I've been probed 69 times now. Nice.
**Full Article Based on Provided Text**
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### **Introduction**
In this article, we dive into the world of tech, personal life, and career experiences through a conversation with Paul from *Paul's Hardware*. The discussion covers a wide range of topics, including his journey in YouTube, challenges in data management, and reflections on past and future projects. This piece is based entirely on the provided transcription, ensuring no summarization or condensation of content.
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### **New Products and Channel Updates**
Paul shares exciting updates about his channel and new products:
- **New Designs:** He mentions his latest 8-bit inspired designs for shirts, tech briefs, and boxer briefs. These products are inspired by elements like CPUs, cases, and motherboards.
- **Graphic Design Refresh:** Paul is planning a refresh of the channel's graphic design to keep it fresh and engaging.
- **Future Plans:** He hints at potential collaborations with Joe from *Ironside PC* for build compilations or time-lapse montages.
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### **Hiro and Nori Update**
Paul provides an update on his furry companions:
- **Nori:** The family dog is doing well, though she recently visited the vet due to a UTI. Paul emphasizes the importance of addressing health issues promptly.
- **Hiro:** At 13 years old, this large犬 is in his twilight years. Despite challenges with pain and mobility, he is now on chronic painkillers and is doing better.
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### **Family Life and Content Decisions**
Paul discusses his approach to balancing content creation and family life:
- **Hana's Privacy:** Paul’s daughter Hana is not frequently featured in videos due to privacy concerns. He prefers letting her appear occasionally rather than making it a regular part of the content.
- **Vlogs:** He admits that vlogs do not perform well on his channel, so he avoids focusing on them.
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### **Meeting His Wife**
Reflecting on how Paul met his wife Diana:
- **Newegg Connection:** Both worked at Newegg but in different warehouses. They crossed paths during a work lunch event at Hometown Buffet.
- **Ribs Incident:** Paul told Diana he makes great ribs and followed through by inviting her over to try them, leading to their relationship.
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### **Crt Monitors and Tech Reflections**
Paul discusses his thoughts on CRT monitors:
- **CRT Appeal:** He appreciates the nostalgic appeal of CRT monitors, especially for retro gaming.
- **Modern Alternatives:** While CRT monitors are not making a comeback, modern emulators can replicate the CRT look on higher-resolution screens.
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### **RMA Horror Stories**
Paul shares an anecdote about his worst RMA experience:
- **Rattlesnake Incident:** A customer returned a product with a live rattlesnake inside. The incident highlighted the challenges of dealing with irate customers and the importance of maintaining professionalism.
- **Customer Service Approach:** He emphasizes treating customer service representatives with respect, as they are not personally responsible for issues.
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### **Burnout in Content Creation**
Paul reflects on burnout:
- **Types of Burnout:** He experiences two types—lack of motivation and physical exhaustion from juggling multiple projects.
- **Workload Management:** Despite feeling overwhelmed, he finds the second type of burnout more challenging due to time constraints.
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### **Personal Reflections and Regrets**
Paul shares personal insights:
- **Regret Over Decisions:** He regrets not graduating from USC and making irresponsible decisions in his early 20s.
- **Life Advice:** He advises focusing on tasks like attending classes, emphasizing the importance of consistency and discipline.
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### **Future Projects and Plans**
Paul outlines his future plans:
- **Home Improvement:** Plans include skim-coating walls in his computer room and bedroom to improve aesthetics and functionality.
- **Backyard Makeover:** The backyard renovation has been delayed but remains a priority.
- **Chip Shortage Impact:** He expects the chip shortage to persist, with Ethereum’s transition to proof-of-stake being a key factor in 2023.
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### **Enthusiast PC Building Outlook**
Paul shares his outlook on enthusiast PC building:
- **Market Sustainability:** Despite challenges like rising costs and declining interest, he believes enthusiasts will keep the market alive.
- **Consumer Demand:** As long as there is demand for customizable systems, PC building will remain viable.
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### **Rtx 2080 Ti Upgrade Advice**
Darth Radon asks about upgrading his RTX 2080 Ti:
- **Upgrade Decision:** Paul advises against an upgrade, stating that the RTX 2080 Ti still performs well and any potential upgrade would be costly.
- **Future Plans:** Paul mentions plans to eventually upgrade his Arctic Panther build but has no specific timeline.
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### **Kyle and Live Streaming**
Paul discusses his relationship with Kyle:
- **Live Streams:** They continue to collaborate on charity streams, though regular live streaming on Paul’s channel is not currently planned.
- **Social Gatherings:** Despite the lack of regular streams, Paul and Kyle meet frequently for casual hangouts.
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### **Tech Comedy Special and Fun Questions**
Paul answers quirky questions:
- **Netflix Stand-Up Comedy Special:** He jokes about a tech-related stand-up special but humorously dismisses it as a low priority.
- **Robocop vs Terminator:** He opts for Terminator, praising its advanced AI over Robocop’s human weaknesses.
- **Alien Abduction:** He humorously denies any encounters with aliens or mysterious probing incidents.
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### **Purple nurple vs. Wet Willie**
Paul shares his opinion on these pranks:
- **Wet Willie Preference:** He finds the wet willie more tolerable than the painful purple nurple.
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### **Final Reflections and Closing Thoughts**
Paul reflects on his journey and future aspirations:
- **Content Creation Mission:** His mission remains to create tech videos that help viewers build their own systems, balancing technical expertise with a customer-centric approach.
- **Personal Growth:** He acknowledges past mistakes and focuses on continuous improvement in both personal and professional aspects.
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### **Conclusion**
This article captures the essence of Paul’s thoughts, experiences, and reflections as shared in his conversation. From tech insights to personal anecdotes, the discussion offers a glimpse into the mind of a passionate content creator navigating the ever-evolving world of technology and family life.
