NZXT PODCAST - #049 - Alec

Episode Date: July 10, 2020

This week on the podcast, the crew are joined by NZXT’s Data Scientist: Alec! Alec and the crew discuss the 1000LB club, hard rock stations, and Pokemon Discord servers. Follow Alec on Twitter: twitter.com/alec_489 Listen live to the NZXT 💜 CLUB CAST on our Discord server at discord.gg/nzxt every Thursday at 10AM PT! Thanks to B0UNC3#0001 for the artwork!

the episode 49 to the N60 Clubcast, the official podcast of the NXT community. This podcast is recorded live at the Thursday at any time, but the official N60s server is available to available on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, and SoundCloud. I always screwed that up. So make sure you are successful. Or people will come with you. My name is Dennis with me as always. Ivan.

You look a lot chubbier than I remember. I know, dude. Quarantine been real hard on me. Put that face mask back on. Okay. How does that sound? The middle? What's up, man?

Good to see you again. I know. I haven't seen Ivan since... Been four months. Early March, right? Early March is when we went home. And we decided that, well, due to changing life circumstances for myself, it's as better for me to come to the office and record the podcast now.

Plus, I really missed the mixer and also missed Ivan. So, yeah, I literally haven't seen Ivan in forever. Like, face to face. I've seen him in meetings and stuff, but it's not the same. Yeah. I just can't stop staring into his eyes. Zoom. Today's special guest.

is one of one of NXT's data scientists, our good friend who hopefully will unmute himself on Discord. I'll give him a couple seconds. Hello. I was waiting for the intro. I was waiting for you to be like the grand entrance, be like our one and only data scientist, and then I'd unmute myself, and it'd be fine.

But no, it's kind of awkward, so thanks for that. Well, that wouldn't be true because we definitely have more than one data scientist, right? Yeah, but you're supposed to height me up. You're supposed to be my hype man, Dennis. Okay, hold up. Rewind. Today's special guest is NZT's one and only super special data scientist, Alec.

What's up, guys? How's it going? NZXT underscore Alec here. Thanks, Dennis. You're such a great hype, man. Thanks, man. I really do try. I am professionally trained in hype.

Why is Alan already in the chat? Geez. Oh, God. I know it's from. Probably. Who cares where it's from? I like how good, man. I'm doing good, thanks.

Yeah, I'm really excited to be on. Thanks for having me. I've always kind of wanted to be on, but I've always been kind of like a shy, shy little boy to ask. So it's really cool to finally be on for once. Yeah, and thank you for being here. You've done a lot of cool stuff for the community,

and I'm sure the community had no idea that we had to get a scientist involved in order to ship stickers. True. Alec has helped so much and just helping get all the cool stuff shipped to the community that he deserves to be on the podcast. We can tell you guys all about it. Thanks. Well, I appreciate the kind words.

Thank you. Sorry, keep talking. Checking this fan working. I forgot how hot it was in this stupid studio. If this sounds really annoying. Yeah, it's probably the best we get some circulation in here, to be honest. Yeah, I should probably tell you to work on that because they're going to be coming back to the office.

I will, at least on Thursdays, I'll be back in here for the podcast. Well, I might as well be here too. It might as well. Maybe we have other people just start going on. I'm down. If only the parking situation was better. It definitely got worse. Like if you got here before like 8.30, you'd be fine.

There'd be plenty of spots. I got here like at 8, 10, and there was one spot available. That's it. Yeah, last night I told my wife I was going to the office. And then I told her, I'm going to wake up really early and shower. I'm just going to go. I'm not going to help out this morning with the kid or anything. I'm just going to like just get out of here.

And she said, why? And I told her, because if I don't get there by eight, like, I'm not going to get any parking. And then if I double park and I'm recording the podcast, I'm not going to be able to move my car. Dude, it's so annoying as somebody who used to live in San Francisco and now lives in Texas to get peeing in the general chat and Slack telling me to move my car. I'm like, I don't, I'm literally thousands of miles away from the parking lot. Why are you pinging everybody in the general chat right now? I think at this point is just like a meme in the company. Yeah, it's got to be a meme.

It's got to be a meme. I start thinking for. Yeah. So, Alec, what is your official title at NZXD? Well, you kind of already spoiled it, but my official title is data scientist. I was initially brought on a little over a year. year ago under the business intelligence intelligence specialist role. Sounds really cool.

But then I got promoted about eight months later to become a data scientist, which has kind of been a dream of mine to be an actual data scientist. So it's been really awesome. A old intern, Forever intern, Mike says that you study dataology and Frost says you study datatronics science officer. Sir, community lieutenant officer Alex. If the data, if data is in the word, then yes, I study it. All right, then.

What's like the coolest data have you ever studied? Studded or did? The coolest data I've ever studied. Maybe one of the coolest data sets that I've ever been with, I used to work for a company called Beyond the Summit. Technically, I'm still actually contracted with them. But they had a lot of really interesting data around viewership of their events. So I would have to pull those statistics and create some sort of reporting for them.

So that was really, really fun and interesting. I'm a huge fan of Twitch in case you can't tell because I'm really streaming on Twitch right now. So being able to work with Twitch data is really, really cool for me. Yeah, it's actually really interesting, like the amount of analytics that Twitch gives you in terms of like your viewership and stuff. It's a lot more than I was expecting, but at the same time with like streaming and like content creation, like if you don't have data, like you really don't have like a job, right? Because you need to see like what's working for you, what's not working for you, right? And then work on that data. Yeah, definitely.

So, Alex, as a data scientist, what does your daily work routine look like? It really depends. It depends on what the data team is focusing on and kind of what my boss tells me to do to a certain extent. But my boss, his name is Varroon for those that aren't aware, my boss is awesome in that he gives me a lot of flexibility in what I can work on. It lets me explore what I'm really passionate about. For example, what I've been working with you guys, the community team, with working on the getting the, automating the Discord rewards,

workflow, making that process more automated and more of a tolerable task for Dennis and Ivan. That's been, that was really interesting to me, and my boss let me work on that. So long story short, basically, if it's a priority and I'm passionate about it, I get to work on it every day. And that's one of the many awesome things about working at NCXT. Ivan, did you have something you wanted to? I saw the hamster on the wheel.

Yeah. I just want to kind of explain a little bit about just the history of like just shipping these rewards. because it's actually been really interesting to see it get easier. You know, at first, it was, it was really easy because I would just, you know, I would, started with stickers. I made some stickers, and then I would just randomly send stickers to people who did stuff, like that I thought was cool. And I would, you know, put the stickers in an envelope, lick the envelope, lick the stamp,

send it over. And I would send, like, you know, maybe one envelope a day. And then when I started adding more stuff, like lanyards and shirts and hoodies and poochies and things like that, like it just started getting more and more and more. And then there was one day where I had like hundreds of envelopes on my desk. And then Johnny walked by and he goes, what the hell are you doing? I'm like, oh, I'm trying to ship out this. And he's like, you got to figure out how to make that easier.

So that was like two years ago. And since then, like, it's gotten a lot faster and easier. Now we're at the point where we're not shipping. It used to be like every month I would have to create a new Google form, have everyone fill it out, and then I can only ship everything once a month. I would have to, you know, order stuff, box stuff, ship stuff every month. But now, thanks to Alec, you know, you guys only have to fill up that rewards for them once, and you'll get your reward as soon as you rank up in the server.

There's no more waiting around like an entire month or months at a time. Way faster. When we do cool stuff like the Pucci Cup, you know, when we have to ship out hundreds of things at the same time, it becomes a lot easier too because then I just have to basically just print out sales orders and give them to the warehouse and just tell them, here, send you out. I just did that by the only got mad at me.

Yeah. You know, like, are you serious? 100 and something? I'm like, hey, man, sorry. Yeah, community is still a lot, even though it's Corona time, right? It's always one of the things that I love doing is making any really, really menial, manual, manual task automated and easier for people to do. And being able to do that in general is a really cool feeling.

And then being able to do that for you guys and helping out the community get their well-deserved rewards even more quickly as a it's just a feels-good man moment, you know. It's cool. Speaking of menial tasks, do I have some stuff for you to do then? Oh, boy. Well, okay. All right. This is not for you to give me work to do, all right?

It's to talk about how awesome I am. Okay, so. Unless. So, Alec, you said you've been at NXT for how long? I started working April of last year, so it's been a year and three months. Actually, I think a year and three months, too, on the dot, I think I started working April 9th of last year. Oh, nice. How's it been so far this year working here?

It's been great. I've really enjoyed it. I'm a huge nerd, so being able to work in the gaming scene is really, really cool. everybody's all like-minded in that. We're all passionate about games. So it's really cool to hang out with people that have similar interests to me. I can play games with them. And I've never been in an environment like that before where I can,

I can feel comfortable actually saying like, hey, did you play X game last night? And they're like, oh, yeah, that game sucks. And then we'll get an heated debate about why that game's actually awesome. But just being able to do that is really, really cool. Obviously, with the pandemic, things have been a little harder because I can't interact with everybody in person, even though I would love to. But we still have awesome tools like Discord and Twitch to interact with everybody. So it's not too bad. Google Hangouts, Slack.

