Waveform: The MKBHD Podcast - The Steam Machine Takes on PS5 and Xbox

Episode Date: November 21, 2025

While Marques is out enjoying the Ultimate Frisbee on a beach somewhere, Andrew and David sit down to talk about everything from the new Steam devices to Google Gemini 3. After that, things go off the rails quickly as everyone discusses the pros and cons of local storage vs cloud storage. Enjoy! Shop the merch: https://shop.mkbhd.com Links: Valve - New Steam devices Tom's Guide - Rabbit next-gen hardware Tom's Guide - Employee payment story Google - Gemini 3 announcement blog Google - Antigravity announcement Verge - Cloudflare outage This episode brought to you by: Shopify: https://www.shopify.com/waveform Framer: https://www.framer.com/design (code: wave) LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/MKBHD Wealthfront: https://www.wealthfront.com/wave T-Mobile: https://www.t-mobile.com/switch Music provided by Epidemic Sound Social: Waveform Threads: https://www.threads.net/@waveformpodcast Waveform Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/waveformpodcast/?hl=en Hosts: Marques: https://www.threads.net/@mkbhd Andrew: https://www.threads.net/@andrew_manganelli David: https://www.threads.net/@davidimel Adam: https://www.threads.net/@parmesanpapi17 Ellis: https://twitter.com/EllisRovin TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@waveformpodcast Join the Discord: https://discord.gg/mkbhd Music by 20syl: https://bit.ly/2S53xlC Waveform is part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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That's O-D-O-O-O-O-com. This podcast is so gross. Marquez, I'm sorry. Because I came to work and I really gave it my best effort. I just tried to make a good podcast while you were gone. And then all this happened. I'm sorry. What is up, people of the internet?

Welcome back to another episode of the Wave Form podcast. We're your host. I'm David. And I'm Andrew. And I'm David. And today, we got a lot of stuff going on. As you might have noticed, Marquez is gone. He's gone. Wait, what?

I know. Where do you go? I know we sound the same, but he's gone. Oh my God, I had no idea. Yeah, he's out being hot on a beach. He's throwing frisbees. I asked him, why are you doing world championships again? I thought you already won.

Listen, I'm an ultimate player. Even this one's confusing. He was like, I'm gone for worlds. And I was like, you just brought, we did a whole episode of your trophy. Anyway, he's doing that on a beach now. So good luck, I guess. Anyway, we got a lot of stuff to talk about this week. We barely missed the Steam announcement last week, which is a bunch of new Steam hardware,

which is very exciting. Sundar Pichai did us a big favor and dropped Gemini 3 on a Tuesday. So we're actually able to talk about it relatively on time. We're only going to be four days late this week. And we've got a few other things like Rabbit being a bad company again. What else? Oh yeah, Cloudflare took down the internet again. We got a lot of fun stuff for you today. All the usual suspects. All the usual suspects. So also, we launched new merch this week. We did. So I think we should talk about that real quick. We're going to do it real quick. This has been a long time coming because our team's been like, really going hard on this for a while, getting everything set up on the shop and getting all the designs and all those samples and making sure prints are correct. But we're really, really pumped about this. I think most importantly is, like, as a big channel, it's really easy to just throw a logo on a shirt and sell it to an audience. And that's something Marquez has not wanted to do. And I think the design team really took it to heart in this one where all of these shirts,

we have one for each channel right now. If you were to look at it, I don't think, you would immediately say that's MKBHD or that's a, like, YouTuber merch, it would be like, that's a cool design. And then if you know, you know, which is kind of what we were going for. Kind of the vibe. Yeah. So we have, I'm wearing the waveform shirt right now. So is Adam.

Adam looks cooler because Adam has a jacket on. That's not the only reason. It's like a purpley color with kind of the top of the MKBHD logo that like waves and patterns out, almost like the Joy Division. Yeah, kind of looks like the Doodoo. We also have an autofocus one that David's wearing right now, which is a red camera with like a manual shifting knob and a tire as the focus ring. That's probably my favorite design. It's really good.

I like it a lot. Ellis is wearing our main channel. It's kind of like the logo spinning around in a cool pattern. And then no one has the studio one here, but it's basically our studio logo deconstructed and just a bunch of really cool colors. Great. The shirts fit really nice. They're great material.

I think it's the best merch we've ever done. Yeah. So just big shout out to Tim, Olivia, Brandon, Vin, Jono, and even our old intern, David. I think he's the one who maybe pitched the waveform design. Yeah. So he's not here anymore, but they all worked really, really hard on all of this. No, it's legit.

Very good. And I'm, you know, I know you're not going to believe me because we're selling it. It actually is good. I mean, look for yourself. We took, like, we had a professional photographer come in. Yeah. And I took photos. The photos are cool.

They're really good. Adam looks really good. good in his. It's funny because I showed my fiancee dressed the pictures and she was like, you never dressed like this, but you look cool. That's well because we had the photographer, but we also had Brandon and Vin dressing all of us. So they were like styling us. I wore none of my own clothes that day. I think I wore your jacket. There's also a great treat. Olivia are one of our graphic designers. She was wearing this red hat with the studio shirt and someone on Twitter had posted like Pokemon Trader cosplay.

Anyway, yeah, check that out on the store. But until then, until you do that, we're going to be talking at you. So let's talk about the new Steam devices. Yes. Because that's the first thing that happened last week that we barely miss because it happened literally Wednesday afternoon. I think it happened. Or all the videos came out on Thursday? Yeah.

I thought it was Wednesday. Linus's video came out on Thursday. Well, maybe he's just late. Maybe. I think Dave 2D was on time probably because there were some videos that came out Wednesday night. 10 day. Yeah. Because I remember thinking, like, I'm mad that we missed it, but thank God we missed it

because I would have known nothing about it. Dave was on the 12th. So, yeah, Wednesday afternoon. All right. Well, to give you guys a little bit of context, the Steam Machine is this idea that Valve has had for a very long time. Valve is the company that makes Steam. It is the biggest gaming platform in the world.

It runs on computers, and you can play everything on it. And there's been this transition over the last few years of, you know, you used to be able to have a console where you played on your TV or you had, like, like a handheld device, like a Nintendo DS or something. But there was never really this like melding of the two. And considering Steam has like so almost every game ever made besides like Nintendo games on it and maybe some exclusives to like consoles. Yeah, there's some.

I think more gaming companies are making their own launchers. It's like BattleNet and Epic. But I mean, it clearly has the most amount of games, period, on a single. And it's like the most affordable. They're very, steam is very famous. Everyone who's listening to this probably already knows this, but, like, Steam is very famous for its, like, insane mega sales during the summer and during the spring. And, like, everyone that has Steam has way too many games that they've never played. It's both a waste of money and also very fun to just collect software.

Anyway, a number of years ago, Valve released the original Steam machines. And the idea of this was, like, okay, we can kind of split the difference between being a gaming PC and a console. You should be able to just have something hooked up to your TV. You should be able to play it with a controller because, I mean, it's just a gaming console after all, but Valve is very hardcore about things working on Linux. It's all this stuff. That was a colossal failure because Valve has also been a very much pro third party. And when they launched the original steam machines, they launched them with a bunch of different companies that were doing it. There was like Alienware and there was Asus and there was all these different configurations.

And to be honest, it was just very confusing. Those companies were needed to make margin, all of this stuff. And so now what Valve is doing after the success of the Steam deck, which came out a couple of years ago, two years ago, I think two years ago. A couple years ago. I recently took ours from the office and I've been playing it nonstop. The OLED one? I think it's just the first one.

The regular one. But I'm obsessed with it. So like Valve kind of took the idea of what the switch had done by, you know, making a console that could be plugged into your TV or played remotely. and it put a whole computer into a handheld console, which was really cool. That was super popular, and it kind of created this wave of new handheld gaming PCs

that people are using. There's an Asus one that's very popular. There's a Lenovo one that's very popular. And now they decided to re-enter the Steam Machine world. So we have three new announcements from Valve. Number one is the Steam Machine again. But this time, it is a small cube. and it's kind of like optimized for Steam in a number of ways and they're trying to create a little bit of an ecosystem because as I mentioned before, them going to a bunch of third parties was like, that is good for a choice, but it makes it hard to kind of sell a bunch of stuff together that works really well together. So all the hardware that they announced specifically works well together. So the new Steam machine is this small cube. It's running a semi-custom AMD solution with a Zen4 CPU with peak frequencies of 4.4.