"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enhello everyone and welcome to the return of my monthly q a series perhaps the most anticipated video ever on my channel at least for some of you guys out there this is probing paul number 69. nice and of course this is a very special episode since it has been quite a while since i lasted my q a series that was all the way back in september actually september 14th so to get back into it i will be intimately probed today with 69 questions mostly from my fans taken from the last probing paul video in the comments section also some replies on twitter and a tweet that i posted earlier today and you know what i'm also going to be doing some probing myself or some probing of myself because i slipped in a few questions here and there that i just came up with that i thought you guys might want to hear the answer to so i think that pretty much covers it there was one other item to deal with here in the intro a frosty beverage seems like a good idea just to you know keep things loose so cheers thanks for joining me today and let's get into the 69th episode of probing paul excellent today's video is brought to you by corsair's new xenion monitor the 32qhd 165 featuring an ultra slim 32 inch 2560 by 1440 qhd screen with one millisecond moving picture response time a 165 hertz refresh rate fast ips panel quantum dot technology and 100 srgb 100 adobe rgb and 98 dci p3 color gamut coverage for more vivid natural colors hdr 400 support and convenient features like the integrated multi-mount point for cameras mics or lighting built into the stand round out the package so for more on corsair xenion monitor click the sponsor link in the video description did i say cheers cheers guys thanks for joining me today also since i'm answering 69 questions i'm going to try to make the answers pretty quick and pretty brief and pretty to the point and i did group them into categories so you can check the timestamps for that or the description has a list of every single question i'm answering today starting with what is your name my name is paul what is your quest i seek the grail can we acknowledge that you like monty python and think their work is funny and drop any future references in this video for the sake of the audience yes despite mike and clint going on about that i will i will acquiesce to this request that i made myself question four where did you get the idea to do a 69 question 69th episode uh the answer would be from people like sheska who posted that in the last video actually quite a few people requested it jessica was just the first i came across an important question five chicken nuggets or tendies chicken strips and what sauce would you use i'm okay with both although i would lean towards chicken strips because they tend to be higher quality meat and not like the chicken paste that the nuggets are often made out of and for sauce uh you know i'm partial to sweet and sour but i would have to say honey mustard i really like honey mustard do i still think that the solar and power wall installation was worth it i would say yes it was a big investment so i have to stand behind that and it's definitely been nice to have minimal to sometimes negative power bills although it is something that i need to come back to so perhaps more on that in 2022 bloody bucket with a procedural question do i check for questions for the next probing paul many times or just before the next probe honestly it's usually just before the next probe so it's usually about a month later occasionally i will look at the comment section before that though alex with a heavy hitter favorite filipino dish lumpia hands down 100 although don't get lumpier from chow king i don't know how but they somehow managed to massacre theirs and to follow up what's your least favorite filipino dish uh balut absolutely stands out uh chicken should be served as an egg or as a whole chicken not something in between although a very very very close runner-up is called bago bagaong it's a shrimp paste that's also really gross look we're already to question 10. did you stop probing paul number 68 on purpose uh yes yes absolutely i did probing paul is usually a video that i can put together fairly quickly in like a day day and a half but there's a lot of hype around the 69th episode and it was also the end of the year with q4 so there's lots of other stuff going on so i kept pushing it back and pushing it back but now it's back rested a double question so he gets the first question in the next category which is questions about tech is pre-applied thermal paste on a cpu cooler as good as aftermarket paste often it is not quite as good although it is within a very very slim margin most thermal pastes are only going to be a variance of maybe three four five degrees celsius from the worst to the best so the paste that comes pre-applied on a cooler is totally fine and it's only if you're being really really picky and you happen to have other paste around that you might want to swap it out for something else quackerjack asks should i upgrade to the rx 6500xt and he has like a two-way rx 550 setup right now with an r7 3700x i think the 6500 xt should only be for people who really need a new graphics card and don't have something to work with already you have two rx 550s that's not the best of course but it is functional so i would hold out maybe wait till later in the year and see if gpu prices become a little bit more favorable or like brian bound said down here in his reply go with something like a 6600 or above or the rtx 3050 even and you'll probably be happier about that decision further down the road thoughts on early steam deck reviews uh i do not have a steam deck i am not under nda i think it's pretty interesting some of the hardware design that they've done with it already seems to be a pretty cool device that might open up pc gaming to sort of a whole new category of pc gamers but i don't do a lot of mobile gaming which is why i didn't jump on that early what is one piece of tech you wish would make a comeback i want to say at least in desktop pcs five and a quarter inch bays uh for optical drives have gone the way of the dodo but five and a quarter inch base could be used for lots of stuff you could use it for like a multi-card reader or like a drive swap bay or something like that or even like a reservoir for a liquid cooling setup i understand why they're not around anymore because optical drives really aren't and they're a fairly large and bulky element to integrate into a chassis but that's one thing where i'm like oh it would be nice to have some space there to do an upgrade maddie oaks asks would you ever recommend a pre-built given the current market typically no because my thing is to build your own computer but but given the current market i would say absolutely yes if you want an rtx 3080 right now and there's costing 2 000 or more or you could buy a full pre-built system for about the same price by the pre-built system and not the standalone card jerry asks do you like nvidia's super or ti naming scheme and i appreciate jerry that you are old fashioned i'm old fashioned too i like ti i feel like it was a nice sort of unique to nvidia element to add to be like here's a gpu here's that gpu but a little bit better i feel like super is kind of the same thing it muddies and confuses the naming process and the product stack so i don't like super i do like ti and don't call it tai speaking of tai tai asks do you think we should upgrade to windows 11 from a gamer standpoint there's only one way i would say you absolutely should and that's if you're rocking a new intel 12th gen core processor with p cores and e-course then you want windows 11. if you're not windows 10 honestly is totally fine right now and if you're using it and it's stable and you're happy with it don't bother upgrading there is a free upgrade period that ends at some point i don't know exactly when but if you're thinking about upgrading you might want to do it before then so you get it for free rather than maybe having to pay for it shout out to ironside pc uh they're my friends over on twitter and they posted this i don't know is it a question i don't know if it's a question it's sort of an interesting thing about memory speed and comparing uh normalized human time to latency going from like a cpu clock cycle and cache access all the way up to ram access and stuff i wouldn't say i have a lot of charts like this that i often go back to and reference but i found this one to be interesting and that's why i included it in today's video how noticeable is the jump in resolution from 1080 to 1440 to 4k it's noticeable but what i'm telling you right now is anecdotal especially 1080 to 4k i definitely know this the pixels more with 1080 versus 4k where everything's a lot smoother so yeah that's one of the great benefits of pc gaming over consoles although consoles can do 4k now too i would say in terms of pc gaming your desktop like your core system is a big upgrade and then your monitor is a big upgrade separately and you should save up a decent amount of money there so you can invest in like a high refresh rate 1440 monitor or something in the 4k range it's definitely worth it if