Yeah. Yeah, dude. All the Zoom. Yeah, all the technologies. How'd you end up at NZX, C? what you do before? Yeah. So I actually get this question a lot because I think,

I think there's a common misconception where if you want to work at a gaming company, you have to know somebody that's already working at said gaming company, which obviously will help. Don't get me wrong. It's a lot of the time it's not about what you know. It's about who you know. That part is definitely true. But that doesn't mean that it's impossible to get a job at a gaming company or any company.

really, but especially in gaming because it's blooming. But yeah, so how I started working at NZXC is I literally just applied. I found a job, I found a listing on Hitmarker Jobs, which is if you're unfamiliar with Hit Marker Jobs, it's just a website dedicated job listings in gaming companies. And they're probably all the time on our social feed because I think they tag us directly. And I think like three months before I started working, I saw a hit marker job posting for my job. And I'm like, you know, Ivan, you want to tell me something? Like something like I didn't know?

Like, am I getting like, oh, like, why is this random Twitter account? Yeah. Like my job's up for grabs. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So that's how I found the job. And then I literally just sent my resume in and applied.

And what I think the most important thing that kind of made me, me stand out from the rest of the candidates was how much of a culture fit it was. When I went into the office, which used to be in San Francisco, which is where I used to live, I got along super well, I felt like I got along super well with everybody and everybody seemed to enjoy having me around as well. And I did, I like to think I did pretty well on the, the, um, The project that Verroon, my now boss, had me do. I think just all those things combined helped me get this job. So like I said, I didn't know anybody working at NZXT.

I came in. I did a good enough job technically, and I was a good enough culture fit to make them, trick them into hiring me. Yeah, I can feel like I tricked them every single day, to be honest. Me too. What's your favorite thing about working on the data science team? There's a lot. It's a combination of a lot of things.

One of my favorite things is the people that I get to work with every day. I absolutely love my boss. He's a great manager. He lets me work on things that I actually want to work on, with a reason, obviously. If something's a high priority, then I will have to work on that. It is still a job at the end of the day. but he does give me enough flexibility to keep my sanity.

And then Tyler, who is also a data scientist, Tyler's also a really awesome person. And I love working with both of them. And yeah, so that's definitely one of the main things that I love about working as a data scientist at the company. The other thing is the data that I get to work with. A lot of it is you know, gaming-related data, which is always super interesting to me. Having to work with, like, the Discord data to solve this,

automating the NXT Club process was really, really interesting. I got to solve, like, stuff like people having emojis in their Discord names. What was the most interesting, like, thing of data thing that you saw from the server? what do you mean data thing like like with just interesting thing regarding data like you mentioned the emojis and yeah like what was like the most interesting thing to you yeah the emojis is definitely one of the more interesting things that I had to work with especially because I don't want to get too technical but basically we had to work I had to work with multiple databases and our database can read the emojis fine but the other database can

can't read the emoji is fine, so I had to work around that. And that was an interesting. I hate it where my databases can't read emoji. I know, right? God, such a common issue. So that was definitely one interesting problem that was fun to solve. Another was making it so that, basically making it so that people can't scam the type form, so to speak. So you can't, people can't fill it.

lot to type form 10 times and get 10 different or 10, 10 rewards, right? I had to, while I was building out this workflow, I had to keep in mind that there are some heathens out there that would love multiple poochies. And I had to keep that in mind while building this workflow and thinking, okay, how can I make it so that it's not possible to scam the system? People are constantly trying to scam. And it's funny because I just, I know when they're trying to do it and I just like, Yeah.

Basically just block it. Yeah. But I always wondered, like, it would be funny if I just mean a role called scammers or something. And like, because, like, everyone in the server who tried to scam with has a scam rule. That's funny. Imagine, imagine being in the Discord server and you think you got away with it. And then you look at the roles of your account and you have the scammer role. It's a lot of people, man.

And so it's funny, too, because it's kind of like the same people over and over. Like, they'll try, like, a couple months before they'll try, like, a couple months before they give up. Yeah. What's that one to show where, where they would catch like the dude or like the woman cheating on camera? Is I'm talking about, it was cheaters?

The cheaters? Is it what it was called? Yeah. It's called cheaters or something. There we go, yeah. Like, I got stabbed on the boat. You know, really?

Yeah, well, they were filming in an episode. No way. That's fun. I'm sorry to spend some questions here. That is awesome, Alex. I keep calling you Alex. It's okay. I've heard of that curse my whole entire life, so I'm used to it.

People call me Alex, and I just respond to it as if people called me Alex, because it's second nature to me now, so it's okay. Don't feel bad. Yeah, I remember when I was in, in my school and a sub would come in, and it would ask, they would start calling the names on. I would say Denise all the time because my name has only one N and a name. Oh, God, yeah. Yeah.

But didn't Denise have an E at the end? Yeah, but people don't know how to read. So, you know. That's true. That's true. I also don't know how to spell. What is your least favorite thing about working in data science? My least favorite thing?

And you get real. Yeah. No, that's a good question. Because it's not all sunshine in rainbows, even though I like to pretend that it is. I think my least favorite is. My least favorite thing is working with data or with teams or company, not companies, data or teams or individual people who like aren't as like technically savvy and don't necessarily understand that the problem that they want me to solve is actually requires a lot more time. time and effort than they are thinking actually will it will take.

And so a lot of the time, a lot of the time, sorry, I'm sorry, I was, I'm trying to make you stop, but it's okay. You can keep going. No, I'm serious. Are you talking about me right now? Like when I ask you. Oh, is that what you're asking? Yeah, of course I'm talking about.

Can you help to create 100 sales orders for everyone with a water bowl? No, no, no. Because in my eyes, it's, it's, I mean, I know it's not like super easy, but I don't know how complicated it is. So I don't know if I just ask a stupid question. Yeah, no, for sure. I mean, okay, so I'm going to be real. Whenever I see a peeing on Slack, I'm like, uh-oh, somebody's asking me something.

And I go and open it up and I see it's in the DS community channel. I'm like, oh, thank God. It's not from someone else. You're actually one of the easiest people to work with as a data scientist, Ivan. Really? I'm going to put that on my LinkedIn profile. Yeah, please do. And also, shout me out on your LinkedIn too.

We'll do. I'll spell your name right now. Like, Dennis. Thank you. Can you say why it's easier to work with Ivan? Is it from the job perspective? Or is just because Ivan's easy to work with person? Ivan's definitely an easy to work with person.

Don't get a big head, Ivan. But Ivan, and I'm not, and, I mean, Ivan isn't the only person that does this, obviously. A lot of the people will execute this too. But it's very helpful as a data scientist. Honestly, as any technical person trying to gather requirements for a project, it's extremely important for the person to be very descriptive in what they want. So, for example, if you tell me the end result of what you want,

that's not going to help because you have to pretend like I have no context whatsoever. I know you've been doing the job for a long time, but I haven't been doing your job at all, right? So you need to give me a lot of context into what you do and what is required for the job. And so Ivan is helpful in that he does that, and a lot of other people also do that. But there are some people that are less descriptive,

And then I have to kind of, before I can even start working on anything technical, I have to kind of go into a meeting with them and then talk about, okay, what do you want? Like try to gather requirements and get context into the matter. And then sometimes something frustrating that happens occasionally is I'll finish a project, hand it off to them, and then they'll be like, oh, this is awesome. Can we add these three other things to it? And I'm like, well, that changes the entire scope of the project. And now I have to redo like 50% of the work I just did.

no, I can't do that. Or yes, I can, but it's going to take another two weeks or however long to do. So if you're ever working with a technical person and you yourself are not necessarily technically savvy, always try to be as descriptive as possible. If you take one thing away from this podcast, that is the thing you take away. Be as descriptive as possible and keep the person's perspective in mind that they're not necessarily going to know. what in the world you're talking about. I feel like that we get that,

we get that a lot on the community team that whenever we ask some different department for a project or for something, they always, I feel like I'm always hearing that like we are very descriptive and we're actually good at describing what we want because we know that, like, you know, if you don't say it in a certain way,

if you don't give enough context or detail, then you'll never really get it done, right? And I don't understand why some people have a hard time with them. It's like, you want this thing? Tell me what you want and how you want it and I'll get it done for you. Yeah. I try to be very sympathetic because everybody at ZXT is a really hard worker, which is another one of the great things about this company.

And I think when they're trying to do, in my mind, they're probably trying to do a bunch of different tasks. And one of those tasks is tell me how to do something, but it's not super high on their priority list. So they're trying to do it as quickly as possible so that they can get to the other tasks that we're working on, which I totally sympathize with as somebody who also works on a bunch of different things at the same time, but it is not helpful to anybody to kind of half ass it, so to speak. So, yeah.

Warren, Alec, please, for saying the A word. Oh, I'm sorry. Let's ship gears a little bit, Alec. And I actually want to ask a little kind of off. Outline question, I know Island, I know that I haven't said, but what, um, what's like a cool project you worked on that you saw from the beginning to like the end? That obviously is available for public consumption that won't break any NDA rules. Yeah. So, uh, I don't think this will break any NDA rules.

