calling it even mean? I don't know but you go on ntX's website and it's just really simple.

You have a small one, a medium-sized one and a big one. Which one do you want? Yeah. Well when I joined actually one of the things Johnny told me was he said when we were talking about whether I was going to join so I you know he was trying to figure out if I wanted to be here he said you know one of the things that that I want to do is I want to reduce skew count I want to I want to have fewer models and stuff and I and he said you know you're a product guy is okay I said

It's always been my vision. Like I don't, I'd rather build three great things than 30 okay things. Right. So for me, it's always been, I was like, yeah, sign me up. Like, like, that's why I would love to do that. So people, you know, we kind of talked about before. Why would you go from something like Coursair, which is, you know, now a couple billion dollar company pretty close, right?

To a, to a company significantly smaller than that. I had the most fun I had at Coursair was when we were just a memory company, more or less, and we were growing into all the other categories. That was the most fun I've had because it was all, it was all new. It was all exploratory. It was all, what does Coursera mean in this space, right?

And so with NZXT, it's the same thing. I'm back at that, you know, we're a case company. What else are we going to do? Back in your Coursair days, did you notice NZXT?

Yeah, only because Johnny beat me to a white case by about four weeks and pissed me off. So otherwise, no, He was like, everybody told us not to build a white case, but we launched it. And I'm like, yeah, four weeks later, I did too. Damn it. You just beat me and beat me by four weeks.

I could have been first. Shoot. Right. So yeah. So we launched the graphite series. Actually, I think it was probably, to be fair, it was probably a couple months after, but we had always had a white case planned in that line. It just looked the white.

It was the first case we designed that looked like it should be white. All the other cases that we designed should have. been black and one of the I'll give you guys a hint and and if if anyone from our competitors is listening please shut down your speakers for a moment we designed everything in white we designed every product in white first and then we color it even poochie everything we do well Pucci is not my product so i don't know but but all of our all of our product yeah all of our external products are designed in white first um we designed our audio platform in white first.

The headsets were designed in white before they were changed to any other color. Because white is the hardest color scheme to achieve balanced visuals in. Yeah. You can make it look good in white.

You can make it look good in anything. Yeah, it's easy, it's easy to take something from white to another color. It can be very hard to go from black to white. Right, right.

And make it look right. It's a good slogan. That should be on the website. Don't clip that. All right. Money wants to know. Do you watch anime? I'm the so do I watch modern anime no but dude look up Kimba the White Lion and Speed Race

soundabouts like yesterday we did I I'm I was in love with OG anime so those were the first two animated cartoon series as far as they know ever made they were made in Japan and shown in the US on independent networks like KHJ TV in LA I definitely remember watching speed racer on on Saturday mornings it was awesome yeah and Kimba the White Lion which is the story of Lion King. That, I never watched that though. Disney just blatantly ripped off Kimba. It literally is.

No, it actually is. Kimba. Kimba is the Lion King story, just not Disney. And, but yeah, so, so do I have an appreciation though for the art form? Absolutely. But it's, you know, I have. So different now. Yeah, it is very different. But I have less time.

And so I'm more choiceful. And so while I appreciate the art form, one, one thing that is probably a negative and I'm going to disappoint a lot of people here is I was never a comic book guy. Another negative is McKay's car. Yeah. Just covered in anime stage. Yeah. That's a pretty bad anime thing.

Yeah, that's a pretty weird. That's kind of weird. But because I was never into comic books, the anime format today isn't as interesting to me, right? So, you know, I, like I said, I have a, I do appreciate the art form. I'm, I find some of the artwork I see just stunning and beautiful. So it's really, really good. Yeah, some is really good. And some of it's just.

just like, why am I looking at that right now? And by the way, I did design one puck man. Oh, yeah, that's true. I sketched up the original one puck man. One puck man was Jim. Yeah. And it was, we actually were, I was trying to actually make it a GPU holder. And then it turned into an April Fool's joke.

But I have a sketch that Jim did. I remember. Oh, my God, yeah. I got to find it now. Yeah, you probably have the one of kind of the Atlas with a, where he was holding up the GPU with the puck head. And then Johnny said, that kind of reminds me of one puck man. So then I sketched up one punch man and turned it into one puck man.

So, yeah, I think I probably have those images. If you don't, I can dig them off. I have them somewhere, but I'll look at him. I was looking for that. I have another question here. Captain Move 15. Jim, did you get any extra college education? So I never graduated from college.

Hey, turn the club. Let's go. So, yeah, I dropped out to join the PC industry, truthfully. At that time, that wasn't a negative because there was nobody in the PC industry. And anyone who was willing to join and knew something about it was happy to be invited in. And so I never finished. So now you can ask me one of, you can ask me if I regret it and I will tell you yes and no. No, I don't because my career has been fantastic anyway.

I probably could have been in in a position to be have more authority or make more money earlier if I had had the college education, but I don't really care. I traveled the world. I've been on six of the seven continents. I mean, my life is charmed, right? So no, I don't, yeah, there it is. So no, I don't really, I don't regret it. I do because it made opening doors harder, but I came in early enough that that wasn't a thing. Today, I would strongly recommend you finish, even if you have what you think is the best job in the world in front of you. Because if that job goes away, that next job without the college degree is damn hard to get. Like today, I mean, I have a good enough reputation,

but my resume, we would reject my resume for a product marketing role here. Right. Automatically, the system would knock you out because you don't have a college degree. Wow. Now, do I agree with that? No, but that's how the system set up. So I don't really have control of that. Unless.