you're a pc gamer and you're currently on 1080. and the last tech question will i get into gpu and cryptocurrency mining as a side hustle extra channel content i had debated this in the past a little bit more now i would say no i'm not interested in it at all i am interested in cryptocurrency in the future and i would like to have like a rational discussion about cryptocurrency that's separate from gpu mining so if they do separate and ethereum moves to proof of stake and suddenly gpu mining goes away i think i'll be much more keen to rationally discuss the benefits of cryptocurrency and some of the positive aspects to it i just really really really don't think that gpu mining is an effective long-term mechanism for scarcity within a cryptocurrency incidentally this is also why i don't own tech stocks i wouldn't want my investment in gpu mining to cause me to veer my opinions on gpu mining in general just as i wouldn't want me owning stock in nvidia or amd or intel to affect my decisions or recommendations to you guys i don't do that so that i don't have that potential conflict of interest our next category is questions about my channel first one is from shelby tech what's up travis do you have any big plans in the works behind the scenes for the channel this year uh no okay maybe no is too stark of an answer yes i do have plans i have projects that i want to work on mostly i just want to maintain sanity that's my goal right now is maintaining sanity and sort of a nice stable level of well-being in my life mental health and everything and one way in the past that i've shot myself in the foot is just planning out too much stuff and making too many commitments so i'm trying to make as few commitments as possible other than you know regular videos on the channel so that i can you know not go crazy here's a nice follow-up neochaos x had asked in the last probing paul about an rgb backlit capable keycap and i just wanted to point out that yes i totally followed up on that it is right here it's available on the store it's 9.50 so that may or may not be worth it to you i know it's a lot for a keycap but you know we can't do huge runs of these so that was what we settled on but here's some of the pictures i took of it it's really nice i've actually got it in my keyboard right now and thanks neo ksx for your influence on that decision what's it like being a full-time youtuber what's your schedule like being a full-time youtuber is awesome in many different ways i think the thing i like the most about it is being independent being able to make my own decisions as for my schedule it often varies wildly but in my head i spend about four days in direct production work and then maybe one other day doing what i would call admin tasks following up on emails and business stuff and making plans for future videos and getting parts lined up and everything so it's fun uh obviously there are downsides to it as well i often feel like i there's never an end to the work that i do so winding down in the evening and sort of cutting off my work and making sure that i have some time for my own mental health is something that i try to do all the time what's up big al any more gaming live streams planned in the future uh not immediately kyle and i are still planning to do the awesome hardware charity live stream uh twice again this year i think one for summer and one for the winter as for streams directly to my youtube channel i have found that those don't often perform very well and in fact those often lead to a dip in the number of subscribers i get and while that by itself wouldn't make me say oh i'm never doing live streams again it has made me think about it in sort of a different context so what i've talked about doing although i don't have a date where i'm going to kick this off or anything is live streaming directly to my twitch channel or possibly doing a secondary youtube channel and then taking those live streams and having like stats on screen or something like that editing those down into a much shorter segment that i would still post on youtube or some sort of balance in between those but the awesome hardware charity streams will still be on the channel because those those i love and i don't care if people watch them or don't it's all about it's for the children what youtube genre would you want to cross over with pc tech there are so many out there but i think for me personally i want to do something with woodworking because it's something that i've dabbled with a little bit in the past it's something that i want to get better at and i feel like that's a good crossover with like the maker community but doing like diy you know wood frames either for shelving or like in a setup somewhere or to build a pc case out of i think that would be really really cool and uh hopefully i have the wherewithal to move forward with that idea edis golovich says teddy whitelisted my channel so the question is have you have you white listed the paul's hardware channel you don't have to i don't blame anyone who doesn't whitelist it but if you like my channel and you want to help me earn a little bit more money and keep things up and running uh that would be cool when did you realize you could make youtube videos for a living that would be around 2012 which was when i started my channel i guess i should clarify when i started my channel in 2012 it was heavily influenced by kyle who also started creating youtube videos on his personal channel at the same time and then a couple years later in 2014 it was absolutely kyle who came to me and said hey i think i'm gonna go independent with this that made me think like wait can i do that too at the time i had around 80 000 subscribers and then it built up from there which is really cool it became sustainable very quickly as well and then another big influence on that and something that allowed me to do it was my wife diana who also works full-time and said i can add you to my healthcare plan and support you in that way to allow you to sort of get this up and running and see how it plays out so big thank you to diana and kyle sean asks did you fully disassemble riptide yet and the answer is yes and actually this also goes back to around september this is riptide as it was this is riptide in the middle and then i have also now pulled out the freenas system that was down at the bottom i do still need to find a home for that corsair 1000d case it's sitting over there taking up way too much space and i'll post a link to the riptide playlist in the description if you guys are interested in more on that do i have any new products coming to the store thank you colton a very good question this shirt i'm wearing right now is one of my new 8-bit ish designs i have like a cpu and a case and a motherboard in storage and basically all the little elements of a pc i've just recently done a case fan as well those are currently being vectorized and i have a bunch of ways that i'm going to be integrating those into products shirts tech briefs of course i want to do some boxer briefs and i'll also be doing sort of a refresh of the graphic design of my channel so all that stuff coming soon i'm slow going with it but it's it's moving along it's coming have i ever built my own custom keyboard no no i have not it's one of those niche pc gaming things that has really blown up in popularity especially over the past couple years it kind of surprised me i was never thought that people were that into their keyboards it makes me glad because subjects like that just make me happy in general people getting really down into the nitty-gritty of how hardware works but it's just something that i i haven't really done myself i have lots of mechanical keyboards i have a good video on cleaning a mechanical keyboard but who knows maybe i'll do that soon my next 10 questions are questions about life which you know it's a good subject uh when are we going to hang out asks dr ian cuttress as well as brian dr cutress senor stro i would love to see you guys in person i really would i'm hoping to do a little bit more travel this year again you know there's just there's so many elements that go into it travel has obviously been difficult because of kovid my life has gotten pretty busy in some unique ways in the past uh two years and eight months or so since my daughter was born so that's obviously a concern as well so i have to give you the standard answer here soon soon soon i hope how do you manage large amounts of data such as storage and sorting it asks cyberx i don't have a very good solution for that i do have a good solution for my pictures my pictures are all in a folder and there's like a date for each folder with like the different event that happened and those are pretty well sorted stuff beyond that is not very well sorted i have a lot of external four terabyte hard drives that i've done a bunch of backups of stuff onto for my old pulse hardware content i do have my final renders like the the final completed videos stored on my freenas as well as in another backup location so i can get to those without too much difficulty but i feel like a long term large capacity data storage solution and sorting solution is always something that like i have in the back of my mind