28 gigahertz boost, and it has an RDNA3 GPU running at 2.45 gigahertz that sustains a 110 watt TDP. This is specifically designed to hit pretty much every single game on Steam at 4K60 FPS. That is their goal with this, which is a pretty big ask. Specifically, obviously, that's using FSR, so it's like upscaling and that kind of stuff. But the point is that you should be able to plug this into your TV. and just, like, jump on any game on Steam at 60 FPS, 4K, really cool.

I think that's a reasonable target also, 4K60, because, like, we're looking at this as more of a console, right? Like, I know PC gamers love to get way higher than that a bunch of different crazy things with really, really expensive machines, but this isn't quite going after that market. This is a sit down on your couch and play. It is interesting, though, because it is also a full PC. Agreed, but, like, but what this is going out.

Like, this doesn't need to run 4K, 300 FPS, like crazy stuff that people can run on a $8,000 piece. Right. It's like, it's a computer that is made to be played on your couch. They can run all your Steam games. So they didn't announce a price yet. It is going to be probably more expensive than the traditional consoles, but that's because it has more access to more software and it runs SteamOS. I spent so long on PC parts picker trying to, like, figure out more or less what this would be. ish like what it could cost like what it could cost yeah and i found something like the configuration

i got and i was like posting about this and people kept going back and forth with me like what they got what i got like it seems like the average is like anywhere from 800 to like a thousand ish like the cheapest thing you can get that you would feel comfortable actually getting it to play but then someone replied to me and they made a good point which is like they probably have deals that they can get with the like chip manufacturers and stuff like that that they're making these like massive orders with to get the price even lower. So if it could be like $500, $600, I think it's going to be more than that?

I think so, too. I think it'll be like $7.99. That's where I was like landing. But if it's like $600, I think that's a steal. That would be awesome. A really good thing Linus brought up was, well, first of all, he said this will probably be, they told him no price yet,

but more closely resembling a PC than a gaming console. So I think we automatically go over $500 on that, right? Yeah. But not only that, but like what consoles can do is because when you buy a new console, there's X amount of games that can subsidize the price of a console. Because those are so expensive and you have

to buy new games pretty much to buy those where this is running Steam. You could, X amount of these could ship out and you don't buy a single game for it because you already have a library already and it's just a PC you can install stuff on. So like, they actually have to make money on the hardware. They have to really make money on the

hardware for this. So it's most likely going to be I think $750 is like a reasonable guess, but I wouldn't doubt if it's closer to 1,000 than 500. Yeah, yeah. I feel like they just have to be careful, though, because if it's too expensive, you could just build it your own. Like, you can't upgrade some parts of this.

So it's like... There are certain things in this that you can't really build your own in terms of, like, connections with the controllers. Like, they have better antennas and stuff inside of it. There was specifically the HDMI port being able to connect to your TV and wake the, uh, the console itself through your TV remote and like through that you wouldn't really be able to do that on a regular PC being hooked up to it. So there are some benefits to this being like yeah really made top down connecting to your TV. There are a lot of optimizations like it has

super fast like pause and wake where it can be the game can be sort of in a suspended state for months on end and then you press one button and it's instantly back to it. So they have a lot of optimizations around that on steam deck that works incredibly the game i'm playing right now is called slay the spire it's been around forever but it's like i started playing that's great you did start playing it's really fun it's pretty addictive i could see though that game way better to play on a steam deck when you're sitting on a couch because by my pc i have to like kind of just get up and down yeah yeah but like being able to just because it's turn based at any time when anything happens i can just put the controller down and sleep it and it could be three days later and i could be in the

middle of the same turn. So I'm assuming this is going to do the same thing. Yeah. Yeah. The I.O. ports are a little disappointing. They went with a lot of USBA ports and only one USBC port. I saw people complaining about this. Yeah. I would

love for them to move towards USBC. I do think that a lot of the traditional gaming hardware and PC hardware is still utilizing USBA, so that's probably why they were thinking that. But one USBC port just seems like a small amount. Either way you're probably not even going to be using the ports that much so the way you charge the

controllers through this magnetic puck that doubles as a 2.4 gigahertz connection to the game itself but that puck plugs in and then charges the controller as well assuming the backside of that is a USBA that it comes with I guess it's just USBC on the other side you're probably plugging straight into the front of it so that's what the USB ports for right right right it could be C and could just be C to C that would probably be better but yeah yeah I don't uh it has 16 gigs of RAM and 8 gigs of Vram. Yeah, so it's also quite, I don't want to say modular,

but they're releasing CAD files for it. So you should be able to replace the front panel with anything you want. There is already a company that is making like e-ink displays and stuff for it and different types of stuff that you can run on it. Like you can show the like temperatures of the different components.

It was running like bench, or not benchmarks, but like specs and like heats and like graphs on the front through an E-ink display because it's just a magnetic snap on the front of it, um, which some people had like wooden textures on it. I'm sure Dbrand's going to go crazy because they already did flat. People have been joking that this is a game cube because it literally is a game cube. And D brand has already announced that they are selling a game cube rap. That's that makes it look like a game cube. This is like as a console that's going to live in a living

room of people that live in a house. Thank you for not making this absurd. Like the PS5 to me still is insane that that's like does not fit into anything no i'm not putting that on my tv console it just seems crazy so like not only that but then making it modular on the front to be able to possibly add accents to it that would fit with the general aesthetic of a living room yeah to not have to be everyone's gaming dungeon yeah is awesome yeah um and did you see the LED the like user customizable LED bar on it yes that's fantastic one of the ways like basically between the magnetic gap and the power buttons and i.O. ports on the front. There's a little IO bar that users can define what that will show or a LED bar. I forget what I said. But one of the ways you could do it is if you're downloading

a game, it can show the progress of the downloading. So you could change the channel, watch TV while it's downloading, and then know how long you have until it's finished and then swap back. Yeah. People are going to think of some really cool stuff to do on that. I love the idea. I don't play video games at all. So I have literally no interest in this product. But I love the idea. I love the idea of a living room PC. Yeah. Like the idea of a PC with an OS that's optimized to be on a TV several feet away from you. I feel like, and this is going to sound crazy, but Nintendo sort of attempted this with the

Wii in the way that the home screen was laid out and the way that they handled screensavers and there was a web browser. Yeah. You know. True. And I feel like we haven't really come close to something that that's as pleasant to have running in a living room. Yeah. So I would even consider buying this as someone

who doesn't... Actually, I do a Steam account. Everyone has a Steam account. Everyone has a Steam account. But I don't know. I want someone to make the non-gamer version of this. What would that look like? Something that's like more optimized for web browsing. I guess it's the thing I said. It's like an

OS. You say WebOS? WebOS. Dude, don't even get me started on WebOS. I've been the biggest defender of LG TVs ever since I bought one. Like this blow Samsung out of the water. I love my LGTV. WebOS. It was at 25 or 26, the one that came out last week. That's a bad. It's good. No, it's terrible. Oh, okay. I don't know. It's so terrible. I can't even, I'll derail the steam talk. It's like, yeah, it's like, it's worse, get this. It's worse than

AI overviews. It's like, what were you thinking life's good? What were you thinking? They should call, they should rename the company LB. Because life's bad. if you get WebOS 25 or 26 or whatever. God damn it sucks. Don't update. PSA. Yeah. Don't update. Yeah. Okay. There's a there's a memory leak issue. There's a memory leak issue if you for any app that uses the built-in media player, which is all streaming apps. And most LGTVs have like one gig of internal. Dude, it's like and then and then by default it turns your screensavers into ads. So if you don't do anything on your TV, it's just like, it's just like, what is wrong sorry sorry but just like oh you ruined my tv lp yeah all right well to bring us back

yeah let's talk do you think linux gaming is going to be a thing now because i've been seeing a lot of movement of people trying to leave windows because of the yeah i've been seen that too and everyone's going to be like oh finally we have like a linux alternative i mean but i've been hearing that for a decade so i've been also hearing that for a deck it seems to me that a lot of like people are buying computers specifically for the gaming aspect now. And it is also becoming a little bit. Well, I would say PCs specifically. Yes. Yeah. Well, yeah. Because no one I know is buying a Mac to game. That's what I'm. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. But it's kind of like people are buying Macs for like work and creative work. And then they're buying a PC just for gaming. There's not a lot of reason to just buy a

Windows computer anymore just as a general purpose computer. I think Linus actually just did a video about how good the M5s are and how it's very hard to justify a Windows computer at this point. So I could see like a movement in the industry more towards things running Linux that have like a gaming skin on top of them. I think that the idea of having a dedicated gaming computer is getting much more normalized. So we'll see that. I'll let you guys talk about Linux. I know nothing. I'm not saying anything about this. Well, shout out to Damien Wilde from 9 to 5 Google, he's been on his personal channel going deep dive after deep dive

in Linux gaming, and it's very interesting. Very cool. So there's a couple of ecosystem optimizations in the cube. One is that it has a micro SD card slot, and the idea of this is that if you have a Steam deck, the Steam deck has a micro SD card slot, and that's where you mostly put your game library and like your save data. So you can quickly just, when you get home, take your micro SD card out of your

Steam deck and put it in the Steam Cube, and then suddenly you just have everything. And it's all local. You don't have to download anything. It's pretty awesome. They also have a specialized antenna inside of the Steam Cube for the new Steam Controller, which we will get to.