So I would recommend people, you know, if you can, finish your college degree. It's really, it's more important than you think. it also proves that you can stick something out that is kind of unpleasant sometimes and get it done right when I'm looking at resumes I don't care if you went to Harvard or clown state I want to see that you stuck to something that really sucked and was hard and got it done and you got it done and you know not everyone can do that and like I'm not trying to knock people that I can't do that or don't do that but man that shows commitment but I also say this if college isn't your thing that's great don't do it

there's plenty of other career options that don't involve college. But if you want to be in tech, if you want to be in a certain kind of space, it's pretty hard without that degree. It's really hard to get a door open. Not everyone can be Bill Gates and Steve Jobs. Yeah. I mean, you know, if you're not founding your own company, it can be really, really hard to get a door open and you need a door open.

Even, you know, Johnny, our founder, he's even, he graduated. He has his degree, but even to his days, still going to college and taking classes of learning. Because learning does not stop once you're done with school. it's, you know, that's literally not the point of going to school. Yeah. No, I take classes. I haven't recently, but I've taken plenty of college level classes afterward, especially things around like learning to read financial statements, right?

So I've taken accounting in some finance classes so that I could understand P&Ls and balance sheets and department budgets and things like that, right? So, so I've gone back to fill in gaps in my knowledge. You have to? Yeah, you have to. So as long as, I mean, if you're not, if college isn't for you and you still want to pursue it, go for it, but realize the road ahead is tough. So you've got to be really resilient.

You got to dig deep. You got to network. You got to do all that. So, you know, stay in school, kids. You know, if you can. I totally, but I'm a guy who didn't. So trust me, there's no judgment if you can't or don't, right? There's none.

I'm, I get it. I totally get it. All right. Okay. Why don't we give something else away and then take some more questions? Sure. Yep. Do we want to give away the Half Life CDs as a set?

Or do you want to give them away one, two, three? I think we should do the set. Yeah, I can use them anyway. So someone's got to win this whole collection. Right. I think so, yeah. So this is Half-Life Game of the Year edition. This is Team Fortress Classic and Half-Life opposing force.

So Game of the Year edition includes the extra Black Rock Mesa stuff, I think. And they're CD-ROMs. They have CD-ROM keys. I'm pretty sure the keys were used, so they may not, you know, I don't think the license servers exist anymore. But yeah, these are these are originals in original cases with original keys on there. So kind of cool stuff. They came in a set like this.

So I got a case of them and I gave most of them away and I ended up finding that I had three left in a box. Are you going to play the new half-life, VR? I don't feel about VR actually. Truthfully, no, probably not. Again, it's a time thing for me, right? It's it's choiceful, being choiceful about time. Sadly, my game time is pretty short. So I have kind of a few things I do when a game,

and they're usually around friends and community that's already built. So, I mean, if I can find the time, I might. But, you know, I don't play through a lot of stuff anymore. I'll probably play it, but I probably won't play through it. Yeah. And here's some heresy. I thought Half Life was good, but I didn't think it was phenomenal. Really?

Yeah. I'm surprised. I love the opening. I love the cinematics. I love a lot of the production value. But truthfully, I wasn't that blown away by the game complexity or gameplay or anything. It was kind of like it was reasonably pedestrian

in my humble opinion. Just my opinion, right? Now, I will say the work they did on the production side was absolutely gorgeous and amazing and phenomenal. So, you know, qualify that. I loved the game from that perspective, but it's not my favorite game. I love it for what it did to change video games.

Yes. That's what I love it for. Absolutely. I mean, you don't have to. You don't have CSGO. Yeah. Well, I mean, if you don't have, you don't have, you know.

Well, you also don't have the amazing cinematics that go into games if you don't have Half Life. Yeah. I mean, the opening sequence to Half Life set a bar that is actually, if you, if you were around when it happened, that bar hasn't really been exceeded by much. Yeah. Because it was so radically different.

That whole, the way they told that story, how long it took and how, but how involved you were in watching it was remarkable. Yeah. Remarkable. You ever meet Gabon? I have met him once, yeah, to trade show. Yeah. How was he?

Is he cool, dude? I just, I mean, we shook hands and that was about it. I mean, it wasn't that big of a deal. I met him back when we launched the 3D Blaster Voodoo 2, the E3 that was there. I've been thinking about email him, emailing him one day because he replies to his email. Yeah, he's, I mean, I met him. He seemed like a nice guy, but we didn't sit down and have a beer. We didn't chat.

We didn't do anything like that. I was introduced to him. We exchanged business cards, that kind of stuff. but it wasn't, you know, it wasn't, you know, I've met a lot of, a lot of folks and, you know, there are a lot of them are just pretty much regular people. They're not very remarkable, right? They're nice, but they're not, you know, you're not going to kind of get blown away by them. Right.

So, right. It's waiting for the giveaway to go through. We had 12 seconds left. So before we start and answer to the question, I was going to make sure we get the winner in three seconds, two seconds, one second. And, oh, nice, mech one. Oh, Mac. Awesome, buddy.

Oh, sorry, mods are disqualified. Sorry, guys, re-rolling. It's really cool. That's great. Congrats, Mac. Other questions. Favorite, favorite D&D character ever made from Mike the Intern? My favorite D&D character is probably my half-Elf Ranger.