and i never actually move forward with so if that's you as well then don't feel bad at all but uh i how do i manage large amounts of data i get a new hard drive and i start dumping stuff onto that what's your best choice for a 55 foot tv under 1 000. uh a 55 foot tv is very very large that's very i don't know if you can get one for that cheap so obviously jake made a little bit of a typo here in the same vein as like spinal tap with their stonehenge monument that they had made but i will say my personal experience with tvs recently that i've enjoyed has been the lg cx series tv that i did a video on i was like a year or two ago now beyond that i can't really tell you too much because i don't have a broad range of experience with a lot of different types of tvs but i try to be honest with people about the stuff that i know and the stuff that i don't know quite as well and tvs i don't know quite as well but i do i do like the lg oled series what are your favorite backpacking and hiking areas in california so most of my backpacking has been done in northern california kind of in the range of yosemite and there's an area called ansel adams wilderness that's just north of mammoth mountain so that's where we would often start out from from a place called agnew meadows and we would hike up this valley and we get up to thousand island lake and right before you get there there's this like alpine meadow that you go through and there's like banner peak in the background with like snow topped mountains and it's just like the most beautiful place i've ever seen california is massive so there's tons of other places to hike as well but those are the ones that i've really enjoyed in my experience ansel adams wilderness or if you can get up into the yosemite high country that's awesome too chukara asks how are hiro and nori those are my two dogs nori is doing great she she might have a uti right now like she's she's been tinkling on her beds which we're trying to deal with she just went to the vet today hiro is doing well too but he is definitely in his twilight years he's estimated about 13 years old now and he is a 100 pound dog that's pretty old for a very large dog so he is now on chronic painkillers to deal with pain he's been having in his back hips and legs that has been helping he's a lot more mobile than he was before he started taking that medication so so he's doing better there but you know he is a very old dog and he's a very large dog so we're trying to keep him comfortable and happy as long as we can how is hana your daughter doing haven't seen her in any vlogs in a while that's totally intentional both not doing quite as many vlogs because again that's just content that i make that i know there's a group of people who enjoy but on a larger scale they don't tend to do very well and as for my daughter i'm fairly protective of her and i i just don't want to put her in videos all the time i don't mind if she pops up here and there because she's my daughter and she might be there but it's not something that i want to like actively go and be like oh how can i put hannah in this video too but she's gonna be three this year and she's absolutely awesome and wonderful and she's even like starting to get over the terrible twos phase two which i really appreciate are you an introvert or extrovert asks the reuben uh introvert absolutely introvert like i have a few slightly extroverted tendencies but uh introvert is the way to go for me do you want to be my friend asks maddie well matty i just talked about being an introvert so no but no i i would i would like to be your friend as long as it's like a small group environment with just like a few people i'm very very much over like large parties and group gatherings at this point in my life i'm just like no like make it quiet so we can have a conversation or just eat some good food or something like that that's what i want to do why is the default volume setting always 67 on a fresh windows install that's a good question sam it's actually something that i hadn't really noticed before i guess it's sort of a nice midpoint between having the volume loud enough to hear not having it maxed at 100 so it'll blast out the speakers emily asks what is something fun and different i can add to my system to celebrate its first birthday happy birthday to your computer four months ago emily but i would say like an action figure or something like that something non-tech that you can put in there just sort of as a bit of flair or whatever you want to call that um you know find an intellectual property that you like and enjoy like star wars or lord of the rings or anything like that and get a little character and put it in there and add a little bit of character to your system the next 10 questions are questions about the past and the first one is from jacob who says if you could meet any one of your past ancestors for the first time who would it be i don't know a whole lot of my past ancestors but i do know that my dad has a family tree that goes all the way back to like the 1500s or something like that i am german at least like half of me or so by descent so i would be kind of curious to go back to some of those ancestors who lived in that time and just sort of be there to observe how they live on a normal basis and what it was like back in that time that that would be cool what product brings back horrible memories from your time at newegg uh this is a good one because i made me realize that not all of my old newegg tv videos are gone there's a secondary newegg channel called new egg products and this is the diy pc ultimate miner v1 i absolutely hated this product for one it was for mining for two it was basically just a bunch of pre-cut metal pieces that you had to assemble yourself with some screws they tried to charge eighty dollars for it it again was made for mining which i think a lot of people at the time were just using plastic crates for or something like that literally during this time lapse the whole time i was just going like what what the hell is this product i hate this product and i don't want to do anything about it but you know it was on the secondary channel so i didn't feel quite as bad but yeah awful awful awful thing that it was and uh hey like i said some of my videos are still on the new egg tv secondary channel follow-up question from the reuben how did you meet your wife i also met her through newegg she worked at new egg and i worked at newegg we were at different warehouses but our departments had a little bit of sort of overlap so there was a like work lunch event at hometown buffet and i sat next to her and i told her that i make really good ribs because i do i make really good ribs and then like within a week i actually made her those ribs and i followed through on what i said i would do and then there was some other stuff that happened after that and then we got married what is the capital of assyria uh this is a good question about the past here's the wikipedia page i bet that has the information from 2025 bc to 609 bc and that's a trick question assyria had multiple capitals a sir carte but you didn't think you were going to learn that today thoughts on crt monitors and are they coming back crts or cathode ray tube monitors which are the big bulky ones that they used to have before lcds became popular are still popular for certain applications and especially if you're playing older games like 8-bit titles here's another area where i greatly appreciate the people who are so dedicated to sort of recreating that experience and crts will look a lot better if you're playing an older game that's like an 8-bit game than playing it on an lcd i don't think we're going to see a resurgence in popularity or like monitor manufacturers coming out with new crts or anything like that what i do see happening is the video game emulators themselves starting to emulate or reproduce how a crt looks and from my understanding some of the newer ones especially if you're on a higher resolution like a 4k monitor can really recreate that look without actually having to get an old crt monitor what's my worst rma story as a customer or worker and this is probably a follow-up to the video i did just a few days ago about newegg and the gamer's nexus rma situation and i probably relayed maybe the worst one in there which was the rattlesnake that showed up just because it was presented the most danger to me physically however i'll say just in general that you often deal with really irate customers when you're working with returns and i don't know whether it's the anonymity of the internet or just people look down on customer service service agents or something but people would often be just insanely rude and offensive and insulting and one of my favorite things to do is to reply to someone who had just like basically insulted me and everyone who i worked with and said that we're all idiots and i would say something like thank you for expressing your indignation with such effusive candor and then i would go on to sort of scold them a little bit for insulting my entire department because we're just trying to do our jobs and surprisingly quite a few people uh would turn around and come back and be like you know