The Steam Cube? Yeah, it's the Steam Machine. It's a GameCube. Steam Machine, awesome name, by the way. Yeah. I love it. GameCube is better, I'm sorry. Can't wait for Steam Machine 720.

Yeah. All right. There's a new Steam Controller, which we'll talk about now. It's kind of an evolution of... Hey, man, when you got to talk on the fly, you got to add some filler. It's kind of an evolution of the last Steam controller that they released a number of years ago. Really freaking weird controller because they introduced these touchpads that are basically ways to interact with games that traditionally did not work with just controllers and were made for mouse and keyboard.

And they added those touch pads onto the Steam deck. And that ended up being very popular and people really liked it. So they now have kind of evolved this. concept made them bigger, made them more concave, and now you have this massive controller that is kind of just like this bigger evolution of the older one. Really cool feature. New tunnel magneto-resistance magnetic thumbsticks, which is better than Hall Effect, apparently. They're also magnetic like Hall Effect, but they have lower power use and they minimize the dead zones. Wait, what does any of that mean? Okay, so we've talked about Hall Effect before.

Andrew should actually explain this because he knows more about it on a keyboard which I'm assuming It's the same It'll be pretty similar It's basically on a regular keyboard switch When you press down a key It's moving a piece into a leaf

So when two pieces of metal connect That can send something to the board underneath Right and create a key stroke Magnetic is When the key gets pushed down There's a piece of metal that is now making a magnetic sort of connection. Like a magnetic field? Yeah, I guess. However,

it connects to the board. And with that, you can change the range of how much you need to push that down. And it can be much faster. Yeah. So presumably for the joystick, it doesn't grind against itself. Yeah, you're not. There's pretty much. I mean, it's a spring and a keyboard switch, but yeah, there's

no real connecting parts doing that. Yeah, which is cool. So it means that it should last a lot longer. These are apparently even better than Hall Effect. And it's really nice seeing a company do this because Notably, on the Nintendo Switch 1, they did not, and the OLED, they did not use Halifact, and the JoyCon Drift issue where pretty much everyone's joycons would eventually just start like moving left constantly.

I appreciate that you tried to, like, isolate it to the Nintendo Switch 1, but the Nintendo Switch 2. Well, I was just going to say. Everyone was like, oh, they're definitely going to, because this is the main problem from the Switch 1 was the JoyCon Drift. They didn't update it. They said that they made the chasm like bigger, but. I, they didn't, it's the same parts, basically. So that's sad.

And so Steam just went out and said, we'll go one step further. Not two steps further, because not only are we going to do Hall Effect, we're going to do the better version of Hall Effect, which is really cool. They have a, they have grip sense in the controller, which can sense how hard you're squeezing it. Yeah, my, so I was listening to these. There are also four buttons behind. Yeah.

Was that part of, was that part of the grip sense? So like one of the features that you can do with the controller is, is if you're using the gyro controls in it. At any point, if you want to reset where the center of, like, the gyro is, you can unsquease the controller, right? Was that by squeezing those buttons on the back or was the controller itself actually has squeezing?

It says by gripping the buttons on the back, you can reset your gyro. So it's less of a squeeze. It's more of, like, having pressure points on the buttons, like, that are on the back of the handle itself. Yeah. Which is a really cool feature. And I think you can also, according to Dave's video,

So if you're like, you can use the gyro as a mouse cursor, essentially, which is another point on top of now the touchpads of like games that might not be optimized perfectly for controller versus a mouse cursor. Right. Also, you will be able to see it in the Steam frame, which is the VR headset we're going to talk about soon, which is kind of similar to in the Applevision Pro, you can see the magic keyboard and the magic mouse only. And I think they added like a Logitech keyboard, but yeah, it kind of like peers through.

apparently that will happen in the steam frame which is cool um it charges via this magnetic puck that we talked about a little bit earlier it's kind of this it's a wire that comes out of the front of the steam frame that connects it to it but that wire acts as a um as an antenna right and it has a 2.4 gigahertz I believe the the puck itself is a small almost oval shaped I mean I don't even know what to compare it to it's very small yeah and what the puck does is there's like a three-pin magnetic place on the back of the controller and get magnetic onto it. And then with that is going to connect to your steam machine through its own separate 2.4 gigahertz connection, which is awesome. So it's like eight milliseconds of latency. You're losing the, don't have to deal with

the Bluetooth latency stuff. And all you have to do is slap it on the back of your controller. Or you could use Bluetooth normally, but like that's awesome. And then what that does is that just then can plug into a USBC port or I think it has USBC on it. And that doubles as the charging pass through to charge the controllers, which I think have like 30 hours of battery life. Yeah, I think they said. Yeah. But I think I'm a big 2.4 gigahertz stand as like someone who, you know, I always use dongles for mice or keyboards when they're wireless when I have the option to. Yeah.

Everyone in this office uses Bluetooth and it drives me insane, even though it probably works totally fine. Yeah. But I am a dongle fan. And I think that is such a cool way to just make sure that all your controllers have their own. individual connection. I can't believe you still use a mouse. Pleb. Sorry.

All right. And then the last thing they announced was the Steam frame. So this is a new VR headset. It's kind of the next VR headset from Valve after the Valve index that came out a number of years ago. It is powered by a Snapchat and 8

Gen 3 processor, which is interesting. It runs SteamOS, been in development since 2019. And it supports both VR and non-VR games. So not only can it do VR games like you're used to, like Half-Life Alex, but you can also play a Steam game where it's just in a big floating window in front of you. And I think that's kind of like a learning from the Vision Pro, from the Oculus Quest, that kind of stuff. It has a modular design, so you're able to take three different parts off of the headset so you can use like a third-party strap accessory for it. So that way it's not just one size fits all.

it kind of works like a ski mask by default ski goggles right that's different they are different that's different and from people that have tested it they have said that it's a little bit hard to adjust when you first do it but you really only have to adjust it once

and then it should fit on pretty perfectly after that they are prioritizing gaming performance over other XR things so it's not supposed to be like a multi-use kind of like XR headset they're like this is a gaming VR headset very specifically.

I think the biggest thing that proves that is it's black and white pass-through. Yeah, it's black and-so you have pass-through, but yeah, it's black and white, so they're not prioritizing that. They have controllers that come with it that update 200 to 250 times per second, same as the valve index, and they have IR cameras on the inside that track your eye movement. And the reason they do this is because they have foviated rendering, which if you don't know what that is, it renders the things you are looking. at a high resolution and then everything around that it renders at a very low resolution.

But it's foveated like graphics, isn't it? It's foveated streaming is what they're calling it, which is crazy. Yeah, because it's like it basically can tell where you're looking and know that's the part of the game to stream at a higher bit rate. Right. So the point where I think did Dave say there was a demo where they played a game where it's not even that it did the outside parts of it as lower frame rate or lower band, uh, bit rate, but it was just dark. And he was trying to like ping his eyes around to try and catch it and was having a hard time. Yeah. Because there are 18 infrared cameras that update every 8 to 12 milliseconds to track where your eyes are looking. So that it can, yeah, it's pretty awesome. Yeah, I was, when I heard

the foviated streaming thing, I was like, at what point do you spend so much money and everything? And I'm sure there's a really easy question or answer to this. But like, you're doing all this stuff to save on performance. At what point does it cost that much more money to put in 18 IR cameras over just like having everything render at a higher rate? I mean, you'd have to have a much like more powerful processor, which takes more power. It's just cool how much you have to go into using less power. Yeah. Yeah. It's crazy. Crypto and AI were not a thing. Do you think we wouldn't be doing the foviated rendering at all? Like just because chips would be that much cheaper. Oh, I have no idea

I'll blame crypto if you want me to. It's crypto's fault. It's crypto's fault. But that enables 250 megabit per second over Wi-Fi 7 and the end-to-end latency is about 10 to 20 milliseconds

which is very short for streaming to a VR headset because this is the thing that the headset itself can run games just dedicated inside of the headset because you can run on the Snapchat and 8 Gen 3.