He had a really great backstory. Evan Daronis. All right. Evan Daronis. I wrote a really great backstory for the guy. Maybe one day we'll get to hear that long time. Do you still play Dungeons? dragons? I haven't. It's been a long, long time. We should do D.D. I was thinking that'd be cool

doing the server actually. Yeah. I mean, I would I would I'd be up for it. I mean, I mean, we could take it slow and just you know make it forever. Yeah. No, I've been yeah. So that that I think was my favorite. All right. Jim's a dungeon master. No, no, no, no. No, no. I don't have. Here's a good question. No way. Who in the company do you think would be the best dungeon master, best DM? The best DM. The best DM. Andy. Yeah. I was going to say, well, I was going to say it's It's probably it's got to be somebody who's super organized. Not, okay,

never mind. Yeah, not Andy. I'm trying to think and has the right personality. Truthely, it might be one of the two of you guys, maybe. We're not that organized. I know. But I mean, you also have the personality because the best DMs make it super immersive, right?

They're willing to do goofy voices and they're willing to tell stories and they're willing to make faces. Raina actually. Oh, Raina would be good. She's a writer. She actually came up with a poochie voice. Oh, did she really? I like that. She never did she ever just.

Should we do the intro for the podcast? Plus, she's a fan of the Oxford Comma, so I'm a big fan of fan. Very true. Ospre comma boys rise up. Exactly. Alan wants to know fellow boomer, VHS or Betamax. It's like, you know, we got them. Truthfully, our family is too poor to have a, but either.

So by the time I got, by the time I was able to afford one of the two, it was VHS only. So I got to go VHS. Sorry, man. So, yeah. We weren't, we weren't super poor. but we didn't have luxuries like that. Jim, can you keep going a little bit?

Sure, no problem. Yeah, I think I'm clear through like 12 issues. Special occasion, yeah. Got the holiday banquet later. Jim works remote,

so he's not in the office all the time. So it is a treat to have him here. But he's always around somewhere. I'm lurking somewhere. Ben Zoid wants to know. Seriously, though, when she would be expecting

NXXXE motherboards for A&D platforms? Again. So you get my stock answer, which is we never talk about unreleased problems. or even plans for unreleased products, right? So even if I was releasing it tomorrow, I'd give you that exact answer.

I told you, Bench. You guys can try. Have you learned your lesson? Have you learned your lesson? Yeah, yeah, trust me, I'm a 30-year veteran. You're not gonna get me to slip up. Like, I've been asked hard questions by people who are good at it and they still can't get me to slip up.

So Kudl wants to know, why is your Twitch username Minecraft Dad? Because it is true. Yeah, so that's my Minecraft name is Minecraft Dad. And so yeah. Yeah. So no, so my kid, guess what my kid's Minecraft name is? Minecraft son. Minecraft kid. So, so I am Minecraft Dad 83. He is Minecraft Kid 83.

And we had, no, no. 83 is a is a number. That was my, so that was my football number in high school. It's the year I turned 21. And it has a couple other things that I won't, that I can't share, you know, but are meaningful to me around 83. Um, fun fact, Jim is still a football coach. I am.

We actually call him a coach. Yeah, I'm a part-time football coach for a high school in San Jose. It's awesome. A really funny story about that. I think last year or the year before, we had a party at TwitchCon in San Jose. In San Jose. And Jim was working security, like checking IDs at the door and stuff. But he had gone to the club straight from football practice.

So he's just like a football game. So he's just like a football coach. Yeah. That's funny. So I'm in my white polo shirt with my football coach hat, my tan khaki slags, right? My black belt, my total dad shoes. It was, I was rocking it hard. So, well, no, so I came in.

I came in to attend the party. And we had not planned very well. So we had a line that was wrapping around the blocks. And we only had one PC to check in. But the app that we were checking in on was, it wasn't a PC, it was a Mac, was an iOS-based app. So I had my iPad with me from coaching because we actually have sideline video and stuff like that. So I grabbed my iPad out of the car and I just started checking people in because I don't,

I don't like undone work. So I don't like problems. I jump in on stuff. So I just jumped into help and I ended up being a bouncer at the door for the pretty much for the whole party. Right? But it was fun. It was great.

I got to meet a lot of people that way. And people got to go, what the hell is that guy dressed like that for? man he looks like Jim Harbaugh like dude he's got the glasses he's got the khakis he's you know and the whistle yeah no no I wasn't wearing a whistle I don't wear a whistle I'm the one of a coach so well game day coaching I wear headsets but not a not a whistle all right bugs he wants to know how does it feel to be a boomer um so there that look I got I got stories on top of my stories and there you go stories it feels great ready no no it feels great to be a boomer because okay boomer bleep um oh yeah that's right sorry about that

Apologies. So, um, 38. Yeah. I'm right that one down. So, um, so I mean, I've seen stuff that's never, you're never going to get a chance to see. That's awesome to be a boomer and, and have that perspective. The bummer part about it is I don't get to live as long as you now. So you're going to see stuff I don't get a chance to see.