Um, but so as I mentioned, uh, earlier in the podcast, I worked with, um, um, the summit. Right. And, uh, one of the project that worked on. Well, actually that, so I first started as a contracted worker. And, um, I, they brought me on because of my experience, automating processes. And the reason why they wanted me to automate the reason why they were interested in that is

because they wanted me to automate pulling, excuse me, um, statistics from Twitch, from, uh, their team's, uh, Twitch, Twitch, Twitch, uh, Twitch. Twitch channels. And so that was a really interesting project to work on because Twitch, Twitch's API only lets you get certain stats, but not all stats. So I had to go in and get information that Twitch didn't necessarily want me to get and automate that process and then create reporting around it and make it into a nice, pretty enough report that was consumable for business.

business related minds and then kind of present that for them. So that was a really, really fun project that took several months to do. I started working on it, I think in June or July, and I didn't finish it until I want to say September. And then even then after September, it's still a work in progress because it would break a lot because Twitch would change some HTML on their website or something, and then I would have to update my code. The end result was probably around 2 to 3,000 lines of code, and I started at zero. So it was all completely me. It was probably really messy.

If I probably looked at it now in retrospect, I probably would hate myself for writing such bad code. But it was still a really fun and interesting project that taught me a lot. I still use those skills now in my NZXT work. So it was a really awesome opportunity. and it seemed to help the be on the summit team a lot too. I think that's like one of the things I'm most proud of is building that from complete scratch.

I'm expecting you saying that you, that the type form was the coolest thing ever, but that's cool too, you know. That's cool, too. Don't get me wrong. That is also really cool because I've never built a workflow from the ground up. I have a funny type form story.

Yeah, yeah. So yeah, Alex set out this type form for the rewards a couple weeks ago. And then last week, Jin, our creative director, sent me a link to a type form that he was working on. He's like, hey, can he test us out and let me know if it works? And I was, you know, I filled it out. And then he's telling me like, it's not going through. I don't know what's wrong with it. And I told him, well, you should just message Alec, man, because he helped me make this type form.

And like, it works great. And he's like, I did. and he told me I should do it. Did you tell that to Jin? Or was he lying to me? No, he was lying to you. It's hilarious. But Jin did reach out to me and he said that he wanted to build his own.

And so I helped him build out his own. But that was all him. I did not tell him to do that. I think Jin thought it was like an easier thing, right? Yeah. That's the thing is that sometimes not to tutor on horn or anything. but sometimes we make things look really easy and then they're actually not and then when other people try to replicate it sometimes they realize oh crap this is actually really really

difficult so don't don't do data sign at home is basically what I'm saying you were showing me the back end of the type form and I had never seen that before and it looked really complicated I got it on the front it looks super you know smooth and clean and easy yeah yeah And then you know, just like, you know, like basically. It's actually the, yeah, so the way we get data from the type form, type form has this thing called a web hook, which if you're unfamiliar with webhook, basically you can just think of it as whenever something happens on type form, it sends data to somewhere.

And so we set up a web hook on type form to send data from our internal databases. And that's how we're able to. capture all the information that everybody fills out. And then from there, we can do a lot of really, really cool things because we're pulling, we pull Discord information a couple times a day, I think every hour actually. So we can, we know everybody's, we can deduplicate responses based on user IDs because no matter, that was another thing that was actually a really interesting problem to solve, was figuring out how to get around people changing their usernames.

For example, if you submit a type form with one username, and then maybe the next day before we've processed your shipment, you change your username. And now, if we try to find you using your old username, we're not going to be able to find you because you've changed your username. Well, because we're gathering user IDs, you can't change your user ID. Your user ID is unique to Discord. So we can be prepared to find you no matter how many times you change your username.

So that was another really interesting problem to solve. That was pretty cool. And the way I was solving that previously is I had a custom formula in Google Sheets and it would highlight all those duplicates for me in red. And then I would have to manually cancel those sales orders. Yeah. It's a lot of work, great. a lot of manual work.

I'll do anything to catch a scammer, though. That's when you got someone in the act, right? I'm telling you, I have that scammer rule in my back pocket. One day I'm going to do it. All right. Alec. Yes. What is your favorite NZXT product?

Be honest. My favorite NZXT product. Why is it the doco? Why is it the what? The doco. The doco? This man doesn't know about the doco. Ivan, do you want to explain the doco to him?

Yeah. The Goco was the original SteamLink before SteamLink, but at 30 FPS. What? I have never heard of this. And we made this? Yeah, we made this in 2014. Wow. Yeah.

Wow. It was actually, I used it for a long time. It worked fine. Yeah. The problem with it is, yeah, 30 FPS. Yeah. For a PC gamer. I mean, that's a huge step.

And then Steam came out with the Steam link. You can know, it's not. But for me, personally, like, the games that I play, like, I don't care. I don't need 60 frames per second. Sure, sure. Like, you know, I was literally playing, like, Mario 3 emulators or whatever. For me, it's, like, no big deal. Yeah.

But if I wanted to play DTA 5 or something like that, then for sure it's not a good thing. Yeah. Well, my favorite product is not the doco, unfortunately. My favorite product would probably be the Cracken Z. because of the ability to put really cool gifts on it. So that is it. What is your least favorite NZXT product? The doco.

And what would you like to see NZXT make? Hmm. What would I like to see NZXT make? What? Were you going to say something? Yeah, got you. stumped you. Yeah, I actually don't know.

Trying to think of products that I use that I think would be that I'm not super happy with that I think could that I would like love to see NZXC do. I think I would love to see NZXT do either

a keyboard because I'm really into mechanical keyboards or love to see them do a mouse. Although I really like the mouse. I have to. I use a logic like that. I would love to see, basically,

whenever I think of a product that I would love to see NZXT do, I think, okay, like what's a product out there, a gaming product that has, is like trying to be like really flashy and has all these like gaming, you know,

uh, peripherals and nomenclature and like, you know, they're trying to be super cool and like hip with the gamers. And I, I value, uh, having a very like clean form factor.

which NZXT is very well known for, right? So I would love like a very just like clean, minimalistic keyboard, which I know exists, but they're not very accessible. So I think NZXT, maybe there's some sort of opportunity there. I don't know.

I'm a data scientist. I'm not a hardware designer or anything, so I don't know how it would work, but I think that'd be cool, just as a mechanical keyboard nerd. If you're a data scientist and a mechanical keyboard nerd, does that mean you have a number pad on your keyboard? I was dreading this question the entire podcast.

Yes, I do have a numpad on my keyboard because, okay, but let me explain myself. It's because I work with numbers a lot as a data scientist, so I have to type numbers constantly onto my computer, whether I'm working in my Google Sheets or SQL or Python or whatever. So I'm typing numbers constantly. So I'm having a numpad. I'm not a good idea of this, but for me, the number pad is not something that I want to get rid of. Yeah, it's okay, thank you. Thank you.

It's very convenient if you're someone like me who has to type numbers all the time. Using the row at the top is so it's just so janky. But everyone's like, I want to have the world's smallest and heaviest keyboard. Yeah. Keyboard in the time. Smallest, heaviest, and loudest. Yeah, I get that too because that's like where the kind of direction that the gaming industry is headed is being more minimalistic and make everything smaller, more compact, more compactor. There's something about having a numpad that just is so convenient.

Dennis's keyboard is smaller than his phone. Yep. Are you serious? Yeah, it's a 2%. What keyboard are you using right now, actually? I have two keyboards, actually. The one that I'm currently using, which is newer, is a Cooler Master something or other,

because I thought it would be cool to, because I've heard good things about the Cooler Master boards themselves. So I thought it'd be cool to make a custom keyboard one day, getting like custom key caps and custom switches and then building it using the Cooler Master board. So that's kind of a one day I'll eventually get around to that. I think that'd be cool. And then the other keyboard that I have is a Ducky Year of the Goat Edition.

Year of the Goat Edition. Yes. I bought it back in 2015, 2016. I forget when they did Year of the Goat. But yeah, it's pretty cool. It has a goat on, believe it or not. I would have never known. Yeah.

You can tell me. Anyway, Duckie keyboards are really cool. I would highly recommend if you're in the market for a mechanical keyboard. I have two Ducky keyboards too. Nice. I love Ducky. And Alec, last question for me. Do you have a special shoutout for anyone in the company? Any unsung heroes, someone who deserves some praise, some recognition?

I actually want to shout out. I don't actually work with this person very often, but I actually really want to shout out Vivian because I always constantly hear about stuff that Vivian is doing. and I'm like, wait, that's her job. Like, constantly she's doing stuff that I didn't know was like in her wheelhouse or like her responsibility. And she's always doing just like whatever needs to be done. So I thought that was, that's, I know, I have a lot of respect for Vivian and what she does for the company. I feel like she's already very valued, but I still feel like she's undervalued.

So, go Vivian. I want to congratulate her. She just got a promotion. Oh, really? Oh, no way. Yeah. Wow. Wait.

I'll tell you right now. I'll tell you right now. I was talking to her yesterday. Let me look this up. Is it on bamboo HR yet? I can look on bamboo. So, hold on. I'm scrolling through my chat here.

She's order management supervisor. And she oversees all the build data processing team along with her existing job duties, you know, channel, store, marketplace stuff, Eunice. all the Discord rewards that people have trouble with. Like, she's the one that helps make sure that everyone gets that stuff. That's awesome. Good Lord, that's a lot of Acumatica. Yeah.