Obviously, that's not going to be powerful enough for enough stuff. So what they really want you to do is stream from something like your Steamframe, which also has two, so the headset has two dedicated Wi-Fi antennas. There's a Wi-Fi-6 antenna, which is only for the game streaming. It is dedicated to the game streaming, so there's no other network traffic on it. So it can just push all of that game streaming data directly with nothing else happening. And then it has another band that is just used for general internet things. like being updated and all of that kind of stuff.

So it's very, very targeted at just being able to do that. There is actually no tethered mode available on this headset. Most other VR headsets, you can plug into your computer and go through a cable. They don't want you to have to do that because they want it. They're like, we want you to have more free movement. As long as you have line of sight to your steam machine or Wi-Fi 7 router, which not a lot of people have. So the steam machine makes a little more sense. You should be able to have pretty much no latency issues.

so as cool as the the steam what is that headset called frame frame yeah that's cool but who cares I feel like the coolest thing announced was the steam machine like everyone is so hyped about yeah a little box and this was just like like why even announced this yeah I like I agree and don't agree with you it's like it's cool the steam machine is the coolest thing I also agree it's really hard, assuming the frame is going to be closer to $1,000, there's no pricing on it yet, it's so hard when Quest 3 is $500. Yeah. Like, it's just going to be tough to do that. But you can't play your Steam library. You can play your Steam library. It's like two thirds of people

playing VR on Steam are playing it on a Ben of Quest. Well, is there... I don't know if it's your full Steam library, but you can play Steam games on it. Yeah, you can So it's, that's going to be the tough part. It's like, if you are really big into VR gaming, you're probably, there's probably something like this. If you really, really hate meta, there's another reason to do it. It's how much money do you want to spend to stick it to meta?

Which, there are probably plenty of people to do that. But I think we all agree, the machines, the coolest part about this. I mean, the controller's really cool to it, but it feels like part of the machine launch. Yeah. Again, it's an ecosystem play. For sure. They're really selling the machine. The thing about the machine that's a little disappointing

is you cannot upgrade the CPU or GPU. You can upgrade the storage. pretty easily. You can, you can technically upgrade the RAM, but it's much harder. But yeah, the CPU, GPU are kind of like set in there. So it's kind of like buying a console in that way. Like, will people be able to

open this up and find a way to do it? People find a way to upgrade everything. Yeah. They're soldered in and it's a custom motherboard. Oh. No. I mean, to get it that small. Like, this is, it's small. Yeah. Even compared to small PCs. Like, it is crazy how they got

everything in there. Listen, people will find out how to do stuff on this they always do um but i think it's it's definitely is the like the pros and cons of this are which way does it which way does it lean towards a pc or a console right and the upgrade ability is definitely on the it's better than a console because you can stick an mdot 2 stick in there and get way more storage than like a an Xbox or a PlayStation but um like the rest of the stuff it's just going to have to have a life cycle like a console and i personally think that's fine. I think you're opening it up to so many games out there on a Steam

library. I think so many games on the Steam library when you start looking at indie developers play really well on a TV with a controller. Like I said, I've been having so much run with the Steam deck and a lot of these like different Rogue like games would be awesome on just a TV laying on the couch rather than at my computer. And this makes that part. Everyone who's played PC games envisions like their old PC getting shoved into their media console and being like their backup gaming system on like a TV but that's such a pain in the neck

it doesn't flow well so this being able to do that is awesome and I'm super excited Valve said like 15 to 20% of people who own Steam decks have it plugged into the TV most of the time and that is the reason they made this because it's way more it's way more powerful so it's kind of addressing that market of people that mostly do couch gaming

yeah and I think like a really good number in terms of if you want to gauge powerfulness. I know you were, like, comparing specs and everything. They said it's supposed to be six times as powerful as the Steam Deck. Yeah. Which is, I mean... To me, that means nothing, because I've never used the Steam Deck. So it's like...

That's fair. I don't know. Is that like, you know, Apple six times more powerful? Or is that like... All-day battery. Yeah, is that all-day battery life? Yeah. I'm also six times more powerful than the Steam deck. I think there will be tons of games

that are gonna run flawlessly, exactly how you want them to, and then the higher echelon of games will be like, okay, this isn't running like it is with my 1580 on my computer, but like, so everyone can like run the benchmarks and play the games and do the things, because I'm so on the fence with this.

Like I don't know if I wanted or not, because one, pricing, I think it really depends on pricing, but two, I think also performance. Like, I'm really curious to see how it performs because I'm not spending hundreds of dollars on something that I'm gonna have to, upgrade it. And I can't even upgrade it in like three or four years ago. Are you K with 4K60 on every game that you want to play? I don't know. Do you? What consoles do you own? I have a PS5 and it's fine

and I have the P. Do it. There it is. Nice. Sorry. It's all right. No, I have a PS5, but that's like when I get the PlayStation, when they come out every 10 years or whatever, I kind of know, like, like, okay, I'm just stuck with whatever this is. Like, I feel like the point of Steam and Steam games is that if a game comes out that I really want to play, I could just upgrade something for 150 bucks and then now I can play that game, you know? On your computer. Yeah, if I had like a computer, like a PC computer.

So, like, I can't do that with this thing. To me, that's why, like, I think this is really cool because it's just replacing that cycle of a console now. Like, if this is the console I like, because the games I prefer are on Steam and a lot of the games on Steam that I like, I would prefer to play on my TV in like a, like, I'd much rather sit down on my couch and play a game with a controller than sit at my desk with a controller. Like, the games I like to play on the computer are like Valorant or Overwatch.

They're things that, I mean, there's console overwatch, but. You have two inches between your eyes. Yeah, yeah. Like, my nose is touching the screen and I'm screaming and like it literally puts me in a bad mood all day. I want to sit down on my couch and enjoy some things. Pause it. When Claire does say pause, I don't have to be like,

I can't pause the game, Claire. Like, I want that to be a game I can pause and walk away from. The computer games are for stressing yourself out. The TV games are for enjoyment and relaxation. Well, that's kind of where, I guess, my thinking about all of this goes. Like, is this more taking aim to replace PC people, or is this trying to replace consoles? I think it's starting to replace consoles,

but with the variety of the games you can play on Steam. Yeah, I think there's so. many people who are play on computer and on consoles. And I think this is like ideal for them without having to buy a PlayStation. Now they can have the same library between the two of them. Also in the last couple of years, there's been a massive rise of like indie games. And I think indie games are very well suited for the TV. Perfect example. I told you about Slay this part of the other day. I bought it for eight bucks for you to buy it on your switch was like $30, wasn't it? Yeah. Steam sales are. I got it on Steam, I believe.

Oh, you did? Yeah, yeah. Okay. Yeah, I did buy Hades 2, which was $30. Yeah. I think Hades 2 is my next buy. It's, yeah. It's very good. I've heard it's really good. So that's that. We're a week late over where it's going to be almost two weeks at this point once you hear it. But I hope that hearing it out of our mouths was a better experience for some reason. Hopefully. And if it's not, I already know what comment you're going to make.

Like, L.O.L, these people shouldn't talk about games. So there, I already made it for you. You don't have to. Thanks. I'm casual. God, I hate when these people talk about games. They don't nothing. Although I'm not casual in Dota, too, because I have almost 6,000 hours. Yeah, but what's your rank?

We don't talk about it. I'm really bad. I keep playing it. Anyway, if you're not good at a game... Speaking of really bad. If you're not good at a game, you're good at other stuff, right? Like, I don't waste my time

trying to get good at a video game. Okay. I don't hurt it. You have 6,000 hours. Yeah, but I'm trying to get good. I could waste more hours trying to get good. But I intentionally

trying. Anyway, let's move on. Well, speaking of rabbits, Rabbit, the company. What happened? Where was the rabbits before? When were we saying? The Rabbits game with the White,

the Ravens? The Rabbit, that's Nintendo. Well, Raymond, Raymond is not Nintendo, but the Rabbits. The Rabbids X Mario collab is Nintendo. Okay. I played that one.