Although, right, there is a chance that in our lifetime that someone's going to figure out how to live at least a little bit longer. Oh, sure. But I mean, I mean, I mean, look, my, my wife freaks out when I say stuff like this, but on an average age, on an average age, I got about 15, 16 years left, right? So, so maybe if they can do, yeah, it's a oof moment, right? But, but that's, I mean, that's a, that's, that's, the world is right? And life is life. And you got to kind of realize that that's the reality of the world. So when most of you guys are turning 30, I probably won't be around to see it on average. Now, I try to take care of myself. I live a good life. I got a lot of energy. I work hard. Who knows? Maybe I'll,

maybe I'll beat the odds and go to 100. That'd be awesome. But, you know, but don't know. But don't know. So for me, I mean, I think it's great on one hand and it's kind of a bummer on the other, right? Because boomers are closer to, closer to not being around than we are to being around, right? That's why I'm very happy that life is a simulation. And I'll reboot somewhere else. Yeah, just take up our VR helmet. There you go. So to answer that, that was a crazy one.

Which one's next? It looks like some Half Life 3. Hey, dog's wants to know. Did you work on INAQ? E-N-I. Eniac. Eniac. No, I never worked on a, I never. I never worked on Enniac, but I did work on some card-based.

I worked on an IBM. I'm trying to remember the card-based system that I worked on. But I did learn assembly language programming on something called Cardiac, just as a crazy reference, which was actually card-based assembly language. So you had an IBM designed it for training. You actually had a card that had holes in it in sliders. Oh, the punch cards. No, no, no. It was a big cardboard card and it had sliders.

and the sliders were either operators or values in registers. And so you'd say, I want to do, I wanted to say, AX, Modulo, BX, right, as an operation. So I'd load AX with a value. I'd put Modulo. I'd look at, and then I'd slide to the BX thing. I'd turn the card over and I'd look at the value that I got, right? So then I could write that down and then I'd do my next step in there. So if you look it up, I think you can still, I think I saw online a cardiac, somebody

had put some pictures of the old cardiac assembly code stuff from IBM. It's actually really an amazingly cool concept because you didn't let people learn on hardware because they could damage things back then. Right. I'd probably go under cardiac arrest trying to figure this out.

But I didn't work on any act. I did actually code and worked in IT at the junior college when I was taking one of my coding classes on the data general Nova Eclipse C-150 which is the computer that the book soul of the new machine is written about.

This cardiac thing is kind of like an abacus for in a way, right? Yeah, you found it. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, yeah, it's super cool. Yeah, cardio, yeah. I'm actually, like, really interested in this sort of stuff now. You know, I have a daughter now. And if she's only, she's about to turn two in February, but I want to teach her like,

like eventually, but I want to kind of teach her like, you know, with an abacus first before I give her a computer. Like, why? No. I think it's important to learn things the hard way. Yeah, so you know how to do it if you don't have the tools. Yeah. I mean, that's what pen and paper is for now, right? Well, yeah.

For example, they don't teach cursive in elementary schools anymore. But I want to teach my daughter how to write cursive. Obviously, I still want to learn how to use a keyboard, but I think it's important to learn things a hard way. Because you appreciate the easy way a lot more. I don't know about that. I think it's a waste of time. You're part of the post-Malone generation. It's a way of the Mologians.

I mean, when I'm going around using a horse and buggy, you know first before we use a car like you'd appreciate the car a lot more I do appreciate my car because it cost me a butt ton of money yeah okay so caucus wants to know who is joe who is joe mama oh I don't know who joe is hey have you heard the joe mama call that the support team got surgery got a Joe yes I did so so did you hear that I tried to call the mom no house yeah so so that we were we're actually going to dial them up and then we realized there was a three hour time difference because I was going to call and tell the mom about her kid.

Just, I mean, in a fun joking way, right? Because we all got a huge laugh out of it. And so I was going to call if you want me to play. Yeah, I was going to call and scare. I don't mind if you do, but I was going to call and scare the kid through his mom. It's actually one of my favorite things to do on social media is when when kids tell me or tell us, can you convince my mom or my dad to buy a computer from you? And then I would tell them, yeah, sure, call this number.

And I'll give him the customer service number. and then a couple days later they'll reply and be like hey thanks so-and-so you know talk to my mom and now I'm getting a PC we really will talk to parents it's kind of funny okay so we do have some time I'll play the call right now it's really great so while you're doing that why don't we uh why are you're gonna do you're so great Rockware I was having a hard time

hearing you You're looking for what In the case So you got a case But you're missing what I'm missing like My Software in a game

I'm missing Borderlands Three And I'm missing Borderlands Or Sergio And I'm missing Like the Windows 10th row

Not home Good on Sergio For being so patient Okay, so you ordered a PC from us. Do you have a billed order number? No. You don't have the build order number. Okay, I can try to look at it from your phone number,

or not saying anything coming up to that. Do you have the first and last name of the person who ordered the PC? So perfect. Okay, yep, got it, Joe. Last name, last name? Great, okay, I'm going to go and hang up now. That was a good one now. Kids comedic timing is perfect, man.

He's just, he's a natural. Joe, Joe. I love the, I love the part where he says, do you have the first and last name? Yes. Total pause. Yeah, it just waits it out. Can we hire that kid, please?

That was amazing. Yeah, it was amazing. Why don't we give away? It's a building right now. Why don't we give away the Rainbow 6-3? So, yeah, this one's crazy because it's rainbow 6-3, Raven Shield. and I think is it opened Yeah the box is open but everything's in it

So I actually did open this one I actually still have a copy of that game in my room I don't know what to do with it Yeah Play it maybe It's kind of cool I mean it can't anymore servers are dead Yeah the servers are done

Unless it's like hosted because like actually there may be You never know I mean the community brings up so many Crazy things there might be there might be one out there but Back in the day you could host your own server So it wouldn't matter if a game died You could just run the server That's right. The server files.