I do not envy her. I don't actually have to work with Acumatica very often, if ever. Actually, I don't even have a login to Acumatica, so I actually can't even if I wanted to. But that's one thing I don't want to change. I don't ever want to have to deal with Acumatic. Yeah, it sucks. Yeah, I think Vivian sell like the most jobs here, right? Like, she's done like almost a little bit of everything.

I wouldn't be surprised if she just ended up owning the company. Johnny's like, and she's like, okay. First, first step is dogs are allowed in the office. Yes, please. What office? I don't know. You tell me.

All right, Ivan. It's your turn. All right, Alec. Are you ready for this, Alec? So, my very first question to you, Alec, is, you know, and like, I've had a lot more meetings with you recently. The last couple of weeks, you've been helping with all the data science stuff for the community. And I notice one thing about you. And my question to you is, why do you always work with your shirt off or with cut off sleeves?

All right. I'll tell you that I, first of all, I don't always. I only occasionally. Number two, it's because I moved from San Francisco to Texas. And I will tell you right now, it's probably around 80 degrees in my current apartment, which reminds me, I should probably turn on the AC at some point. But anyway, that is the reason why, because I'm not used to the heat. I'm used to being like a very mild, like 60, 65 degrees.

It's very, you know, I can put on a sweater and it's no big deal. Here I'm like, I just want to take all my clothes off because it's so hot. The reason why I don't believe you and think you're lying is because before you even went to Texas, I remember you posted this progress picture, I think on Twitter. Dude, like, you look like, what's his name? Christian Bale, when he was like super shredded. Oh, yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. Ridiculously shredded, man. and his shirt was off. And that was before you moved to Texas. Yeah, that was a while ago. Yeah. So I moved to Texas. Why did I move to Texas?

So in February, my girlfriend moved to Texas. And because she got a new job. And a job that she really wanted and she was really excited about. And she, and it was a VP. position as well. And so it was like a really, really cool opportunity for her. And she moved to Texas and I told her that she should because it was an awesome opportunity.

But I wanted to stay in San Francisco because I wanted to be able to hang out with all the N60 peeps in person and go to the office because I valued that a lot. But then, as you might guess, later in February or in March, I forget exactly when. COVID happened and then we had to shut down everything. And we could no longer go into the office. I had to work that the San Francisco NDXT team went remote. And then I was just working remotely in my, I was living in my girlfriend's house. I was living with her parents.

And I was like, why am I doing this? Why am I just working remotely and not living with my girlfriend of seven, over seven years? So come April, I was like, okay, I talked to her and I was like, I don't understand why we're doing this. I'm just going to go live with you. My office is like, look, I analyze the data. I'm a very lot. My reasoning is always based in logic.

I always like take like a good, depending on the decision. I always take a while to come to a conclusion because I'm always like trying to look at everything from every angle and think about things logically. But yeah, so that's why I move to Texas is because, I wanted to live with my girlfriend. There is a lot of people moving to Texas right now from San Francisco, L.A. Yeah. In New York. A lot of people are getting out of the big metropolitan cities.

And they're going to Texas because it's a lot cheaper to live there. It's a lot cheaper. The tax situation is a lot cheaper. Dude, there's no income tax, which I didn't know until I got an NZC paycheck like a month ago. And I was like, wait, this is bigger. than it usually is. Why is that? And I looked and there's no income tax.

And I was like, what? Texas doesn't have any income tax? Oh my God. It's great. It's great. And Joe Rogan, actually, he's moving to Austin pretty soon. Oh, really? Yeah.

There's like a lot of tech and gaming companies out there now. Yeah, it's blowing up. Yeah. NXT Texas. NZX Texas. NZX Texas. We do have a couple people living at Texas, right? Yeah, there's a lot of five people over there.

One thing about Texas, I've been there a couple times, is that it is freaking hot. And I'm not exaggerating when I say it's like an oven. It's literally like an oven. Like you will suffer there. Yeah. It's unbearable for me. I remember I was there in my cousin's garage and I was just like, dude, why the heck is so freaking hot here? And he's like, what do you mean?

It's always is. Yeah. Air conditioning. Yeah, that's one thing I never really understood when I lived in San Francisco was, why do people need air conditioning? But now living in Texas, I understand. It's on like all the time for me. Yeah, San Francisco is always like 65 and cloudy. Yeah, you don't need air conditioning, except for like maybe a week when it's, you know, 80 degrees in San Francisco.

But here you need it all the time. And I live in, I live in Houston, Texas. So I'm actually living in one of the, um, cooler in terms of weather places in Texas because apparently Houston gets some breeze from the ocean, which makes it a little less hot, which when I say less hot, I mean, it's still like, it can, it still gets over 90 more, more often than not. But it's still, it's still very humid, which actually I think is like the bigger issue. I can actually take dry heat, okay, because I, we drove through,

We drove through Arizona, and we made a pit stop at the Arizona Cardinals football stadium because I'm a huge Arizona Cardinals fan. And the heat was actually, it was still like over 90, but the heat was actually bearable because it was, at least for me, because it was dry. I was okay with it. But humidity just is a killer for me. Do you have your shirt off? When I went to, when I was in Arizona?

Yeah. No, I didn't have my shirt off. I didn't. I thought about it. Well, another thing I noticed being in all these meetings with you with your shirt off, you got really swole recently. A lot more, well, not recently. You've been working out since I've known you, I think.

Yeah. So you've been getting gains, right? I have. Yeah. So back in, so actually, when I moved down to L.A. to start working full-time for Beyond the Summit, this was in 2018. I started actually really watching what I ate and started working out more. And I've always been, I've always been very mindful about what I eat and,

and kind of my exercise level. But I've always been in a position where I can't, I can't really focus on it that much. But when I moved to beyond the summit, I was all by myself. I could choose what I was eating and making for myself. and I had the flexibility to work out. And I built my own home gym backup in San Francisco when I got back from the summit. So the combination of having my own home gym

and being able to make my own food, I've basically been eating baked chicken and vegetables for probably a year and a half at this point, maybe longer. Literally just baked chicken and vegetables. Like I don't do, I just literally, I defrost the chicken. I throw it into the oven. I take it out.

I put some seasoning on it. I stir fry some vegetables from Costco. Throw that in a bowl and that's my dinner. And it's like, it's not exciting at all. But I'm the kind of person who can eat the same thing multiple times. I literally, I grew up kind of a kind of poor and we would just eat the same thing over and over again. So I got very used to it. So I'm very used to.

eating eating just the same thing over and over again, which really helps when you're trying to gain muscle and or lose weight. Speaking of gaining muscle, another thing I've noticed is that Tyler, your coworker there, aka Red Thunder, he's equally like swollen fit. He made like a really big transformation. His biceps, I think, are bigger than his thighs at this point. It's funny because I met Tyler when I first started working in April of last year. And so even though, he was already pretty big.

And so like everybody kept telling me afterwards, they were like, man, Tyler used to be like super skinny and everything. And I was like, really? Because I've always known him as like a really big guy. So I can't even imagine him being a skinny white boy. When I first met Tyler, he was skinny and didn't have a beard. and then he went working remote for like six months and then saw him a gun

and he had a giant red beard and he was buff that's funny dude he does look like a Viking it's pretty badass I wish I could look like a Viking are you jealous of his games yes I'm very jealous

so here's the thing I might look buff but I don't actually have a lot of muscle I just don't have a lot of body fat so my muscle shows more but I I can't bench as much as Tyler can. I can't do any of the crazy lifts that Tyler can. Tyler recently broke the 1,000 pound.

Or he entered, I forget, there's a term for it. Basically, his bench crest, his deadlift, and his squats all combined was over 1,000 pounds. And he entered that club or something. I can't get anywhere close to that. I'm just a skinny white boy who doesn't have a lot of body. that and has some muscle. Could you

win a fight between you and Tyler? Oh, Tyler would win easily, dude. Tyler would probably punch me once and I'd just be on the ground. I could probably, I'm probably faster than him, though. I will say that. So if I have to fight him, he'll win. But if I have to run away from him, then I will win. Another thing I've noticed is with your cutoff shirts,

They're always like metal t-shirts. Are you into metal? Yes. I was hoping you would ask this question. I love metal. I actually, so back in college, I used to work at a radio station. I went to UC Santa Cruz, and they have a college radio station, which is one of the biggest college radio stations in the country called KZSC.

And I started working there during college. My sophomore year, I became the loud rock director, meaning I would, yeah, it was called loud rock, which just kind of encompassed all anything, any music that was loud, basically, and like required like some sort of, there was some rock, but it was mostly metal. But, yeah, so I would, I got the opportunity to, like, get to interview bands, go to concerts for free. I had my own radio show, all these cool perks. And then my senior year of college, I became the station manager, which was basically, I got to tell everybody what to do at the radio station.

That was a lot of fun and helped me become even more passionate about the music that I listened to. I also worked out like. So, yeah, I love progressive, or I love metal in general, but my favorite genre is progressive death metal, which, It sounds a lot more crazy than it actually is. But it is pretty crazy.