Anyways, there was a recent article from Jason England at Tom's Guide that had some interesting news about the company we all know and love Rabbit that we talk about so nicely all the time. If you don't know about them, they're the people who made that R1 AI box. That's most well known for being orange and being able to do almost nothing. But this all started from an interview with Jesse Liu from Tom's Guide, where he was coming on to announce that

Rabbit OS2 is coming out soon, and he continued to tease a new device, which, first of all, two things about that interview, or the article about that interview. Jason at Tom's guy is saying Rabbit OS2 seems rather good now, which seems kind of interesting because it wasn't before. That's what I've been seeing on the internet as well, yeah. Okay, well, he also said the review is coming soon, but I can't find the review anywhere, probably because of something we're going to talk about later. But Jesse also kept teasing that the Gen 2 device is going to be a 3-1.

What does that mean? It means shampoo conditioner and violence, bro. Come on, man. Which, by the way, are always bad. Yeah, don't use three and one. Never use two and one, three and one. That's a good point. Don't do that.

First of all, what are the three devices and what is the one thing it's in? Second of all, we make fun of everything that is like X in one in tech in life general because they're usually terrible. I love feeling the keyboard keys on my tablet. On the back of my tablet. Three in one, one, orange, two, square.

Three, A, three and AI. It's just the same thing, but R2. Yeah, yeah. But anyway, so after he released that interview, they received multiple tips alleging that Rabbit has a history of either paying late or failing to pay

some of their employees or contractors, and a number of employees have been on strike since October. Hell yeah. So this is what the report says. This is obviously still all alleged. We will link the article to both of these in the show notes,

if you would like to read all of it. there is a hilarious graph of the timeline of how often people didn't get paid, which is basically just a straight line of people not getting paid. To be clear, people not getting paid is not hilarious. Yeah, yeah, the graph is very funny because it's barely a graph. It's just a list. Just every month, workers not paid. So from January to June, 2025, payments to some contractors' employees were at minimum

each month, eight days late, some months being 37. days late. That's, is that late? Is 37 days late? That's another month. That's just crazy. I'd love to get a double check. I'd love to get a double check.

When the check before just never came. And then July, August, and September, there were contractors and employees who hadn't been played at all. Some of the employees threatened to go to the press and were met with pleas not to. Those responses, the, or rabbits' response to the employees were along the lines of payments would be conditional based on additional investment coming from. to the company at the end of October. What?

You might get paid if we make more money. And it's not even if we make more money. If we get more investment. Yeah. I feel like that should be immediate red flag as employee. Three of the employees have been on strikes since the start of October, which three does not sound like a lot. It's not.

But Rabbit only has 26 employees. So that's a fair chunk of 26 isn't that much either. And if I can go on a side rant, Ellis will love this. this. I was trying to figure out how many employees Rabbit had. So I typed in Google. How many employees does Rabbit AI have? What happened? The Google AI overview said the Rabbit R1 company has 26 employees and that actually goes into a whole thing about how they're not getting paid right after that because of the most recent article. But I was like 26. That sounds totally reasonable. But I just want to find the exact quote that they got that from. So the links weren't

really helping me on the side. And then I went into the AI. mode and said, can I see the exact quote you got this 26 number from? And I said, well, it's not an exact quote. In fact, we're just basing this all on an estimation of other information. Some websites say 5 to 10, some say 25 to 50. But then I was clicking the sources for that. It was bringing me to other rabbit like companies basing the number off of the wrong thing. Only for me to then read the rest of the original article I was reading. And Rabbit themselves are quoted and they're saying 26 employees. So it was right. There was an exact quote. AI overview just couldn't find the quote that it was right about. It's the second worst product

ever made. Well, on their LinkedIn, it says 2 to 10. Their LinkedIn says 2 to 10, which is what I was about to write. But then in the Tom's Guide quote, they said it's three employees who are currently on strike and we have 26 total employees. Maybe it's 2 to 10 and then they have contractors. Possibly. I mean, they definitely, there's contractors that are not paying. So that could be right. That's true. Just to clarify. I did not mean the Rabbit R1 is the second worst product ever made.

I meant Google AI overviews. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Is the first worst product, the human AI pin? No, it's LG's WebOS 25. It's just insane that they did that to us. Dang. Rabbit has responded to this. They claims they were ready to sell units in India,

but due to regulations that got paused, which caused a money flow issue. Jesse claims that they've signed a term for a next round of, of investing and we'll get everyone paid for sure. Cool. Take that as you will. But with all of this going on, how can you look at Rabbit in a positive light at all? I mean, this is the company that like their founding was like this weird NFT pivot. Do you remember that? Vaguely. The CoffeeZillow videos on all of this were like crazy based on like the NFT stuff and then how like some of the AI things

it was doing was like if you asked to play its favorite song you would just play the Beatles every time it wasn't even really doing anything it was just like oh yeah the Beatles and then their whole generative UI thing was completely false and like their weird

tech demo live event thing was like totally staged and like I don't know man this yeah so it's one of those things where they're launching Rabbit OS2 and they're saying a new product's coming out next year sounds like they're trying to get funding to pay those employees Yeah, it sounds like they're trying to pay their employees and maybe stay alive.

I mean, they stayed alive longer than humane. Congrats. They ain't making printers. At least they're not in the HP dungeon. Yeah, true. None of this makes me say I want to give them another chance with the OS2. But we got to do the same thing we did a few weeks ago. We got to find something nice to say.

I'd still like the orange. I think the rabbit has amazing packaging. The little, like, Game Boy case kind of thing. Yeah, that clear plastic. Scrashes very easily, though. Yeah, but it's great packaging. So we said something nice. You can't be mad.

Yeah. Everyone calls us TechDumers. I think it's totally reasonable to watch a company hype something up, completely fail to deliver, and lose trust in that company. I think that's fair. Yeah, yeah, especially when it's over and over and over, you know. Yeah, fold me once. So, yeah, let us know if you're using Rabbit OS2.

Can't get pulled again. And if there's more than 26 people saying that, I'll know one of them wasn't working for the directing. All right. Well, that's depressing. I guess we'll... Speaking of depressing. Yeah.

Ad break. No, trivia. Trivia's not depressing. Trivia's like a fun part of it. My score is dwindling and that's depressing. Compared to mine. Throughout American history, we have had so many visionaries make immense profits off of their brilliant ideas.

We had Steve Jobs. and Bill Gates believe that the personal computer could change the American home. We had Sergei Bryn and Larry Page believed that a search tool was what Americans needed and the world needed to find what the information

that they needed on the web. Jimmy Wales. Who's Jimmy Wales? The Wikipedia guy. Oh, we had Jimmy Wales, you know. And we had Gabe Newell who realized that knives actually make a better casino

than product. True. And with his billion, Gabe Newell just received shipment of his new 360-foot megayot. This thing has... And I got, from reading, it has a hospital on board. It has a basketball court on board. It has 15 gaming PCs, which feels like not that many.

Is that how many fit on a basketball court? It has a hot tub. That's how many fit near the hot tub. But guys, what is the name of a... this yacht and this is a multiple choice questions. Let's get our office. Is this from his yacht brand? Because he's now the CEO of a yacht brand. You're kidding. I'm not

kidding you. This is like recent news from a couple months ago. Jesus. He like has a yacht company now. This guy owns a yacht company and can't buy Steam.com. Who owns Steam.com? No one. Still. Is it like a Satoshi Nakamoto sort of situation?

I have no idea. Yeah, maybe. Steam.com used to be never mind. I would sell this to Valve for like $1 billion. A. A. Alex. A. L-Y-X.

Named that for the half-life character. B. Leviathan, because it's really, really big. C. The USS Shinji Ikaru. And I had to look this up. Shinji Ikaru is a neon genesis Evangelian character.

I hope I said all any of that right. Or D. Zero Day. Named after the kind of exploit. Why do we do the music? Because otherwise I'm just going to be reading a list. Yeah, fair. I like the music, to be clear.

Okay. We're going to talk about Gemini 3 and the other stuff Google did after this. So, don't go away. Bye. No, not by. We'll be right back. We'll be right back. Sorry. We'll be right back.

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You can post your job for free at LinkedIn.com slash mkbhd. That's LinkedIn.com slash mkbhd to post your job for free. Terms and conditions apply. Oh, hey, welcome to gift wrapping. Whoa. Soie Saldana. Hey, can you wrap these, please? Wow, iPhone 17s.