That's right. That's right. So yeah, this one probably got it when I was at creative. We did a lot of work with Ubisoft back then. And this game is another one of those games that just won't go away. Yeah. It's great. Yeah.

Yeah. It's so different, too, the only way it used to be. Because like, when you would, before you even played the game, you had to plan out your entry and your exit and like you had like a squad you would control and tell them where they go. So you kind of like hit a button and like the game is kind of played itself almost. and you can like one person in that. And you can even like use your scroll wheel to like slightly open a door and chuck in like a flashbang. It's actually really cool. No, they did agree.

Yeah. They didn't agree. Yeah. Actually, I really, I played the heck out of it. I liked it a lot because I was, like I said, we had a, we had a Counterstrike team at creative. And interestingly enough, I'll tell another story a sec about that because I, I had people who I competed against work for me. Yeah. And I didn't know it when I joined, but I'll tell that in the second.

But no, I was, I did most of the planning for how we would approach any given, you know, any, any given game as a T or a CTE, depending on the map and depending on our opponent, right? So, so I would, I would kind of be the guy who called the strategy in real time on the game. Because I wasn't the best shot. Right. But I was decent at staying alive and, and fairly good at the tactical side of it. I think that comes from spending just gobs of time on. strategic board games right I was a kid you know just just I had a knack for kind of coming up with pinch point ideas and stuff like that so um and I knew the maps pretty well yeah and um and so

I would call the strategy so for me that thing was amazing because it was squad based but it was single player squad based so you set up all the tactics for your squad right and then press the button and see how it worked yeah it was and so for me I loved that game I played the heck out of it sticker on here says epic single player intense multiplayer action yeah and it It was fun multiplayer too. Yeah, it was really good multiplayer. But the single player was, for me, it was really, really fun. I really liked it.

Did you just write that down? It's a good tweet. All right. Yeah, there you go, yeah. Yeah, we really don't have, like, single player experiences. Like, experiences that kind of like emulate multiplayer anymore. Yeah. Because now, you know, you just log on.

You can play with a bunch of people. And, like, ultimately, it's, you know, it's always better to play against someone who can think, right? Yeah. And move differently. But, like, it's kind of cool to have, like, the developers put this, like, puzzle in front of you. And you try to figure it out yourself. Yeah. They put that AI and have decent AI.

That actually game had decent AI. It wasn't terrible. I think it's also one of the reasons why people to go back to one of the greatest games ever, Half-Life. Yeah. One of the big things was the AI, right? Yeah, yeah. They were coded in such a way. We were like it looked like they were thinking.

And like they really weren't. But like they had such a good job of like knowing how to like orchestrate the quote unquote AI and the game to make it like do what they wanted to do. Right. Well, they would track you by noise. they would hide, they would do things that, you know. It's always been like probably the most advanced type of game like this, right? Half-flip? Yeah, I think, I mean, Rainbow 6.

Yeah, I think Rainbow 6-3 was probably, yeah, it was probably the pinnacle of that kind of that work. Yeah. Right. And then it kind of drifted more toward, you know, the competitive gameplay online, right? Multiplayer stuff. So, I mean, like, I mean, Siege is still like crazy cool. Oh, yeah. Like, no game is ever the same.

Which is like, I think the biggest thing. that like makes seats still so popular is that there's so much variety and how you can encounter you know the same the same map you know like a million times right right nice umsy ummski bombski the tea guy one of our one our fellow webes won the copy rim of six nice sorry weaves are disqualified oh no weaves okay sorry guys rerroll time nice very cool very cool good stuff good stuff all right hopefully has windows 98 yeah There you go. I do on my stream.

Let's see. Joe, Joe, Joe. What is the best low-cost GPU, lesser honk? Oh, man. I'm not the guy to ask that question too. There's guys who do comparisons and stuff all the time. But I'll tell you this, that for a long time, I gameed on 1060s because there are plenty.

It depends a lot on what you play. It depends a lot on the monitor resolution you're playing at. you know I will tell you that when I when it's my money it's not a 2080TI right it's it's a you know it's even though I could probably afford one it's not what I would buy um it's just plain old overkill it's it's great if you want to flex man more power to you but for for value I mean I'm you know I don't I don't game on 4k so I'd likely be a 1660 kind of guy depends on the games you play I still game on 960 and I may or may not solely play emulator games.

Yeah. Well, I mean, yeah, I mean, I still, one of the games I play, I still play is Minecraft, right? I have some friends and we still play. And in fact, like I do some UHC with some folks and if the timing is right,

I'll be in a UHC that's on YouTube in a couple weeks, so I'll tell you all about it if it happens. But, you know, we still goof around with that kind of stuff. But like I said, I don't have a lot of time. So I'm not, I'm not buying into super modern, you know, high games and yeah and i'm not doing 4k because at the end of the day you know i got i got pay for college

for my youngest pretty soon here and you know the wife the wife doesn't authorize unlimited pc budgets so you know i keep it in the i keep it real and so you know like you said i if i were buying today it would probably be one of the one of the one of the one of the mid-range vagas or probably like a 1660 truthfully but there are i mean look some of the websites that do the do the real analysis they're the guys to go to yeah they know what they're doing That's, yeah, yeah. Bugsy wants to know, what was the best meme of the OG Boomer Times? The best meme of the OG boom.