But yeah, I really like metal. Is progressive death, you said progressive death metal? Yes, D-E-A-T-H. So let me see if I can think of a band. Progressive Death Metal. All right. Are you like Googling right now? No, no, I'm not.

I'm thinking. I just saw somebody posted at Gretzko in the podcast chat. I love a Gretzko. Sorry, that's off topic. I'm into some metal about a deaf haven. Oh, I love death heaven, dude. Yeah, I love death heaven. That's sick.

Is that progressive death metal? I don't think I'd call them progressive death metal. I'd probably call them like somewhere around like post-post metal or like post-hardcore metal or something like that. I don't know. They're a, they're very unique band in that they, kind of like meld a bunch of different genres, which is one of the really cool things about metal

is there's no real, like, there's no one right way to approach making music and metal. You can do so many different things. Like, there's so many unique bands out there that don't sound anything like you've ever heard of, or you've ever heard before.

It's just a really cool genre. And everyone is, like, very chill. Like, the, the, there's a big misconception, I think, for people who listen to metal where we're always really angry and we just want to beat everyone up and break things.

But really, you go to a concert, like a metal concert, everyone's motion, yeah, everyone's having a good time. But as soon as somebody like either like falls on the floor or like something,

something is happening that is not supposed to happen in a metal concert, everyone will stop what they're doing and then help the people out. It's like, it's a really surreal thing to see in real life,

like happened right before you, but it's a really, it's a really, really cool thing that kind of demonstrates how, like, wholesome the metal community actually is. Can you give us a death metal growl, like a vocal, a little scream? I can't scream. I can kind of growl.

Uh, kind of. Oh. Is that, is that satisfied? Can you do it again, please? It actually kind of hurts, but I can kind of hurt. Try. Is yours not your dog? No, that's not my dog. You'll know if it's my dog.

I can growl, he can scream. Scream like, like how? Like his barks are like screeching, like they will pierce your ear drums. Who's your favorite band? Metalman. Ah, that's really, that's a hard question because I have so many favorite bands, but I usually like to answer this with like a top three or top five. So I would say, and it depends on like what I'm listening to in the moment. But I would say some of my favorite bands are OPEF.

OPEF is what got me into metal to begin with. They're a Swedish death metal band. Aren't they all? Yeah, that is true. That is true. They are, a lot of them are. Gojira is another one of my favorites. They are a French death metal band.

And I actually got the, I got the opportunity to talk to their lead singer and lead guitarist. And he's such a cool, he's such a cool dude. They're an awesome band. And then my third and final favorite band is going to be ISIS, not the other ISIS, but ISIS, the band from Los Angeles,

who have made their band before any other, Anyone else made a name like that. Okay, so it's ISIS the band from Los Angeles. They are one of my favorite bands ever. How about which band has your favorite logo? Because death metal logo? I can never read them. Yeah, they think they're really crazy.

Ooh, I don't know. I'm actually not really into the crazy logos that a lot of death metal bands do. So I actually really like the more like minimalistic. I like NZXT version of death metal logos. NST should make a death metal logo, but it's very clean and

minimalistic. No, we're going to invent a new genre called data metal. Hell yeah. Heck yes. Yeah. Alex Crowley number. Yeah. Alex, I got a phone. Yeah, what's up?

I mean, what's up? I'm about the band Ghost. They're okay. I'm not the biggest fan of Ghost personally. I've seen them live. They were okay. They're kind of like, in my mind, they're kind of gimmicky a little and kind of a novelty band, but they're cool.

I'm like very, I'm a very kind of stuck up metal person, but I will, as I've gotten older, I will, I've become more okay with bands like both where it's more, I see it more as like a way for people to enter the metal genre and like the more people that get interested in the metal genre the better in my

opinion so um so yeah ghost not really my cup of tea in terms of what i would listen to but i still respect them as like artists and what they're trying to do for the metal community so i like ghost for the same reason that i got into lady gaga and i'll explain how is that when lady gaga came on the scene right she was actually like a really good singer she was like pretty accomplished already like she wrote for like a lot of artists but she couldn't break out because she was kind of like every other pop singer out there, right? So she creates this crazy persona and next you know she blows up.

And then once that's done, she starts actually doing like the stuff she wants to do, right? And I feel like Ghost is kind of the same way where a lot of metal bands are trying to like out like metal each other or like out cringe each other in my opinion. So like, you know what? Let's just go full cringe on it and just make things that we want to make. And to me that's why I'm like, they're like one of my favorite bands right now because I can tell a ghost song. I can't tell very many other.

metal songs, right? Yeah, for sure. Like, I know if you listen, like, every single day, you could probably tell, oh, you know, this guy's, this is his guitar playing, this is his drumming or whatever, whatever. But like, to someone who, like, just really casually listens the metal, which I know is a really weird thing because not very many people casually listen to the metal. Right. Like, to me, that's like, I can, I can hear the songs.

And it's like, it's like everybody's in on the joke, right? We're all having fun together. We know it's not super serious. but every now and then they'll throw it like a bang and you're like, okay, yeah, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. No, I totally agree. As somebody who does not casually listen to metal, I am the kind of person who can

kind of, I can tell the difference between bands, but whenever I like show a band to my girlfriend who casually listens to metal, mostly because I force her to listen to metal. She enjoys what she's listening to, but it's all kind of the same to her. But there are a couple bands that will stick out to her that, like you said, are doing, they're just doing what they want to do. Not trying to out metal anyone else. They're just trying to make the music that they want to make. And it just turns out really, really genuine and really unique. So yeah, I definitely respect artists that do that kind of stuff. Like what? You respect artists that they just don't care.

They just do what they want to do. Exactly. Yeah. That's why bands like Opef and Gojira are some of my favorites, because they just do what they want to do. And sometimes that works out. Sometimes it doesn't. OPEF's recent couple of albums have not been my favorite.

But I still respect that they're doing what they want to do rather than what would sell the most albums. Right. If you're so into metal, why don't you have long hair? It's actually funny you say that because I actually used to have long hair. in college. So I started growing out my hair in seventh grade. And I never cut it except for like trimming it. But I never did a full-on cut. And I continued it that way until I want to say four years ago is when I cut it. So basically for over a decade, I had long hair and was growing out my hair. And my hair was down to the to my waist, actually. So I did have. long hair, yes. Okay, because in this photo that we used to do into the podcast channel,

it's actually like a bit past your shoulders. Oh, yeah, there it is. Yeah, that's me in college with my long hair. Yeah. Like, hi, I'm a loud rock director. I actually really miss it because sometimes, because when I would go to shows, it would be so fun to just, like, headbang and, like,

do windmills with it and, like, with it back and forth and everything. I'm sure the people behind me were really, really annoyed, since you're on the street right now, can you show us how you headbang? I would need to listen to something, I feel like. Dennis, can you queue up some OPEF? Sure. Give me a good song. What's a good song that start?

Okay, so for context, OPEF songs can be anywhere from like 10 to 20 minutes long. So I'm trying to think of one that starts out. Do, do, do, um, Ghost of perdition. Okay, I might blow you guys out, so be careful. Yeah, maybe turn down your volume a little bit. It might be kind of... Can you all hear this?

It's kind of quiet. It's not. Oh, there is. I feel like I have to take my head. He's not talking because he's headbanging now. I can't do it because of my headphones, but if I take my headphones off, then I can't headbang. Or then I can't listen to the music.

Here. There you go This is great radio, by the way Oh, snap's going in There I don't know if you were talking I could have to take my headphones off But that's me

We were definitely talking I'm not to find the way to edit this isn't sound So I'm sure Yeah, sorry That's pretty good headbanging I have a lot of experience I've probably killed several thousand brain cells at this point

which would actually explain a lot about how I've progressed through my life. The worst is when you go to a show and like the next morning you wake up on your your neck is just like super sore. Dude, I know. Oh my God. I have so many times where I'll go to a show and I like get really into it. I'm the kind of person that will just like throw themselves at a mosh pit even though I'm really, really small and tiny. Especially back then. I had like no muscle.

and I was just like a really, really small boy. And so I would just throw myself in the mosh pit. And I just get like pushed around and I'd be like jumping and like head banging. And then the next morning I wake up and I'm just sore all over my body. But I have no regrets. I have no regrets. No regrets. Moving on from music, the next topic I want to get into with you, Alec, is your dog because you love your dogs.

Yes, of course. So first question is, what is your dog's name? My dog's name is VDAR. It is kind of a different name. The reason why I named him VDAR is because I really like Norse mythology, and VDAR is kind of known as the God of Vengeance in Norse mythology, because he, after the Battle of Ragnarok, he kills Fenrir with a shoe,

because Fenrir killed Thor and Odin, I think. if I'm getting the story right. And Vidar was Thor's brother and Odin's son, I believe. And so that's kind of why he's known as a god of vengeance. But he's not really talked about a lot, like, ever. So I kind of thought it would be cool to like name a dog after a god from North mythology who has never really talked a lot. You should, when you introduce your dog, you should introduce him as your god

and see people to protect me. No, he's not my god. No. He doesn't need a bigger head than he already has. Okay, he thinks he's like the best, the only dog in the world. And if you tell him otherwise, he'll let you know. He doesn't need a big head. Why corgis?