You splurged. At Team Mobile, you can get four iPhone 17s on them. It's the perfect gift for everyone. I'm the worst. I only got my mama robe. Well, it's better than socks. So I have to trade in my old phone, right? No, at Team Mobile, there's no trade-ins needed when you switch.

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With 24 monthly bill credits and four eligible portends on Estangles for well-qualified customers, photo pay plus taxes, fees, and $35 device connection chart credits, and imbalance do if you pay off earlier. Contact us, finance agreement, $256 gigabytes, $830 required. Visit T-Mobile.com. Welcome back. We were blessed by Google this week

for dropping a big announcement on a Tuesday. Google! Thank you to Sundar for dropping this on a Tuesday. Anyway, we got a big announcement. It's Gemini 3. So previously we were on Gemini 2.5, and it was kind of fallen behind a little bit.

Opening I had released GPT5, which was a little bit of a disappointment. Recently, they had GPT 5.1. We had CloudSonnet 4.5. Now Google has released Gemini 3. Google is calling it its most intelligent and factually accurate AI system yet that's quite important

they call it the strongest model in the world for multi-modality and reasoning supposed to be much better at nuance they talked about this a lot so like trying to actually understand what you mean instead of just what you say that was a big focus for them another big thing about Gemini 3

is it's supposed to be much less sycophantic and much more objective so it's supposed to be a lot more to the point when it gives you answers it's not going to be like you're absolutely right you're the most beautiful person in the world something like that so it's what i want i mean you could probably ask it to do that if but by default it's going to be just a lot more straight to the point more objective it's also much better at math and science um and yeah these updates just sound like it went from third to fourth grade yeah yeah like each one of these just like we're going through elementary school now yeah yeah Really good at math. Yeah.

I listened to an interview with Demis Hasavas, who is the CEO of Google DeepMind. And a few years ago, he did this interview, and he said, we are five to ten years away from AGI. And then in this interview, he said, we're five to ten years away from AGI. And that was like... You want to guess what he'll say in five to ten years? I was going to say. Pretty sure he said that three years ago. So a big feature of Gemini III is that it's supposed to create dynamic interfaces.

So if you ask what is the three body problem in Google search and it uses the AI mode, it's supposed to explain it and then also create an interactive animation that you can play with to actually show you how it works. And that's a really big feature of this model that they're really pushing is kind of the learning capabilities, the ability to be able to move through things that you're trying to learn. with this platform. And it didn't work for me. So I tried pretty much every single exact prompts that they had given it in the ads that they put out and none of them worked. On one of them I asked for a visualization

of the three-body problem, just like it had asked, or just like they'd put in the video. And it described what a visualization might look like. And then I said, can you just make the visualization? And it said, I don't have the ability to make interactive visualization. visualizations, and I'm definitely on Gemma.

This is just on like the Google.com AI mode. AI mode, but you have to change the drop down to the one that includes like graphical things. There's like the default one, which is just like regular problem solving, and then they have a special one that will like whip up UIs and stuff. Yeah. How do you get to that? Me and they were trying to figure this out earlier because on my account is just a drop

down and it is, it's nowhere to be found. On mine, it does not show at all. Maybe it's like rolling out. It's possible that this is rolling out slowly. But yeah, it seems like Google is kind of starting to try to skew Gemini towards being like a tool that you can use to learn, a tool that you can use to build UIs. And as part of that, they released Google anti-gravity. And this is a dedicated app that you can download. It's kind of Google's response to cursor.

Cursor was this AI coding app that has blown up in the last year, gotten very, very popular. most companies are using it as an IDE You may remember it from trivia extravaganza where Ellis looked at all of the startups that were founded by YC and it was like the cursor of blank the blank, the cursor of blank like those companies, that's what cursor was from.

Yeah, and cursor costs $20 a month for the pro version, Pro Plus is 60 and Ultra is 200. So Google's anti-gravity is free which is pretty cool. For now. For now. and it's pretty good Adam and I both used it last night

I used it to create so whenever there's a new model that comes out that talks about its vibe coding capabilities I just have it build my Pina Colocator app which is like where to find the best Pina Colada near you and it honestly did a pretty decent job

it did a pretty decent job it looked like a template you would find on the website building whether or not it was functional was different but like at least the front facing UI of it all was like, okay, I could see this. Yeah, but I had made Gemini 2.5 build Pinnacle Locator,

and it looked horrible. So this is definitely a big improvement in the Pina-Colada finding capabilities. If you want to use that as a benchmark. I was just going to say, this is the benchmark that all the I companies should be using. Yeah, but the kind of cool thing about Google Antigravity

is that it's got different modes depending on how forward with the agents you want to be. So there's a mode where it's mostly U-Coding, but then you can just like talk to it. There's one where you tell it what you want it to do, but then it creates a checklist and it asks you across every step if you liked that or if you want to modify it. And then there's another mode where it just basically does everything in one shot. And so it is an IDE, but based on the interview that I heard with Demis, it's more that it's like a development

tool that they built an IDE around as opposed to an IDE with AI features. So it's agent first. So, I mean, it's pretty cool And I think that a lot of the industry is now going to move over from Cursor Which is kind of bad for Cursor Famously Google bought WindSurf Which was like one of the biggest acquisitions ever And that was also, I believe

Like an AI coding environment I'm really interested in this In particular because Cursor has been such a game changer for the developers I know Yeah And they're working in like very big code bases So like cursor seems to be able to understand everything, you know? Yeah. I obviously haven't, like when we mess around with these things,

we don't, we're not connecting to some like big corporate database, you know? Yeah. So I'm not sure how it's going to function in those situations. I would imagine fine. Yeah. But I don't know. We haven't been able to test it. I just like opened up my personal website and had to do a couple things just to see if it would get the context of it. So like to your point earlier where you were saying that they were trying to make it more nuanced. One of the things I did was in my personal a website, I basically just have a list of the places that I've worked, right? So I have, it's my resume. So I have Wayform as one of them, like Wayform Podcasts. And I told it in the IDEe. I didn't do this in Google Gemini or anything like that. I was just like put a floating emoji of a microphone

next to Wayform podcasts, which coding a floating emoji that will like animate a little bit, not super difficult, but the context of like understanding the word Wayform podcast, finding where it is on the page, putting this right next to that in particular. I was wondering if that would work, if that would, like, trip it up at all. And it did it, like, perfectly fine, which was, like, pretty interesting. So how did you do that? Did you give it a screenshot of your website? No, I opened up my project, because I have my React's code just like, my website is built in React and, I don't even know, something, whatever. It's built in React. So I have that folder on my computer in my computer. So I just opened it up on an IDE. It looked through everything

and I was able to like, yeah, figure it out. Yeah. One thing that I did find interesting, though, was this morning, I was trying to, I've been, like, having on my to-do list and my website forever that I want to add a second page, right? You have a second page? For what? Games. I know. So, I did that this morning.

Oh, you did? I wanted to add a second page because I didn't have a second page at first. It was just a static website because that's the easiest thing to host in AWS, like, whatever. So I told it to use React Router to make. make a second page, which is, that's just how you, like, navigate pages and react, whatever. And it completely just built out a second page for me. No problem. And I was like, okay, that's, that's fine. That's cool. Like, I'm glad it did that relatively quickly. And then I was like, okay, now make a snake game in that page. And it made a snake game. So if you go to my website and

you look at that snake game, there's a snake game. And I put... Adamalina.com. What? Atamalina.com. Yes. Yes. Atomelan.com. But I also put Marquez's face as the little thing that you have to eat if you play the snake game. But I'll just, if anyone wants to see, please just go to the video, not my website, because I pay per click for people that go there. Also,

unless I'm using the wrong keys, oh, it's A-S-D. And it does kind of break. If you go left and then right, it immediately kills you. I thought that's what just Snake did. Oh, maybe it does. Because you're on top of yourself. Nothing's popping up, though. I'm just spinning around. Oh, wait, I got a score, and I don't

even know how I got it. Okay. Okay. One thing that I found very funny about Google Antigravity is you have to obviously give it a lot of permissions because it has to be able to control parts of your computer. Everything. Everything. But when you install it and then it brings up the website where it's like, things for installing Google Intigravity, you've got successfully authenticated. It has a docs link and then it has a Twitter link and it calls it, it says Twitter. It doesn't call it X, which I find, as it should, quite funny. Anyway, something about Gemini 3 that I was thinking about that feels a bit concerning is like, this is very cool that you can do