We didn't have memes, dude. Imagine not having memes. Imagine not having memes. It was like Mad Magazine. Guys, I mean, seriously, you know, we, we didn't have global communications. Yeah. We didn't. I think the, you know, the original meme is A slash S slash L.

That's the original just, you drop that in a, you, you'd log in, you know, you dial up a modem to a BBS. and you'd type you know it didn't matter where you were you always opened with ASL just for fun right I mean it was just it was the was kind of the original go-to if you will right you know so but yeah we you know we in the early days it was all Asky text and you know there was uh there wasn't you know wasn't speed enough to do anything but types and characters kind of yeah yeah so yeah so send the news by carrier pigeon Yeah, so I don't know. I'm not sure what the first meme really was.

But I think I should get a little credit because I wish I still had it. I'm hoping there's one. But we did a limited T-shirt run inside of Creative where when Leet Speak first got really popular. So everybody was walking around with, you know, with. Oh, boy. With Leet written on there. So we did, ours was 7338 or it's sorry, it's 1-338, right? And on the front of the shirt, we had 1338 rather than 1337.

And on the back it said one better than you. So bars. So we did that for the 3D Blaster PCI launch, kind of the team that launched that. We made our, we, we had a very limited run of those t-shirts that we, that we walked around and had a 3D Blaster PCI launch on the, on the back under one better than you. Getting some great ideas for me. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. You can bust that out. That was, I'll even get credit to the, to the PM who did that again, named Dylan Rhodes was the PM for the for me. He worked for me. He's actually worked for me at three different companies, but he not again. Yeah, yeah. He's no, he's got his own, he's now in a, you know, in a marketing agency. He has his own business. So he's not working for me ever again. But he was my CS manager back at Hercules. And then he worked for me at creative and he worked for me at Corsair. So. And each time was actually by accident. No, no, no. I did it on purpose.

Yeah, so. Try to get rid of them. Couldn't do it. Bad penny and all. Alan wants to know what arcade cabinet stole the most quarters from you. Pac-Man. Pac-Man without question. I didn't know why I expected anything else.

I broke a million on Pac-Man. Oh, did. I learned all the patterns. Practice them over countless hundreds of dollars in quarters at the UC Irvine and the ant-trap. And the day I broke a million, I stopped playing the game. I walked away. I walked away with, I walked away with Pacmin still alive.

When I broke it, I got up and walked. It was last week. Holy crap. It was hours long. I can't even remember how long I was sitting there. But once you learn the patterns, if you didn't make a mistake, you are unbeatable. So it was just rote memorization.

But then it was I got to beat a million. And I touched, you know, I touched the 800 number a couple times. I touched the 900. And then it became an obsession. And I just kept pumping money until I broke a million.

And when I broke a million, I'm like, that's stupidest damn thing I've ever done. Like, how much money did I waste to do something that, I mean, they're going to unplug the machine and it's history. Like, it's just, you know, but once you- Miss Pac-Man. Yeah. Yeah. I played it, but I didn't play it like I played Pac-Man. I was obsessed with Pac-Man.

Yeah. Yeah, I just, I, once I understood that you could master the game through learning patterns and figuring out the patterns, it was like. And Miss Pac-Man was the first. game I ever got that and pull position too nice nice nice yeah so the first the first console game I ever got was the original Pong when it first shipped yeah you are the ship no I tell you I'm the OG I really am the OG at this stuff I really started when it started like like it was a big deal my grandparents got it for my sisters and I Jim had it buy a house it was 73 I think it was 1973 when Pong came out and we got it

It came out like in October or something, and we got it in December for Christmas. And, oh, my God, my sister and I played that on a black and white TV forever. Oh, my God, we played for hours and hours and hours. You couldn't get us off. Yeah, could not get us to stop. I still have my, I still have my, I still have my,

Mattel football game too. That was a- And it still works. Yeah, that was, I played that before. It's pretty fun. Yeah, it's actually, it's just button mashing. But it's a fun button masher. Yeah, it's a, it's a,

It's a kick. And I still have that one. It still works. Can I win that one? No. No, that one did not come out of the archives. There's a few things that I mean, most of these things, while they're very sentimental to me, you know, they're not, they're not sentimental enough.

That game was just, I put, yeah. All these, all this is collector item stuff, but that game in particular, I mean, you probably auctioned it off if you wanted to. Yeah, I don't want to. I want to keep it, right? There you. I mean, I could auction off most of the stuff, but why? I mean, it's, you know, if I can even give it a,

way to people who who get a kick out of it that's enough for me you know I don't need the money I mean I mean I'd like the money but I don't need it not you know not going hungry tomorrow so I'm okay Jim's going to give away money now no I'm not no no no I give away enough to my wife my kid kids multiple so no no what's the next question Dennis I'm trying to find so I want to get one last question so we could end at a well we got two more things to give away so let's talk about first one real quick before you drop the question so the first one is a Quake the original launch t-shirt from Quake so it's white it's got the big Q with the rusty nail through the middle it's actually done a metallic copper

ink it's got it on the sleeve coffee stains or is that part of the design that's part of the design that's part of the design that's part of the design yeah for a second I thought it was dirty like dude like what the heck is Jim giving out dirty t-shirts sure is wider than it is long yeah yeah it's a big it's a big massive American side XL's a big boy shirt yeah I mean if if if you're not if you're not a large person you're gonna be able to wear it as a night shirt right It has a giant nail on it. Yeah, it's got the giant Quake nail.