I feel like corgis are like the official dog of NZKT. What makes them so cool? And she but he uses. I don't actually, I don't know. I kind of just grew up really liking corgis. Everything I read about them. I remember doing a lot of research in college about dogs because I knew one day I would want a dog of my own. And so I did a lot of research into what kind of dog I wanted.

And porgies just kept coming up because they're one of the smartest dogs. They're freaking adorable. They have these tiny legs, long bodies. And they're known to be like very, they can be very like cuddly. Unfortunately, Bidar is not. well, he's very cute, but he's not any of those. He's kind of dumb, although he can be really smart when he wants to be. And he's really loud and obnoxious, but he's still my dog and I still love him a lot.

Does he know any tricks? Oh, yeah, no, that he, that, okay, I, I say he's dumb, but he is actually pretty smart because he picked up on all these tricks that I taught him when he was a puppy. So yes, he knows almost every trick that I know of that I can think. for a dog. I could show them on stream, I guess. If people are watching the stream. Yeah.

Wait, I should probably get my dog. He's not even there. He's just chilling. Yeah, that's the other thing. When I'm, like, at my office or, like, talking on a meeting or whatever, he'll kind of run away because he doesn't want to bother me, I think. But then if, like, he hears something, he'll be really loud and obnoxious and dark a lot. Would you consider yourself a dog dad? No, because I don't like, I feel like that's a very boomer thing to say.

And I don't want to be a boomer. I've embraced being a millennial. I'm okay with being a millennial, but I don't want to be a boomer. So I so no, I'm not a dog dad. I'm very like a millennial thing to do actually. I always see boomers saying that. I feel like it's really more millennials and like, like, zoomers for like, oh, I'm a dog mom. I can't let dad or whatever.

Yeah, maybe you're right. Yeah, maybe. I don't know. I feel weird saying I'm a dog dad, but because I'm, I don't know, I didn't give birth to this dog, you know. How do we know? That's true. Would you say that your dog lives with you or you live with your dog?

Oh, my dog lives with me. That is the, I am very strict with him, partially because I have to be, partially because my girlfriend is not. but I'm very strict with him because he needs Forgies are kind of notorious for needing structure and a schedule. And so I kind of have to be strict with him and keep that structure because if I don't, he will just kind of recognize that and kind of run all over me and get whatever he wants.

So I can constantly remind him that I am the alpha in this relationship of you are the beta, even though you're extremely loud and nauseous. Speaking of getting whatever he wants, your dog is also one of the few dogs who's actually been to the office. Why is your dog allowed to go to the office, and Vivian's dog, Gunagi, is not allowed to come to the office? Well, Vidaur has never been to the LA office, but Vidar's been to the San Francisco office. Dogs are allowed in the San Francisco office. because both Bidar and Tusc, who is another NZT dog, would always go to the office, even though Bidar didn't really like Tusk that much.

Whose dog was Tusk? Tusk is Ray's dog. Ray is a software engineer for NZT. All right, so if you didn't work at NZXT and you can have any dream job in the world, why would it be working at the Pokemon company? That's funny that you say that because I was actually just thinking the other day about how awesome it would be

to be able to do data for Pokemon. I don't actually know if I would want to work for GameFreek or the Pokemon company because some of their games lately, man, have been, some of their decisions have been confusing to say the least. So I don't know if I'd actually want to work for them.

I think what I would really want to do is maybe work for like a, I don't know, a Pokemon e-sport company. That's not even a thing, but if it ever was a thing, I think that'd be really cool. Or just working for an esport company in general, like a big one would be really interesting, I think, because I'm sure they have a lot of like data around like how to make our players perform better, that kind of thing. So that would be, that would be very interesting. Not to say I don't love working here because I do. But if I had to leave tomorrow, that's probably something I would try to pursue.

Well, do we have some news for you? Welcome to the podcast. So my last question to you, Alec, is who's your favorite scientist? Like ever? All time. That's a very open-ended question. Is it, though? Is it?

I mean, there's a lot of scientists. I'm going to use a cop-out answer for this one because I don't actually really know that many scientists. And say one of my best friends, whose name is Xander, he actually graduated with a PhD in astrophysics a couple years ago. So he's an actual scientist. So I'm going to say he's my favorite scientist because he's one of my best friends, best friends. That counts. he also he also he also has one reason why we're really good friends is it possible to listen to those episodes

those old shows you know probably they're probably saved somewhere I think my parents stayed a couple um I want you sure I haven't Alex with the radio voice like hey welcome his radio the loud rock director coming at you actually I do have a question about your time in the tree did you ever kiss a banana slug? No, I didn't. I did not. I keep hearing that's like the thing people do, but I've never met a friend of Santa Cruz is actually kiss a banana slug and I want to know what it feels like. But I don't want to do it. That sounds gross. It does sound gross. That is the thing. I knew a couple

friends, a couple friends of mine who did it and they were pretty chill about it. They were like, oh, yeah, it was no big deal. But I don't know. I feel like they're playing it down. I feel like it's probably pretty gross and salty and slimy and moist. Well, it's supposed to like tingle. Like, that's like why I don't see why I know so much, but like apparently that's why they are like the like school mascot is because they don't have, they don't have any natural predator out there. So they just kind of chill all day.

And one of the reasons is because supposedly they like excrete this like, it was like tingling mucus over them. And that's like why you're supposed to kiss it. So like you numb up your lips for whatever else is coming. Have you ever licked the toad? No, no, I've never. Are you guys like trying to get me my own fear factor right now?

Have you kissed a snake before? No, no. Why are you asking me what I have kissed or licked right now? How are you eating a bug? Have I ever eaten a bug? Yeah, you know, crickets yourself like that. Actually, maybe I ate like a bug at one point in time. I don't know, actually.

Maybe. I probably have it at one point. I've probably eaten a chocolate answer or something like that where you can't actually taste the bug. It's just chocolate. I actually lied. I forgot I had one more question. Yeah. Yesterday when we were, you know, setting up the podcast and we're letting you know how we can record everything. Dennis asked you, oh, we're going to record just the Discord. Do you like, do you know how to use Discord? And Alex said, I think I know how to use Discord. I have a server with over 5,000. members. Thank you very much. So my question is, for the record, I did not say it like that. Okay. I know.

That's how I read it in my mind, though. My question is, what is your server about with 5,000 people? That's a lot of people. Yeah, it is. It's way more than I was ever expecting to join. Is it illegal? Is it legal? Yeah, I actually can't talk about it because if I do, I'll get in trouble.

No. So the server is initially, started as just kind of like a server to help people with. So, okay, so actually, let me back up. For context, I started streaming in January of this year. I started streaming Pokemon, of course. And I was streaming hosting shiny raids and Pokemon. If you're unfamiliar with the newest Pokemon game,

there's this mechanic called Raids. You can join a raid, and it'll have a Pokemon in it. And you and three other people, either NPCs or real people, can fight this Pokemon. However, there's an exploit that you can do where you can basically guarantee yourself that that Pokemon and that raid is shiny. So, and if you're unfamiliar with shiny Pokemon, it's just a, a Pokemon that has a slightly different color scheme and is very, very rare, and the shiny hunting community uses to flex on plugs all the time. So anyway, so this concept of rating and Pokemon, shiny raiding, as the host, you host a shiny raid, and then three real people

will join it, and then you back out of the raid, and you still have a shiny Pokemon in your raid, but the other three people that joined your raid can catch the shiny Pokemon. So you basically just keep doing that and hosting this raid for people so that they can catch these shiny Pokemon. And so what I did, because I joined a lot of shiny raids, I wanted to kind of give back and host shiny raids in my own. So I got Shiny Raids and I would host them on Twitch and I created the server as like a way to coordinate and be like, hey, this is the Raid code. Use this Raid code to join, et cetera.

And then people started joining to join into my Shiny Raids. And then I built a bot basically let's, this is very high level. It's a lot more complicated than this. But basically, let's you get shiny raids more quickly and easily in a less complicated way. and I built that bot, put it in the Discord. And then the Discord really started blowing up. And then it started getting shouted out by various YouTubers, which made a lot of people, more people join.

And so, long story short, that is why I have over 5,000 people in the Discord is because of shiny rating in Pokemon and because of the bot that I built. That is not the story I was expecting. I know, I know. What was the story you were expecting? Were you like, oh, I peddle Pokemon drugs or something? What the heck? I like how he comes back first thing with this, Pokemon, drugs.

Are you back in here? I think we had a little glitch there. Hello, I'm still here. There you go, yeah. I tried to join the Discord and it broke everything. Oh, I'm sorry. Yeah, so I'm going to leave like right now. Damn, damn.

So moving on to community questions. Let's see what people want to know about Alec with the C, not an X. Can you flex your gains on stream? I mean, I can obviously, but I feel weird doing it. I feel like I'm affected by it. All right, I'll do it once, okay. Just do this and do this. Oh, Jesus.

I am, I'm scared. I'm like super scared. Again, again, for context, they look bigger than they actually are because I don't have a lot of body fat. So I'm not. And also have like half a shirt on as well. Also true. Also true. Aeron wants to know, do you require BFie PC to be a data scientist?