these generative UIs, right? Like, you're supposed to be able to do these generated, um, interactive tools that helps you understand math and science. You can ask it about mortgages and it creates like charts that kind of like show you what things would cost and all this stuff, but this is all happening on Google.com, right? Like a number of years ago, Google got in a lot of trouble with the European Union. for scraping websites and putting the little text answers on the side of google.com and they got in trouble because they weren't guiding people

to the websites and we've talked about this before if people are not getting guided to the websites those website owners are not making money if those website owners do not make money then google does not have information to scrape from so if you keep people on google.com and you're just you ask any question and it just creates an interactive thing for you on google dot com, it kind of feels like Google is trying to make Gemini and Google.com effectively the same thing

where you can just do everything in one little window. And I see where the value in that is, obviously. But then no websites are going to get any traffic. So I don't know, the far-reaching elements of this, if this is like

very successful, make it feel like SEO is just officially cooked. Well, it's a new SEO. now your SEO has to get picked up by yeah but then you're not getting paid you get nothing you get nothing so what's even the benefit yeah i don't know i foresee a future in which there is a much tighter integration of content creator slash like writer relationships with their audience and that's going to be the way people make money it's not going to be the the banner ad version of the internet

that we have had for a very long time and has been dying a pretty quick death but either way that is It is pretty weird. There have been pretty interesting demos that people have been putting all over the internet. Someone asked for a interactive 3D Lego builder and it made it for them like instantaneously, which is pretty cool.

I can't get any of this stuff to work and it's very frustrating. I think you're using the wrong mode. I don't know, man. You need that drop down. I've been trying. Either way, people are pretty excited about it which is a big shift

from how people were feeling about GPT5, which was a pretty big letdown to a lot of people. so it's uh the the races are heating up forever and always and uh now we're here adam made a pretty sick game this morning or you used the example that oh yeah so when david and i were trying to test this out we were trying to figure out why i was showing up on my account not on his yeah one of the prompts was that someone on x had posted like make me a dino game that has me jumping over the latest news stories from today and then it's basically like you know

when Chrome has no internet and you can just play the dino game that jumps over things and gets a high score. It's that, but every obstacle that comes your way is just a new story. But the first news story, because it did it for me, like it spun it up. I had a little game to play. The first new story was such a long headline that there was no way to win. It was just like, you would jump and it would just jump high enough. You would fall immediately into the first block and just like crash out. Yeah, it was very funny. So I don't know, mess around with it. See what you, see what dumb games you can make. And anyway, that was the big news of the week. So I think that we are going to take it to trivia

before we do our second ad break trivia dude trivia dude the standard way to measure reverb time is called RT60 which is the amount of time the reverb tail takes to drop 60 decibels wait why are you asking a question about reverb

because the shirt that I'm currently wearing and that Andrew is also wearing is called reverb the waveform reverb I thought you're going to put the reverb oh yeah reverb Please write on your whiteboards The correct abbreviation for decibels

Oh, okay The correct abbreviation I got it Okay, if you say so This is definitely a trick question Question, question, question Alone You got it

Alone alone alone anyway we'll be right back we'll be right back we'll be right back with wealthfront

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all right welcome back we're beginning this third segment with a story because adam and i ran into each other on our morning commutes and uh we we got on the path train we left new york city we got to new Jersey and we were waiting at the bus stop and New Jersey transit buses have an app that the Verge famously said is a bad app, but I think is a good app, Nelai. Damn. It's a good app. It's okay. It's for a public transit app, it's amazing. Okay. So let's, anyway, we open the New Jersey transit app and try to activate our tickets and lo and behold, we cannot connect to the server. And I'm like, what's going on? And then Adam goes, oh, it must be the cloud flare thing. And I go, what cloud flare thing? And I go, what cloud flare thing?

thing. And that's how I found out. And then we had the really funny joke of like, how do we explain to the bus driver that neither of us have cash, but we need to get to work and the app doesn't work? Like, do you go up to the bus driver and say, so do you know what Cloudflare is? So Cloudflare, you basically got EMPed. Basically, every, I forget what day was this Tuesday? Yeah. Early this week. This is yesterday. yesterday at the time of recording i was trying to find something at ikea because alex is going to it the ikea website was down yeah like a lot of the internet was down and i feel

like every time one of these moments happen everyone collectively realizes how much power we give these like server companies basically that keep the infrastructure of the whole internet up didn't you say that down didn't you say down detector was down even down detector was down is down whatever you're about to search for us probably down that's it yeah they don't need to be up during that? Yeah, no. But it's just like one of those moments that everyone, like when AWS goes down, I think that happened like two weeks ago and everyone's like, damn, like there's a lot of services that run on AWS. People like legit can't use their jobs. Yeah, it feels like large portions of the internet are just falling apart like every few months now. Yeah. But

brings me to my discussion point because Jono sent me a tweet that he found this morning from Privates Talk Y on X that he was like, this might be a good discussion on waveform. And I clicked it and I was like huh okay yeah so here's the question you have to pick one do you want unlimited cloud storage but you can only use cloud services or unlimited local storage but everything is local so when you say everything is local you mean you have to download every youtube video you want to watch every youtube video every service you use it has to be local so spotify you have to download the songs first you have to download a hundred tweets at a time. Isn't that what Twitter already kind of

does? Kind of. But yeah. That's I would say... Well, no, you would have to have the entirety of Twitter on your phone. It's really hard to... But you have unlimited storage. Yeah, yeah. It's hard to imagine this as a regular website browsing kind of thing

in terms of like YouTube, Twitter and stuff like that. As it just like everything that I save, would I rather have it all local or all cloud-based? I still think that's a fair question because would I rather have it all local where I'm individually transferring things

between all my different devices, which can be a pain in the neck, or would I rather all my devices be able to connect to the same cloud thing, but then we have an internet issue. Even that's a hard question. I think if it was in terms of

live your entire life on the internet, we'd have to start imagining some things that don't really exist for things like YouTube. I mean, unless my phone just had 1 billion terabytes of just literally every single thing in the world could I still use like

like how different is the world in this fantasy like can I use I message or is it like every time I want to sync my I message across devices I need to like put all of my text on a thumb drive and like move them over that's it dude even if it's just stuff you're saving locally like if I took some photos now every time I want to send them to the other families that I was with, I have to bring

them an SST and like plug it into their computer. What's the IP over avian? Oh yeah, over avian care. Yeah. Okay, I'm going to bring this back into territory that I'm intimately familiar with. Do you guys use Obsidian? No.

No. No taking app. No one. Okay. Cool, cool, so you knew the answer to that question. I know. I just said it up. I know. So, the way Obsidian sync works is the files themselves are local. They're in a folder on like your hard drive somewhere. And what you do is you can either set this up yourself or pay Obsidian $5 a month, which is how they make money,

to keep that folder in sync across all of your devices. If you don't want to pay them, you could just set it up yourself. So that's like an option. So in this world, in this scenario, I'm envisioning basically everything works like that. Like you have a hard drive somewhere at home that has unlimited folders. So to your I message question, you would have to then like every time you pull out your phone,

you've got to like pull down to refresh and have it sync across the servers, you know? And then I would get all my local files on all of my devices. So that's the obvious answer. It's not cloud versus, it's not cloud versus local. It's would you rather have access to the world's like cloud network, cloud back end? Or would you rather have to set up everything yourself, PewDiePie style, so to speak? Hmm. I have thought about this so many times, Adam.

Now that I understand the true paradigm of what you're presenting here, I really have a lot to say. Because in a perfect world, I would love to have everything local. It's the reason I don't have an eight-sleep mattress. Well, there's a lot of reasons. I don't have an eight-slee mattress, but that's up there. If I could be confident that I was secure, that all my stuff was, like, encrypted properly

and no one could break into my home networks or certain, you know, then... Well, that's the benefit of, like, the cloud. Yeah. I think the security is what keeps me from, like, going full, quote-unquote, off-grid. And I know it's, like, the most ridiculous use of off-grid ever. But, you know, like, I think I will be bound to the cloud flares, to the Google drives. Actually, Google Drive is not secure at all.