So do you know, do you know where the, you know, from the nail gun right from there? But do you know who did the soundtrack for Quake? Danny Elfman. No, Trent Reznor. Really? Yeah. John Carmack is a huge, huge fan of 9-inch nails. That's cool.

Trent Rezner. Trent Rezner was a huge fan of PC gaming, especially Doom. And they hooked up and he did the soundtrack for Quake. That's cool. And that music is awesome. It is awesome. Quake music is awesome. Right.

Give me a new appreciation. for nine-inch nails. So we'll give that away and then we'll give away the last one right after the question. How's that? All right, sounds good. So while that's going to wait,

it's two minutes, so we'll end the question after the giveaway is done. And that question is, well, there would be an option to put custom designs on cases upon order for an extra fee, like a decal slash wrap. Oh, man.

Truthfully, we'd love to do that. That would be a really cool thing to do. Well, it's just from a practical basis today, it's really difficult to do. you know, we do do custom cases that we do limited editions for, right? The PubG case. Yeah, our craft line, right? So, and I'll tease that we're not done with that.

There's more coming in the future. I'm not telling you what franchises or when. So, but I'll tell you that we're not done with craft. We actually think it's a lot of fun. It's actually quake. Super interesting. But, but there's, it's a complex process today to do and do it. do it so it looks good, do it so it's, it's, you know, we have, we have limits on

on what we can do from copyright too because we're commercial organization. So, you know, we got to figure out a lot of logistics stuff to get it done. But believe me, it's not something we don't think about, right? It's just, I can't tell you it's coming any time soon. It's also, it sounds like a nightmare because we can't trust people to use artwork that they own. Yeah. And we're and we're and we're profiting from it. So it, you, you copy. copyright law applies differently to us than it does to fair use. Like if you go, if you go grab something, you print it out and you stick it on your case, dude, that's, that's called fair use, man.

Yeah, you got every right to do that. You turn around and sell that case for a profit. Bang, you violated the law. So, you know, if we're taking your artwork and putting it on there and we're profiting from that, we get, we get kind of sucked in, even if you send it to us. Yeah. And even if you assert your rights, we have some level of obligation. So yeah, it's a bit of a problem.

It's a problem there. So no baby Yoda cases? Yeah. Yeah. So if you're a gamer with a TTV in your name, sorry, you can't do it. Bugsie actually won the Quake shirt again. Wow, Bugsie's scoring. All right.

Switch to get for listening. Yeah. So the last giveaway is the 3D Blaster VL, which is the original 3D accelerator for the PC. Came out before Diamond launched their Nvidia, Diamond Stealth 3D. Still with the original shrink wrap. Still has this box is crazy. It's been opened. and unfortunately the software is not in there

but if I ever find the five games that were bundled I will I will you know move those along to you but whoever wins this I'll give it give the five games to Ivan and Dennis to follow up and get to you guys but but this box is really cool the reason it has a shrink wrap on it it had the first few thousand of the 3D blasters shipped with that's called a 3D lenticular so it's a it's one of those things where as you move it you see it in 3D

They're called lenticulars. So this one has a lenticular on it. So I left the shrink wrap on it so the lenticular wouldn't be damaged. So it's got the original 3D lenticular on the front. And it's got a 3D blaster VL card in it. And, you know, it's pretty cool. One of the games is called Magic Carpet Plus. Yeah.

So there was Flight Unlimited NASCAR Racing, which was my jam back then for that. Rebel Moon. high octane and magic carpet plus so three three three D games that we actually paid the developers to do ports for the engine that's awesome but yeah it was a video cards were like weird back of the day right like it's like now we're like you can buy any card and play any game

pretty much like you had to have like specific cards oh yeah for specific like some games would look better with this card because it was ported in a different ways and you'd also need a sound blaster yeah yeah we need sound blaster right yeah 3DFX had what they called Glyde, which was their GL emulator. So a lot of games use Glyde. So Creative Labs, when we no longer had a relationship with 3DFX,

we wrote an emulator called Clyde that was the Creative Labs version of Glyde. We got sued for that. That was fun. If you've ever had attorneys to send on your office and seal up your filing cabinets and take everything from you, it's quite an interesting thing to have happened. So, yeah, they served us. and um i think you need a part two of the podcast my boss and i got a lot of stories oh yeah i got i got i got stories on stories but yeah so that's so somebody's going to get um and you're getting my only

copy so um and and and it was i i i actually thought about keeping it because this is the very first thing i i launched a creative labs and it's the very first three three d thing for the pc but i thought you know what i'm not going to be around forever let's let someone else have it my kid loves PC gaming, but he doesn't love PC hardware. Yeah. Like it's just the thing that makes games work for him. So it's not like it has any meaning for me to pass it on him. So I'm going to send it off to the community.

I hope whoever gets it. That would be Dark X Mines. Dark X Mines. Congratulations, man. So I think that's the last thing, right? Yeah. Yeah. So everyone who won something, please send me a DM.