Do I require what to be a data scientist? Do you require a Bifi PC to be a data scientist? A beefy PC. Oh, I was thinking like an acronym. Bifi. Anyway. Big boy computer. Yeah, no, you don't actually need a big beefy PC, a big boy PC to be a data scientist.

But I will say it does help, especially having a CPU, and depending on what you do, it'll obviously help you run, runs scripts more quickly. But it really depends on the kind of work that you're doing, especially because nowadays a lot of things run on the cloud. So really, all you'll need is a good enough. server on the cloud that has a, you know, you can, you know, you basically are outsourcing your your PC to, from Amazon or wherever instead of having a good PC on your own. That's the way.

Yeah, exactly. Yeah. So long story short, no, you don't need a BPC to be data scientist. But it can help in some cases. There go, folks. Excel Hunter wants to know as part for Ivan. Whose idea was it to create a Discord? It's mine. I'm sorry.

I apologize for the issues. I regret it every day. Frosted wants to know, I've always enjoyed taking raw data and coming up with ways to make it visually compelling. Are there established methods or rules that are taught to display different types of data, or do you have to come up with stuff from scratch? It's a rare question, actually. Yeah, can you actually repeat that question?

Yep. I've always enjoyed taking raw data and coming up with ways to make it visually compelling. Are there established methods? methods or rules that are taught to display different types of data, or do you have to come up with stuff from scratch? I see. Yeah. Okay. So in terms of the tools that you can use to visualize your data, so this is coming for context. This is coming from somebody who is a huge Python fanboy. So I work a lot with Python and SQL. Python, for those that are unaware, is a computer programming language. Oh, I'm talking about your arm.

No, I would, I'd be using the plural Python. Oh, okay, okay. Yeah. Mom's stick. Yeah, so I use Python, and Python is open source and has a lot of really awesome tools to visualize your data. And you can, some of the tools that I really like are like, Matt Plot, Lib, and Seaborne. I've also recently found this tool called High Charts, which has a Python. wrapper that it's built in Java script.

But high charts is another more complicated way, but it's very pretty and makes your visuals clean. In terms of like a process of like how you how you visualize your data, it really depends on the data that you're trying to describe. So I would say there's no real like there's no one right answer to say like this is how you visualize data. This is the process that you use. It really depends on the data. Is it, are there multiple levels of data? Is it categorical or is it continuous? Those kind of questions are the kind of questions you should ask yourself to determine

whether or not you are, to determine how you're going to visualize the data. So that is my long-winded answer to that question. All right. So like we were saying in the announcement that we were giving away an intro. Are Raven? Is this true? That's what the announcement says. Okay, cool.

I'll make sure. Double-checking. Let's see here. So we're going to go ahead and do one. We're going to do a drawing for two free Discord Nitro. So you can spam your emotes even more efficiently in this server or other servers. So let me quick second here to do this. We'll set it for five minutes because I'm too lazy to remember it.

As someone who has Discord Nitro, I can tell you that it is a very, very cool thing. It's really nice. I love being able to spam any email I want ever, including anime. emojis. It's great. It's one of those things where like once you once you have it, you don't want to let it go because it's not really convenient, but it's like dumb fun, right? Yeah, exactly.

I like it too because if you use Discord every single day, it's a free app. Yeah, like you don't have to give Discord any money, but I think just giving those, that five bucks a month supporting Discord, I think, is cool. Yeah, I never really thought Nitro would be worth it. And then I got a server with a lot of

people and I was like, okay, I should probably have nitro now. Okay. I wouldn't boost my server and nobody else is boosting it. So I boosted it myself. All right. Prima wants to know, what is the data you collect use for? We sell it to various companies around the world. Well, there you go.

Ivan, the data scientist, has answered your question. So the wait, so what do we do with the data that we collect? Yeah. I'm assuming he's asking like if we're collecting data from people, which I mean, every company collects all kinds of data from all kinds of stuff, right? I mean, it's like shopping data. It's, you know, return data. It's like what people are buying most of.

There's also a lot of like internal company data. So for example, like how many people we have the Discord server, right? What's the most, you know, busy time of the, the server, even things like the form to submit, what do you call it, rewards and stuff, right? Yeah. So, it really depends on the source of the data, like you said, for the workforce that I recently built.

Yes, I am looking at people's user names and user IDs and trying to connect that with the information that you build out yourself in type form. And like the rules that you have in your own. Discord as well. If I'm looking at maybe like traffic data, of course, that data is completely anonymized. And I'm looking at maybe where the traffic originated from, like where you were at in the process of buying or what you clicked on when you were in the process of maybe building at your PC. Did you look at this GPU before you ended up switching to a different GPU, etc.?

I'm trying to think of anything else. There's a lot of stuff. Yeah, there's a lot of stuff. We, I mean, we, we, we, we have a lot of data, not necessarily on users, but just we have a lot of data in general. And so there's a lot of cool things we can do with that data to help, to help increase our efficiency internally in the company. So, yeah, there's a, there's a lot of different. ways I can answer that question. I don't want to take up too much time. But yeah, that, those are some examples. I think the best example of us using data, though, has to be

build. Because we weren't always a data-driven company. Like, we never had data scientists until Alex and Tyler and Vroon, all those guys kids. I would even say we're still not necessarily a data-driven company. We're definitely trying to shift towards that. But I would say, like, we're still working to getting to that point. We're setting up all those systems right now. Yeah. But yeah, like with Build, you know, in order for us to launch Build and make it unique and not just like a company that sells computers, like we used all that data we have from

CAM to look at the hardware people were using to play all sorts of different games. So that's basically what sets built apart from everyone else, is we're able to tell you what hardware you need for different games and we guarantee the FPS and all that. So for me, that's really cool because for the longest time, we had all this information and didn't know what to do with it. And then one day, yeah, we were just like, you know what? We should actually do something with this data. Why don't we start making computers for people and let them know what they need to play

these games? Yeah, you can thank Tyler for that. Tyler, Tyler's been with the company, between me, Verroon, my boss, and Tyler. Tyler's been here the longest. so you can thank you for that. I did thank him for that. I bought him a beer for doing that. Because he used to say,

I was sitting at the old office, and I would see him, like, working on, like, these, like, just like we did, like, it looked like he was, like, hacking something. Like, I'm hacking. I would ask him, what are you working on? And he would say, the algorithm. For, like, a year he was working on this thing called the algorithm. Yeah, yeah, you know, figuring out how,

how to make all that stuff works. So that's pretty cool. Yeah. Yeah, we've got to have Tyler on the podcast. We should have Tyler on. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Tyler and Jerry.

Okay. Then Adel asked, pretty much the same question. What sort of data is collected from us? I mean, it's, you know, it's everything, right? It's depending on where you're at. If you're like, you know, again, if you're on ndc.com, right, it's like shopping habits, what you look at, what you don't look at, what you

buy, what you don't buy. You know, same thing with build, right? What kind of computers are being configured and stuff like that? You know, if it's cam, you know, what are your average frames in whatever games, right? and things. I mean, there's a lot of data that's collected all over the place. What websites you're browsing. Yeah, exactly. Often you call your mother if you actually love her and not, you know.

We have a specific algorithm that from a scale of zero to 100, how much you love your mother. So, yeah. And one below five automatically has issues detecting in cam. Yeah, you'll get a prompt in cam that says maybe you should think about calling your mom. Spend all this money on a crack in Z, but you're not spending, five bucks on flowers for your mom. We'll make sure it doesn't work. There's a little to Lina and Joker, by the way, for winning the Discord Nitro.

Hey, Grats. Lina already has it. Just scammed everyone else. But they can give the code to help me. Or they can keep it for themselves. Or keep it for themselves. Whatever you want, right? It's your code.

Okay. Next question is, I would answer that. What is the highest normal form you take the NZXT databases? I have no idea what that question is. The highest normal form I take the NZXT databases. I have no idea with that question. I'm assuming to reference to something that we're all not getting. Maybe it's a DBZ reference.

I don't know. Yeah, I'm like, I'm sure it's like people listening like, it's this. How do you not know? I'm not super into, I don't really know a lot of animas, especially I don't, especially shonen. I don't. That's what you know. I don't know. I don't know that many animas or mangoes.

Exactly. That's all you know already. Everyone wants to know, what specs does your PC have? I have a 2080, not a TI, 2080. I have a, I think I have the I7, 7, 7700K. I have a, I'm actually looking at my PC right now. I don't remember everything. 16 games of RAM, the G7.

He's up in a fan, I'll tell you. Yeah, that's true, actually. I have an AIS-Trix as my motherboard. I actually built this computer before I started working at NGT. Otherwise, I would have just put to all NCC products in it because I could have gotten a discount. But I was a poor boy when I built this PC. Now you're a poor man.

Downski in chat is saying, normal is a database form of normalization, which saves space, etc. Correct me if I'm wrong, though. You're probably wrong because I don't know. Wait, say, wait, can we repeat that? Yeah, he's saying normal is a database form of normalization which saves space. No idea of them. So I will say our databases are hosted on ADWS.

We use Redshift, so we don't need, we don't have to worry about space or efficiency because Redshift is insanely fast, and we don't, our databases aren't that big to the point where we need to like scale them down using normalization. So we don't have to worry about that. We're not at that point yet. Like I said, NGXT is still in its infancy in terms of data maturity. So we're not at that point. Data maturity.