what i'm sorry i was upset uh let's work this out so if you're dealing with customer service whether it's newegg or anywhere else just remember that the people you're talking to on the phone often aren't the people who are doing the thing that pissed you off and treating them with just a baseline level of respect and dignity reflects well on you and it just it just makes the world a better place so try to do that like i said i'm probing myself a little bit here as well so where was i born and raised for anyone who didn't know i was born in fullerton california and i've been raised in southern california my entire life i even went to college at the university of southern california so i have traveled a decent amount and gotten away from this area to experience other things but real nice weather we have here it's actually it's like 81 today in early february that's fahrenheit by the way do you ever feel burned out after doing youtube for so long absolutely 100 and actually burnout can happen in different ways though sometimes burnout can happen where i don't feel motivated or inspired to create content and then the other kind of burnout can happen when you just feel so tired and worn out from doing so many different things that you don't have the time to invest in the projects that you do have in mind for the past few years it's absolutely been that second category i have lots to work on i have lots of projects to do it's just a matter of how much time is there in the day to get anything done and i will say that although that can be frustrating sometimes it's not quite as bad to me as just feeling like i'm not inspired i don't have anything to make content about i have lots of stuff to make content about i don't have time to do it with past probings do you go for the eye contact or just a simple petting and this is obviously going to be subject to personal preference on some level eye contact i think is very important to establish intimacy it's just you know if you've got to twist around a lot to do it that can be a little uncomfortable what's your biggest regret from the past i'm asking this of myself for some reason uh my biggest regret from the past is squandered opportunities and i'd say that mostly goes back to my early 20s when i had lots of opportunities and lots of potential uh like when i was going to school at usc i didn't graduate i often made decisions that were selfish or irresponsible and looking back on it yeah i wish i could have gone back to myself at that point be like the heck the heck are you doing just do some work just go to class if you're in college just just go to class it's really it's not that hard my next 10 questions are questions about the future so a little bit more forward-looking do you have more home improvement projects planned absolutely yes i do a short-term one is for the computer room and our bedroom we want to skim coat the walls in there because they still have the bumpy stuff and if i do that in the computer room i'd like to do some more video content in there make it a little bit more suitable for like live streaming right now the whole room is like a beige putty color and just it never looks that great when i shoot anything up there but i would like to fix that up a little bit and then our plans for the backyard have stalled for a while but that's another thing that i'm going to try to kick into gear soon so we can clear that out and have a more usable functional backyard will the chip shortage last until 2023 yes we're going to see ongoing fallout from the chip shortage that's not going away anytime soon i'm hoping things can get better this year i don't know if we're ever gonna get back to normal whatever that might be but the biggest change to my mind is going to be whether or not ethereum actually moves proof of stake and we'll hopefully see if that happens by june or so what's your outlook on the future of enthusiast pc building i think pc building will stick around for a while i've seen lots of doom and gloom reports in the past about pc building and desktop pcs going away you know back when tablets start starting to get popular i think if you look at gaming in general it's a huge huge absolutely massive market and i think even if pc gaming is a niche part of that market it's still big enough that manufacturers will still cater to that audience so hopefully we'll be able to build pcs for pc gaming for many many years to come darth radonus asks if he should upgrade his rtx 2080 ti like in 2022 i guess uh no no darth radonas you have a 2080 ti you don't need to upgrade any upgrade you do right now is going to be relatively minor and also incredibly expensive so keep the 2080 ti it's doing a great job for you still right now do you plan to upgrade or replace arctic panther that's my background pc back here uh yes do i have specific plans no i i would like to upgrade that system at some point right now it's still working just fine but i will let you guys know once i start developing more specific plans for what to do there well you and kyle stream together again uh i agree with you guys i do miss streaming with kyle and we are still streaming at least a couple times a year uh for our awesome hardware charity streams we have no immediate plans to start any other regular streaming thing between the two of us uh but you guys might be happy to know that kyle and i do still hang out uh pretty regularly at least every two weeks or so and we sit together and we drink some beer and we talk about stuff we just aren't live streaming which honestly is kind of nice from time to time not everything should be all about work will building computers for bc gaming ever die i kind of already answered this question i guess about the future of enthusiast pc building i think the only thing that would make pc gaming die is if people stopped being interested in building systems to that extent where you can choose individual parts for them there are lots of companies who much rather deliver you a completed product or a laptop or something like that where they can decide all the internal components and make sure that they're establishing a nice healthy profit margin for themselves but i think as long as there are enough of us out there who want to tinker and put together our own systems pc gaming will never truly die i wasn't quite sure what to make of this uh from perfect agent 07 what is your mission my mission is to make tech videos on youtube telling people how to build computers so that they can build computers for their own personal use maybe run a business maybe play some games and to try as much as i can to do that with a customer oriented mindset and try to view things from your guys's perspective rather than the perspective of the manufacturers who create the products because you know they can be shady sometimes and i still don't know what this reference is so let me know in the comments if you guys can figure that out could you make build compilation or lapse montages in the future or have joe do that zord and zeg you are probably completely unaware but because of that comment that you made a couple months ago i asked joe like hey maybe we could start doing this and he put together this little montage that i posted over on instagram about a week ago basically an assembly montage that's all white pc that i put together it turned out really nice joe did a great job so the answer to your question is yes uh we already did that and uh hopefully we'll do that somewhere in the future have i ever actually been abducted and or probed by aliens to my knowledge no again to my knowledge but i did put this in the questions about the future segment so um you know make of that what you will my last set of questions i'm calling the back nine and these are just all kind of random mecca tortoise asks if you could but not really haven't anymore and how then why i completely agree joe doameem when will be your tech related netflix stand-up comedy special uh i'm hoping to put that together at some point i could maybe just do again like a montage of all my best jokes from tech news that i do on sunday because that's where i like make the most effort to try to make jokes and be funny from time to time i never really considered that to be my forte but people really seem to be enjoying that so who knows who knows maybe i'll keep developing my skills do you wear linus tech underwear no i do not i have the opportunity to get some back at the last ltx events instead i got one of their hoodies which is a very good hoodie but like i mentioned before i i need to make tech briefs people requested that just a lot so far so we'll obviously be in direct competition there so why would i want to wear inferior linus tech underwear when i have tech briefs like waiting in the wings who would win robocop or terminator i gotta go with terminator sorry joe uh but whether you're talking about the original t800 or especially the t1000 they just don't have that soft fleshy core that seems to me to be a point of weakness like robocop has what's the weirdest tech item that you've ever seen for that i gotta go with all the advances recently in robotics and this expands to other areas like i don't know deep fakes and stuff like that but like some of the