I mean, I haven't here in the giveaway thing, but just send me a DM just because, so that we, you know, I don't forget. And I have one last question for you. Yeah. So then we ask every single person. First, what is your favorite N60 product ever? Our next one. Oh, no.

That is currently out. Because Jeff, Jeff, Jeff, Jeff, Jeff, Jeff, did you send you to. Jeff, Jeff tried the same thing. But the, but so the reality is, I'm always working on the next thing. Well, of course.

I'm passionate about. Wow. So for me, buy right now in the store. Yeah, that you can buy right now in the store. We can, you know what? Honestly, I'll tell you. My favorite's the 3D Blaster Elite.

Or, three, by, the H. H500 Elite. I'm looking at 3D right in front of me, right. The H500 Elite. And the reason is we didn't actually design the H500 Elite. That's a commute.

A guy posted that in Twitter, the inspiration for it. And then we went and built it. So, because we loved what he did with our design. He understood who we were. And he did a great job. Now, we made some changes obviously to execute it and stuff. But, but I love that we are humble enough to take an idea. that wasn't ours and not steal it, but turn it into a product.

Like, we don't have to be the inventor. Like, and I'll acknowledge all day long that we got the inspiration for that product. Yeah. From someone outside the company. So I'm kind of proud of that. It's a great. It's a great case. I love mine.

It's awesome. It's on the floor. Imagine it like I would have designed a mesh case instead. Wouldn't happen then because we wouldn't have been inspired by the design. Trust me, we've got people who send me stuff. Here's, I've redesigned your case with. I get this all the time. I've redesigned your case with mesh.

Look how awesome it is. I mean, you're like, we do it all the time. It's like, okay, cool. Not fun. Yeah.

All right. And second part of the question is, what is your least favorite N6C product? That is currently out you can buy right now. Oh, man. And be honest, Johnny's always listening. Yeah, no,

no, no. Probably, probably the hue too, because we had so, it was just, it's a great concept. And it's a good, it's a really good product and the accessories are great.

But executionally, we just, we had so many tough, things that we had from the hardware side, from the software side. It was so delayed. There's just so many things that that one, it's my least favorite because it was such a challenge and it, I think it's underperforming because it faced so many challenges. And I really, I'm really hoping that as we continue to evolve it, we'll be able to improve on that because I think the, the idea of the, the cool accessories like an underglow kit where you have to do it yourself and that kind of

stuff. That's, that's nice. And yeah, you know, I think I'd like to be able to, keep that going if we can. But you know, it's got to be commercially successful too. Yeah, enough for sure. Yeah. Yeah. So that's, that's my answer. I'm sticking to it.

Good. Awesome. What's coming next? Whatever my team's working on, man. Hey, there you go. But I'm bum-pum-ch. Right. Next thing they'll be shipping will be our audio products.

They're pretty close, right? I know. I can't wait. I'm so excited. Like, we're using them right now in the studio. I have one at home that I use like when I stream and stuff. It's great. I'm pretty proud of a lot of the aspects of that.

Man, audio quality and stuff is great. The light. They're light. They're comfortable. I think they're very much in the NXT design language. I love them. I barely feel them. And I think I streamed for like six hours on Saturday or something.

And I forgot. I even had them on. They were so great. All right. So with that, thank you for joining us today, Jim. Thank you to every, for everybody who tuned in.

Remember to tune in next week at 10 a.m. Pacific Standard Time the official NZXT Discord. Can we also make one quick announcement? Yeah. I got you on that story. And follow at N6C on all social. Media. Those are wondering the sticker contest, right? I think it's what I don't want to talk about so two things about that so obviously. I mean it's pretty easy to see that Nibbles nibbles nibbles nibblers nibbles. Nibbblers. Nibbys nibbys. Nibbys. Nibbys. That's a real name. Helen. Yeah. So Helen aka Nibler won the contest. So congratulations to her. She will be getting a free copy or free free pack of the stickers and I think I mean you want to do something extra right? Yeah.

So I love the sticker so much. I actually kind of did a little bit of research. I started following her Instagram and I realized she lives like five miles away from the office. So we reached out to her and we invited her on the podcast. So she'll be here next week to not only be on the podcast, but we're going to give her her prize live on the air so she can tell you guys exactly what she's getting. Awesome. Awesome.

And we'll do the drawing for the giveaway soon-ish. Yeah, so now that the winner's announced, next step is the giveaway. Every role will have winners. The higher your rank is in the server, the better your odds are at winning. So time to grind that XP. Spam the chat. So who won the 3D Buster VL?

Oh, sorry, my bet. It was a, oh, no, we said Dark X-Minds. Oh, that's right. Okay, that's right. Yeah, yeah, that's right. I forgot. All right. Well, hey, thanks for having me, guys.

I've really had a great time. Thanks for being on. It was great. And to everybody in the community, feel free to, if I'm on, feel free to ask other questions too anytime. I love interacting with you guys. Yeah.

the longest podcast longer than the Irishman yeah for sure I know dude and uh if you uh I mean if you want also we do have some extra questions on in the podcast channel you can know what I was going in and answer that yeah I'll tell you what I've got a couple minutes before I got got got to go do other stuff I'll jump in if the leave the podcast channel open I'll answer this question awesome thank everyone thanks everybody don't forget to listen to previous episode I can talk today on Apple podcast Google podcast Spotify and SoundCloud and I know I got to replay the song because we took with you long. All right.

Peace all guys. Thank you very much. See you next time.