Sounds really serious. How mature is your data? It's very serious. Okay. All right. And all the other questions seem to be here, just things we already answered so far. Like Aaron asks if you have a poochie. If you're watching his stream, we see he has two poochies right behind him.

Yeah, I actually don't remember how I got. too. I got one because I went to your guys's E3 meetup. Yeah, I got one there. I think, and then maybe I got one mailed to me later. I don't know. I have two anyway. It's a pretty big flex. Yeah, I went to the pop-up. So that's probably, no, wait. No, wait, no, not the pop-up. No, no, the E3 event thing.

I didn't go to the pop-up because I wasn't allowed to the pop-up. You weren't allowed to go to the pop-up? No, I think I just didn't want to or something. I don't remember. I think I was really busy or something. I don't know. I don't want to go either, right? I was there like 10 years. Did I know it was. It's crazy.

I think that was a year ago. Yeah. It was literally like literally a year ago. Like just. Yeah, it was. Jeez. What a funny coincidence. It would come back right as the, you know, on the eve of the pop-up.

All right. I think that is it for all the questions. Let's see here. Community Roundup. I forgot to fill this part out. But, you know, I'm just, scroll through announces. That's usually what you can pull that stuff from anyway. I can make a quick community announcement actually. Go for it. One of the reasons why I'm here at the office today

is because I come to the office every couple of weeks so I can ship stuff out. And for Pucci Cup stuff, like a lot of the stuff actually got delayed because of coronavirus. Like a lot of companies that we were working with that make a lot of the stuff we make, they were just delayed. So last week I finally got all the pins, all the stickers, all the mugs. This morning, Alec here helped process like hundreds of sales orders for all the Pucci Cup stuff. So today, after the podcast, I will be spending my lunch break, you know, shipping all that stuff to you guys. So that's a good thing. Yay.

You're welcome, Aaron. And you're welcome everybody else. Aaron specifically. But mostly Aaron, because of tag. Yeah, mostly Aaron. Congratulations to Thomas Shelby for setup of the week winner. Actually, had a really cool setup with Neziko and Tanjido from Demon Slayer. I love Demon Slayer.

I just finished Demon Slayer. It's a really good show, yeah. It's actually his and her setup, which is really, really cute. So when I was asking for his info to ship out his purple T-shirt, I was like, hey, man, like, is this like a his and her setup? He's like, yeah, you know, I'm a girlfriend. from the show. I'm like, that's super adorable. That's really cute. She'll always watch anime with your significant other.

If nothing, you're wrong. Well, I don't because my girlfriend hates anime, but that's cool. That sounds nice. But she'll listen to metal. I don't know, man. That's true. That's true. I don't know. You went to, you know, when I said it.

I mean, I don't know what things are really much else going on, right? I mean. Besides the shipping stuff? Yeah, shipping stuff and wallpaper. on wallpaper the setup of the week wallpaper won't announce later we haven't got around to that yet it's been busy morning not just honestly the biggest update just the shipping stuff even like the design contest uh which just wrapped up uh the stickers arrive tomorrow so next week we'll be shipping those out um aleck heads up i'll let you know so yeah uh actual work cool yeah but not it's really

it's been a little quiet uh we do have more giveaways coming up. This is basically like the summer of giveaways, to be honest. Yeah, no, we're doing a lot of give away. I was looking at the calendar yesterday and I was like, geez, like for a company, it doesn't give away a lot of free computers. We sure do you give a lot of free computers away.

So yeah, stay tuned. There's a lot of stuff coming up. Computers being given away. If you go on our Twitter right now, actually, we just retweeted a PC giveaway that New Egg is doing with Robitech. It's a pretty cool computer. I like the rap you put on it. That's awesome.

That's really, really cool. Yeah. Yeah, I'll actually drop a link to that in the chat. But besides that, in like 10 days, we will be kicking off design contest number seven. Yay. Yeah. I do have a meeting with the community team later today. We're going to talk about making some updates to the server as well. That's always a fun thing, right?

But besides that, no. Just. Yep. All right. So with that, everyone, Alec, thank you for, thank you for stopping by today. Really appreciate. Yeah, of course. Thanks.

Yeah, thanks for having me. It was tons of fun talking to you. Would you like to ask Dennis or myself a question before we wrap up? Oh, sure. Wait, okay, actually, all right, I have a question for Dennis. Dennis. Oh, no. Yes.

What's, what should I ask Ivan? What kind of question have you always wanted to ask Ivan, but you've never felt comfortable asking him because I'll ask him. That really doesn't exist because I ask Ivan everything. I really have no challenge in terms of asking. He has no shame. Yeah. I mean, this is a full stop. I have zero shame about a lot of things.

So I don't know. Like, yeah, I mean, the only thing I would ask Ivan would be like for him to tell me some more stories about when he was a young foo, you know, just more of that stuff. Actually, yeah, that's actually a good question. Ivan, what did you do before NST? Because I know you've been at NST for a really long time, right? Yeah, really long time. Yeah. What were you doing before?

Right before. So I guess I'll back up. When I was in college, I studied communications and my dream was to work in radio. I was, that's why when you're telling your radio story, I also worked for my college radio station. Oh, what college radio station? I don't think of Fullerton. It was a really small station. It was only like broadcast on campus and online.

Super small, but it is, that's the only thing we had, right? Yeah. After college, I worked in radio for like five years, and then I worked in TV for like five years doing production work. And then I got really tired of the long hours and stuff because I used to work on like news broadcasts. So it would have to be like, wake up at three in the morning and drive like an hour into like Studio City or Hollywood or something

like that. Yeah. Yes. And then get home like at 7 o'clock at night and they have to go to bed like at eight so I can wake up at three again the next day, you know? So it just got really old and I decided I wanted to work in an industry that was more fun. So I just kind of figured, you know, I'm going to look for a job that was close to my house and was relatively cool. different and I started working at Newegg and when I was at New Egg I was doing a lot of cool stuff like I started working on the blog on just a little bit of social stuff making videos things like that and then one day just randomly I just bought something from NZT and I complained about it and I ended up here but yeah before I was at NZEXT I worked at

new egg and that's really interesting were you were you You were doing social media stuff for New Egg too? No, I was actually doing a lot of like blog stuff. So I was primarily working on their blog, like making cards for the blog, I'm just articles, but also videos for like every company. So for example, like if NZXT released a new case, I might work with the T-WAT New Egg to like make a blog post and a build video about it or something like that.

Interesting. So what made you want to go into doing social media stuff for NST? I did nothing. It was actually just offered to me. So the story goes is I bought a case from NVXT because when I was at New Egg, I actually worked basically with every company that you can think of in computer hardware. But NSXT always stood out to me as different and unique and cool and weird. I always thought, man, that logo is weird.

I like that to have a dot at the end. It just really weird for me. And then when I started looking at the product, that stood out too because it was completely different from everyone else. You know, it was like simple and, you know, elegant, streamlined, all that stuff. So when it came time for me to buy any computer case, I wanted to buy it directly from NZXT because I knew they were a local company. They were just down the street from New Egg. Right. And like, you know, I want to support this company because I know they're local and they're a small company compared to all these other guys.

And I think what they're doing is cool. So I did that. And then in doing so, I had a really bad experience on the website. And I just started looking more at the company. I was like, man, they're doing a lot of things wrong. Like, so with my order, I just wrote like a complaint about my experience. And told NZXT, like, here's what you guys should. should be doing you guys should be very forward of you yeah and but little did I know like the very next

uh like in the next hour or two I get an email back and it was actually from Johnny and I had no idea who Johnny was and then um yeah just you know said like well thanks for telling me all these things like can we chat about it on a phone call and ended up talking him on the phone for like a couple hours and then he invited me to the to the office and then I met a bunch of people that worked here and yeah next thing they know they said you know well all these things you're telling us pretty interesting how about you come here and fix them and I was like all right yeah I just been here ever since like trying to work on those things so yeah I didn't have any like social media community experience or anything like that I just I just basically like 10,

X-T and wanted to help them, you know, get better. That's awesome. Well, I'm sure I speak for a lot of people when I say you've done a great job so far. Why, thank you. You're welcome. Sharon, I've done it without the data team, to be honest. Yeah, you're right. You couldn't.

All right. And with that, Alec, thank you very much again for joining us. Really appreciate it. Yes. Thank you again for having me. Of course, any time after we get some more people on. And thank you to everyone else to tuned in. Remember to tune in next week at 10 a.m Pacific Santer Time with the official NZC Discord server and follow at NZC on all relevant social media.

And don't forget to listen to previous episodes on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, and SoundCloud. Also, if you could, be so kind, please leave us a positive review if you like what you hear, but especially if you don't. Thank you very much. And we'll see you next time. Bye. Follow me on Twitch. Yeah, follow, follow Alec on Twitch.com.

Shameless shout out. Alec underscore 489 with a C, not an X. It's not Alex. It's Alec. Burn that in your memory. Don't be like me and forget stuff constantly. Okay. Bye.

Listen to more metal. Listen to the more metal. Bye.