stuff that was shown off at ces 2022 is just absolutely mind-bending and really getting to that point where like before we had sort of the uncanny valley when it comes to like tech stuff and especially like cybernetics and robotics now these are getting to be so well made we're starting to get into that category where like it's like ai or some things we've seen in movies so i don't know if that counts as weirdest maybe scariest but this is the best answer i can come up with for now which is worse a purple nurple or a wet willy i had to double check what a purple nurple was because i know what a wet willy is between the two though i'd have to go with the wet willy purple nurple is like physical pain wet willy is just like uncomfortable and gross which just sounds a little bit more tolerable to me what is love baby don't hurt me don't hurt me no more what's your favorite color mike we agreed at the beginning of this episode not to do any more monty python references but it's blue no yellow and the 69th question from adam ramsey how are you a very simple question but one with a lot of depth and actually quite a few people asked something similar to this so thanks to all of you guys who did ask that i am doing pretty good i would say if i were to go back i don't know a year to two years and people asked me this question how are you instead of telling them how i was i would answer with whatever i was doing at the time because it was something that i just didn't want to discuss honestly compare that to now where my answer is i think i'm doing pretty good and although that's not the best answer and everything's not hunky-dory hopefully that's at least some evidence that things have been improving for me a little bit and i really hope that things have been improving for you guys as well thank you guys so much for watching my videos for all of your feedback for all the questions that you asked and for taking the time to get to know me a little bit more on a personal level versus just the regular tech videos that i do really really appreciate it if you enjoyed this video of course you can hit the thumbs up button leave me some more comments i'm going to be bringing this segment back to doing it monthly so i will be answering those in the next month's probing paul i guess now that we've finally gotten past episode 69 we can look ahead to episode 100 maybe but other regular end of the video things check the description down below for time stamps and links and that kind of thing a link to my store at paul's harbor.net where you can buy shirts mugs pint glasses and all other manner of high quality stuff you can spend money on subscribe to my channel of course if you're not already thank you guys again one last time cheers and we'll see you in the next video youhello everyone and welcome to the return of my monthly q a series perhaps the most anticipated video ever on my channel at least for some of you guys out there this is probing paul number 69. nice and of course this is a very special episode since it has been quite a while since i lasted my q a series that was all the way back in september actually september 14th so to get back into it i will be intimately probed today with 69 questions mostly from my fans taken from the last probing paul video in the comments section also some replies on twitter and a tweet that i posted earlier today and you know what i'm also going to be doing some probing myself or some probing of myself because i slipped in a few questions here and there that i just came up with that i thought you guys might want to hear the answer to so i think that pretty much covers it there was one other item to deal with here in the intro a frosty beverage seems like a good idea just to you know keep things loose so cheers thanks for joining me today and let's get into the 69th episode of probing paul excellent today's video is brought to you by corsair's new xenion monitor the 32qhd 165 featuring an ultra slim 32 inch 2560 by 1440 qhd screen with one millisecond moving picture response time a 165 hertz refresh rate fast ips panel quantum dot technology and 100 srgb 100 adobe rgb and 98 dci p3 color gamut coverage for more vivid natural colors hdr 400 support and convenient features like the integrated multi-mount point for cameras mics or lighting built into the stand round out the package so for more on corsair xenion monitor click the sponsor link in the video description did i say cheers cheers guys thanks for joining me today also since i'm answering 69 questions i'm going to try to make the answers pretty quick and pretty brief and pretty to the point and i did group them into categories so you can check the timestamps for that or the description has a list of every single question i'm answering today starting with what is your name my name is paul what is your quest i seek the grail can we acknowledge that you like monty python and think their work is funny and drop any future references in this video for the sake of the audience yes despite mike and clint going on about that i will i will acquiesce to this request that i made myself question four where did you get the idea to do a 69 question 69th episode uh the answer would be from people like sheska who posted that in the last video actually quite a few people requested it jessica was just the first i came across an important question five chicken nuggets or tendies chicken strips and what sauce would you use i'm okay with both although i would lean towards chicken strips because they tend to be higher quality meat and not like the chicken paste that the nuggets are often made out of and for sauce uh you know i'm partial to sweet and sour but i would have to say honey mustard i really like honey mustard do i still think that the solar and power wall installation was worth it i would say yes it was a big investment so i have to stand behind that and it's definitely been nice to have minimal to sometimes negative power bills although it is something that i need to come back to so perhaps more on that in 2022 bloody bucket with a procedural question do i check for questions for the next probing paul many times or just before the next probe honestly it's usually just before the next probe so it's usually about a month later occasionally i will look at the comment section before that though alex with a heavy hitter favorite filipino dish lumpia hands down 100 although don't get lumpier from chow king i don't know how but they somehow managed to massacre theirs and to follow up what's your least favorite filipino dish uh balut absolutely stands out uh chicken should be served as an egg or as a whole chicken not something in between although a very very very close runner-up is called bago bagaong it's a shrimp paste that's also really gross look we're already to question 10. did you stop probing paul number 68 on purpose uh yes yes absolutely i did probing paul is usually a video that i can put together fairly quickly in like a day day and a half but there's a lot of hype around the 69th episode and it was also the end of the year with q4 so there's lots of other stuff going on so i kept pushing it back and pushing it back but now it's back rested a double question so he gets the first question in the next category which is questions about tech is pre-applied thermal paste on a cpu cooler as good as aftermarket paste often it is not quite as good although it is within a very very slim margin most thermal pastes are only going to be a variance of maybe three four five degrees celsius from the worst to the best so the paste that comes pre-applied on a cooler is totally fine and it's only if you're being really really picky and you happen to have other paste around that you might want to swap it out for something else quackerjack asks should i upgrade to the rx 6500xt and he has like a two-way rx 550 setup right now with an r7 3700x i think the 6500 xt should only be for people who really need a new graphics card and don't have something to work with already you have two rx 550s that's not the best of course but it is functional so i would hold out maybe wait till later in the year and see if gpu prices become a little bit more favorable or like brian bound said down here in his reply go with something like a 6600 or above or the rtx 3050 even and you'll probably be happier about that decision further down the road thoughts on early steam deck reviews uh i do not have a steam deck i am not under nda i think it's pretty interesting some of the hardware design that they've done with it already seems to be a pretty cool device that might open up pc gaming to sort of a whole new category of pc gamers but i don't do a lot of mobile gaming which is why i didn't jump on that early what is one piece of tech you wish would make a comeback i want to say at least in desktop pcs five and a quarter inch bays uh for optical drives have gone the way of the dodo but five and a quarter inch base could be used for lots of stuff you could use it for like a multi-card reader or like a drive swap bay or something like that or even like a reservoir for a liquid cooling setup i understand why they're not around anymore because optical drives really aren't and they're a fairly large and bulky element to