Don't keep safe. It's secure because it's impossible to download anything from it. So, no one's going to take your stuff anyways. But think about this. Like, if you had to have everything local, you, if anything was on your computer, you couldn't access it on your phone and vice versa. No, no, not local. Like, like, I think what Adam's actually asking is, like, would it, would you rat, like, assuming a world where there was no black and white, where either, like, you did not have access to any internet backbone stuff other than DNS. Like, because I think in Adam's definition of local, you're allowed to set up a server.

you know what I mean where you create your own cloud storage and have infinite storage in that world but you have to deal with it then yeah but then you have to be the one that's like actively managing it it's like the it's almost like asking like it's not like asking like would you rather eat vegetables

or not eat vegetables it's like would you rather only eat vegetables that you grow yourself or only eat vegetables that you get from the store which I guess for most people they've already made that choice but it's the same way with file storage like most people do not host a single thing themselves. And as someone who's like

tried to host things themselves in their apartment, like got a big fancy router that I can hold multiple networks on and like, dude, that that shit fucking sucks. It's a lot of work. It's definitely a lot of work. I know, but the idea of being free see, I told you, I thought a lot

about this. Especially if you have unlimited storage. In this, in this perfect world of unlimited storage, sounds like locals, the obvious answer with the extra work. I just thought that it would, it was an interesting question because like then my mind went to like what Ellis was saying like okay then there's the privacy the security the ease of use the part of the big talk about all this AI stuff is that it's all

done on a server somewhere you don't have to worry about it like do so does that mean I need to download these models and run it myself on my own server if I want to use AI like don't use it well don't that's a whole other thing that we should talk we should do a bonus episode on that but Andrew like one of your favorite products of the last 12 months that I've heard you bring up a lot is the picture frame the smart picture frame like would you get as much enjoyment out of that picture frame if you had to manage that server yourself. I guess, sure, like the picture frames server. The way the picture frame works is it's pulling pictures off of my phone. Right, but if you had to, if you, like, if you had a network like at your house, a router, and it was up to you entirely to vibe

code all of the systems. Oh, then we're talking in like a, yeah, this world is crazy then. So when you want to go watch TV or I guess stream things you have to have you're setting up no I don't think there's a you it's a Plex server you have to get a Plex server

exactly okay yeah that's a ton of extra work it is I think you just don't get to do anything no people people do this this is why you need to be on Twitter man no this is not why I need to be on Twitter Pew did you didn't PewDiePie just I cannot

believe how many times I brought up Pewtie this episode, but did this was like a whole thing. It's like PewDiePie pie like embarked on this as like a side quest and and instantly got hacked. Nice. Yeah, I don't know. You don't even seem interested by the concept. I think I'm more confused by the concept. Okay. If that makes sense. I'd probably just pick cloud then. You like you to you like I mean cloud is the obvious choice here right like I mean what we're talking about. The one you

don't want to make, but it's the easy... Yeah, there are obvious downsides. For example, like, a random company, like, cloud flare could have a bug, and all of a sudden you lose access to, like, half of your digital life. You also, like, can never really know how secure your stuff is, because you just have to trust these companies that time and time again actually, like, violate your trust. You have to pay them money, which sucks. I hate paying people money.

I mean, the same thing's true. The other thing, you could have a house fire, and now you've lost... That's true. Literally every piece of everything that you have. You could have a weird electrical surge. You could have somebody spill water on something. Yeah. Yeah.

On the other hand. This is one of those questions that has no answer, and everyone on Facebook just yells at each other. On the other hand, if you wanted to, like, edit a video, you'd have to, like, stream the footage, right? If you were all online, you'd have to edit the video online. And then if the internet isn't fast enough I guess, yeah, like you're streaming it from

whatever server you've uploaded it to. In this metaphor, you plug in the memory card and it uploads to the cloud. And then, but then to edit a video locally, you have to like stream it. Yeah. Let's remove ourselves even further from the reality we live in.

I think the question that is most interesting here is, would you rather everything be Chromebook? Like, there's no processing, no storage, nothing gets done on your end. You're effectively using a terminal at this point, right? No. Or everything, the RTX 5090 super chud gaming PC. Gaming PC.

Because sometimes I'm in a coffee shop and either they don't have internet or the internet's bad. And I want to edit video. But then... But then... Where are you putting your video? On my unlimited local storage. For you to watch by yourself? No.

I don't... Yeah, maybe this is time. This is hard. because please come home. Dad. Wait, you're right. Can you not be a YouTuber if you have a limited local storage?

The way that I was... Do you just build your own YouTube? No, no. Local YouTube. The way that I was thinking about this was the infrastructure, like all these companies still exist. Like the infrastructure is still there.

But you can only access the things by having it local. So everyone gets everything else, but my goddamn frame, I have to figure out by myself. Well, like YouTube or Spotify, let's say. Like you're heading out for the day. And it's like, I'm not going to be home all day, but I want to listen to music. I have to

like download everything in order to listen to it. Like, it's only available on local. We live that life like 15 years ago. Yeah, everything was great. It was. Everything was better. Okay, so here we go. We've landed on an answer. Just take us back 20 years. If you just wanted to say iPods are sick, we could have just said that. It's a really interesting point that I think a lot about because I do feel like we are increasingly entering an era and you choose my words very carefully here

give me a sec so I'm leaving these pauses in I think we are increasingly entering an era that resembles feudalism where we are nothing but serfs to the cloud flares and the Amazon's

and whatever Larry Ellison's nonsense is called and isn't that already it's techno feudalism yeah all right can we please go to trivia guys trivia I wish I had like a sad version of

the trivia music right now this is interesting guys turns out you don't actually need Marquez Brownlee the numbers will show that later after this episode there's that we do actually it turns out you don't actually need to be a techno

feudalist to make a billion dollars all you need to do is convince children across the world to gamble on knives. Gabe Newell did that and bought a 360-foot yacht. I need you to tell me which of these

is the actual name of his Gynormo boat. Also about a yacht company, to be clear. Do we confirm that? Yes. Okay. What a guy, man. Are you ready?

He loves a C. A. Alex. A-L-Y-X like the Half-Life character. That's not in Half-L-L-L-E-L-E-Rie. B, Leviathan, which is just a word that means Gynormo.

C. The USS Shinji Icaru from the neon genesis Evangelian protagonist I think maybe he's an antagonist Maybe it's a she I don't know Or D Zero Day referring to the kind of exploit I put B

because I thought C was a trick question B is the correct answer It's called the Leviathan That's such a boring name Gabe Newell would, I mean, I don't actually know anything about this guy. I shouldn't seem kind of funny. But also, USS is reserved for U.S. Navy vessels. Civilian vessels cannot have the USS thing.

David, congratulations on scoring. Thank God. Your eighth point. I needed this. Oh, it's getting tight. It is. What are you at? I'm 10, I think.

Yeah, so you're still two points ahead. But it might, that might change because my boy, Adam, has got some trivia for you right here. Abbreviate decibles, please. What is it? What do you think? And I, we are going to be very pedantic on this one. As pedantic as the 6-7 part of my trivia?

Yeah, actually. Really? So I have to say this out loud? Well, okay, I'm not going to be that pedantic. We have to say it out loud for audio listeners. anyway. Okay. All right. What do you guys got? I wrote lowercase D, capital B. Yes. All right. I don't know if I'll get marks off for this. I wrote lowercase D capital B with a period after it. I'll get a period. I don't know why I thought period. That's not as

fanatic as I thought. Yeah, no. The lower case and uppercase was really what we're looking for here. Do you know why that is? Because Bells is the unit and a Desi Bell is a 10th of a bell or 10 bells. I guess a deca bell would be 10 bells. Wait. A bell is a unit of sound? Yeah, is it actually like a bell? It's a unit of energy. So it has nothing to do with bells. It's not even spells. This is why no one cares

about audio. That's true. It is named after Alexander Graham Bell. Founding Father. Well, I think that's been it for this week. Thank you for tuning in. Make sure that you like, subscribe and I don't know. Tell us he's a big dumb idiot. Yeah, do that on

whatever platform you like using. Thanks for watching. Thanks for listening. We'll be back to next week. Marquez will finally be back from being hot in Portugal, and hopefully we'll have more news for you. Is it even hot there right now? I don't think it doesn't look hot in all the videos.

It looks kind of cool, actually. Not like, you know, the other kind of hot. The kind that it's like totally normal to call your boss. If you're running on a beach. Andrew, save us. And you're throwing a frisbee. Wait for us, Bruce by Adam and Lina and Lus River. We're partner with the Vox Media Podcast Network.

Honestly, produced is doing a lot of work there. And our introprudder music is created by Vainzill. Bingo. Let's go. Bro, I exercised once. End sentence. I've been so, I've been so tired. Support for this show.

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