integrate into a chassis but that's one thing where i'm like oh it would be nice to have some space there to do an upgrade maddie oaks asks would you ever recommend a pre-built given the current market typically no because my thing is to build your own computer but but given the current market i would say absolutely yes if you want an rtx 3080 right now and there's costing 2 000 or more or you could buy a full pre-built system for about the same price by the pre-built system and not the standalone card jerry asks do you like nvidia's super or ti naming scheme and i appreciate jerry that you are old fashioned i'm old fashioned too i like ti i feel like it was a nice sort of unique to nvidia element to add to be like here's a gpu here's that gpu but a little bit better i feel like super is kind of the same thing it muddies and confuses the naming process and the product stack so i don't like super i do like ti and don't call it tai speaking of tai tai asks do you think we should upgrade to windows 11 from a gamer standpoint there's only one way i would say you absolutely should and that's if you're rocking a new intel 12th gen core processor with p cores and e-course then you want windows 11. if you're not windows 10 honestly is totally fine right now and if you're using it and it's stable and you're happy with it don't bother upgrading there is a free upgrade period that ends at some point i don't know exactly when but if you're thinking about upgrading you might want to do it before then so you get it for free rather than maybe having to pay for it shout out to ironside pc uh they're my friends over on twitter and they posted this i don't know is it a question i don't know if it's a question it's sort of an interesting thing about memory speed and comparing uh normalized human time to latency going from like a cpu clock cycle and cache access all the way up to ram access and stuff i wouldn't say i have a lot of charts like this that i often go back to and reference but i found this one to be interesting and that's why i included it in today's video how noticeable is the jump in resolution from 1080 to 1440 to 4k it's noticeable but what i'm telling you right now is anecdotal especially 1080 to 4k i definitely know this the pixels more with 1080 versus 4k where everything's a lot smoother so yeah that's one of the great benefits of pc gaming over consoles although consoles can do 4k now too i would say in terms of pc gaming your desktop like your core system is a big upgrade and then your monitor is a big upgrade separately and you should save up a decent amount of money there so you can invest in like a high refresh rate 1440 monitor or something in the 4k range it's definitely worth it if you're a pc gamer and you're currently on 1080. and the last tech question will i get into gpu and cryptocurrency mining as a side hustle extra channel content i had debated this in the past a little bit more now i would say no i'm not interested in it at all i am interested in cryptocurrency in the future and i would like to have like a rational discussion about cryptocurrency that's separate from gpu mining so if they do separate and ethereum moves to proof of stake and suddenly gpu mining goes away i think i'll be much more keen to rationally discuss the benefits of cryptocurrency and some of the positive aspects to it i just really really really don't think that gpu mining is an effective long-term mechanism for scarcity within a cryptocurrency incidentally this is also why i don't own tech stocks i wouldn't want my investment in gpu mining to cause me to veer my opinions on gpu mining in general just as i wouldn't want me owning stock in nvidia or amd or intel to affect my decisions or recommendations to you guys i don't do that so that i don't have that potential conflict of interest our next category is questions about my channel first one is from shelby tech what's up travis do you have any big plans in the works behind the scenes for the channel this year uh no okay maybe no is too stark of an answer yes i do have plans i have projects that i want to work on mostly i just want to maintain sanity that's my goal right now is maintaining sanity and sort of a nice stable level of well-being in my life mental health and everything and one way in the past that i've shot myself in the foot is just planning out too much stuff and making too many commitments so i'm trying to make as few commitments as possible other than you know regular videos on the channel so that i can you know not go crazy here's a nice follow-up neochaos x had asked in the last probing paul about an rgb backlit capable keycap and i just wanted to point out that yes i totally followed up on that it is right here it's available on the store it's 9.50 so that may or may not be worth it to you i know it's a lot for a keycap but you know we can't do huge runs of these so that was what we settled on but here's some of the pictures i took of it it's really nice i've actually got it in my keyboard right now and thanks neo ksx for your influence on that decision what's it like being a full-time youtuber what's your schedule like being a full-time youtuber is awesome in many different ways i think the thing i like the most about it is being independent being able to make my own decisions as for my schedule it often varies wildly but in my head i spend about four days in direct production work and then maybe one other day doing what i would call admin tasks following up on emails and business stuff and making plans for future videos and getting parts lined up and everything so it's fun uh obviously there are downsides to it as well i often feel like i there's never an end to the work that i do so winding down in the evening and sort of cutting off my work and making sure that i have some time for my own mental health is something that i try to do all the time what's up big al any more gaming live streams planned in the future uh not immediately kyle and i are still planning to do the awesome hardware charity live stream uh twice again this year i think one for summer and one for the winter as for streams directly to my youtube channel i have found that those don't often perform very well and in fact those often lead to a dip in the number of subscribers i get and while that by itself wouldn't make me say oh i'm never doing live streams again it has made me think about it in sort of a different context so what i've talked about doing although i don't have a date where i'm going to kick this off or anything is live streaming directly to my twitch channel or possibly doing a secondary youtube channel and then taking those live streams and having like stats on screen or something like that editing those down into a much shorter segment that i would still post on youtube or some sort of balance in between those but the awesome hardware charity streams will still be on the channel because those those i love and i don't care if people watch them or don't it's all about it's for the children what youtube genre would you want to cross over with pc tech there are so many out there but i think for me personally i want to do something with woodworking because it's something that i've dabbled with a little bit in the past it's something that i want to get better at and i feel like that's a good crossover with like the maker community but doing like diy you know wood frames either for shelving or like in a setup somewhere or to build a pc case out of i think that would be really really cool and uh hopefully i have the wherewithal to move forward with that idea edis golovich says teddy whitelisted my channel so the question is have you have you white listed the paul's hardware channel you don't have to i don't blame anyone who doesn't whitelist it but if you like my channel and you want to help me earn a little bit more money and keep things up and running uh that would be cool when did you realize you could make youtube videos for a living that would be around 2012 which was when i started my channel i guess i should clarify when i started my channel in 2012 it was heavily influenced by kyle who also started creating youtube videos on his personal channel at the same time and then a couple years later in 2014 it was absolutely kyle who came to me and said hey i think i'm gonna go independent with this that made me think like wait can i do that too at the time i had around 80 000 subscribers and then it built up from there which is really cool it became sustainable very quickly as well and then another big influence on that and something that allowed me to do it was my wife diana who also works full-time and said i can add you to my healthcare plan and support you in that way to allow you to sort of get this up and running and see how it plays out so big thank you to diana and kyle sean asks did you fully disassemble riptide yet and the answer is yes and actually this also goes back to around september this is riptide as it was this is riptide in the middle and then i have also now pulled out the freenas system that was down at the bottom i do still need to find a home for that corsair 1000d case it's sitting over there taking up way too much space and i'll post a link to the riptide playlist in the description if you guys are interested in more on that do i have any new products coming to the store thank you colton a very good question this shirt i'm wearing right now is one of my new 8-bit ish designs i have like a cpu and a case and a motherboard in storage and basically all the little elements of a pc i've just recently done a case fan as well those are currently being vectorized and i have a bunch of ways that i'm going to be integrating those into products shirts tech briefs of course i want to do some boxer briefs and i'll also be doing sort of a refresh of the graphic design of my channel so all that stuff coming soon i'm slow going with it but it's it's moving along it's coming have i ever built my own custom keyboard no no i have not it's one of those niche pc gaming things that has really blown up in popularity especially over the past couple years it kind of surprised me i was never thought that people were that into their keyboards it makes me glad because subjects like that just make me happy in general people getting really down into the nitty-gritty of how hardware works but it's just something that i i haven't really done myself i have lots of mechanical keyboards i have a good video on cleaning a mechanical keyboard but who knows maybe i'll do that soon my next 10 questions are questions about life which you know it's a good subject uh when are we going to hang out asks dr ian cuttress as well as brian dr cutress senor stro i would love to see you guys in person i really would i'm hoping to do a little bit more travel this year again you know there's just there's so many elements that go into it travel has obviously been difficult because of kovid my life has gotten pretty busy in some unique ways in the past uh two years and eight months or so since my daughter was born so that's obviously a concern as well so i have to give you the standard answer here soon soon soon i hope how do you manage large amounts of data such as storage and sorting it asks cyberx i don't have a very good solution for that i do have a good solution for my pictures my pictures are all in a folder and there's like a date for each folder with like the different event that happened and those are pretty well sorted stuff beyond that is not very well sorted i have a lot of external four terabyte hard drives that i've done a bunch of backups of stuff onto for my old pulse hardware content i do have my final renders like the the final completed videos stored on my freenas as well as in another backup location so i can get to those without too much difficulty but i feel like a long term large capacity data storage solution and sorting solution is always something that like i have in the back of my mind and i never actually move forward with so if that's you as well then don't feel bad at all but uh i how do i manage large amounts of data i get a new hard drive and i start dumping stuff onto that what's your best choice for a 55 foot tv under 1 000. uh a 55 foot tv is very very large that's very i don't know if you can get one for that cheap so obviously jake made a little bit of a typo here in the same vein as like spinal tap with their stonehenge monument that they had made but i will say my personal experience with tvs recently that i've enjoyed has been the lg cx series tv that i did a video on i was like a year or two ago now beyond that i can't really tell you too much because i don't have a broad range of experience with a lot of different types of tvs but i try to be honest with people about the stuff that i know and the stuff that i don't know quite as well and tvs i don't know quite as well but i do i do like the lg oled series what are your favorite backpacking and hiking areas in california so most of my backpacking has been done in northern california kind of in the range of yosemite and there's an area called ansel adams wilderness that's just north of mammoth mountain so that's where we would often start out from from a place called agnew meadows and we would hike up this valley and we get up to thousand island lake and right before you get there there's this like alpine meadow that you go through and there's like banner peak in the background with like snow topped mountains and it's just like the most beautiful place i've ever seen california is massive so there's tons of other places to hike as well but those are the ones that i've really enjoyed in my experience ansel adams wilderness or if you can get up into the yosemite high country that's awesome too chukara asks how are hiro and nori those are my two dogs nori is doing great she she might have a uti right now like she's she's been tinkling on her beds which we're trying to deal with she just went to the vet today hiro is doing well too but he is definitely in his twilight years he's estimated about 13 years old now and he is a 100 pound dog that's pretty old for a very large dog so he is now on chronic painkillers to deal with pain he's been having in his back hips and legs that has been helping he's a lot more mobile than he was before he started taking that medication so so he's doing better there but you know he is a very old dog and he's a very large dog so we're trying to keep him comfortable and happy as long as we can how is hana your daughter doing haven't seen her in any vlogs in a while that's totally intentional both not doing quite as many vlogs because again that's just content that i make that i know there's a group of people who enjoy but on a larger scale they don't tend to do very well and as for my daughter i'm fairly protective of her and i i just don't want to put her in videos all the time i don't mind if she pops up here and there because she's my daughter and she might be there but it's not something that i want to like actively go and be like oh how can i put hannah in this video too but she's gonna be three this year and she's absolutely awesome and wonderful and she's even like starting to get over the terrible twos phase two which i really appreciate are you an introvert or extrovert asks the reuben uh introvert absolutely introvert like i have a few slightly extroverted tendencies but uh introvert is the way to go for me do you want to be my friend asks maddie well matty i just talked about being an introvert so no but no i i would i would like to be your friend as long as it's like a small group environment with just like a few people i'm very very much over like large parties and group gatherings at this point in my life i'm just like no like make it quiet so we can have a conversation or just eat some good food or something like that that's what i want to do why is the default volume setting always 67 on a fresh windows install that's a good question sam it's actually something that i hadn't really noticed before i guess it's sort of a nice midpoint between having the volume loud enough to hear not having it maxed at 100 so it'll blast out the speakers emily asks what is something fun and different i can add to my system to celebrate its first birthday happy birthday to your computer four months ago emily but i would say like an action figure or something like that something non-tech that you can put in there just sort of as a bit of flair or whatever you want to call that um you know find an intellectual property that you like and enjoy like star wars or lord of the rings or anything like that and get a little character and put it in there and add a little bit of character to your system the next 10 questions are questions about the past and the first one is from jacob who says if you could meet any one of your past ancestors for the first time who would it be i don't know a whole lot of my past ancestors but i do know that my dad has a family tree that goes all the way back to like the 1500s or something like that i am german at least like half of me or so by descent so i would be kind of curious to go back to some of those ancestors who lived in that time and just sort of be there to observe how they live on a normal basis and what it was like back in that time that that would be cool what product brings back horrible memories from your time at newegg uh this is a good one because i made me realize that not all of my old newegg tv videos are gone there's a secondary newegg channel called new egg products and this is the diy pc ultimate miner v1 i absolutely hated this product for one it was for mining for two it was basically just a bunch of pre-cut metal pieces that you had to assemble yourself with some screws they tried to charge eighty dollars for it it again was made for mining which i think a lot of people at the time were just using plastic crates for or something like that literally during this time lapse the whole time i was just going like what what the hell is this product i hate this product and i don't want to do anything about it but you know it was on the secondary channel so i didn't feel quite as bad but yeah awful awful awful thing that it was and uh hey like i said some of my videos are still on the new egg tv secondary channel follow-up question from the reuben how did you meet your wife i also met her through newegg she worked at new egg and i worked at newegg we were at different warehouses but our departments had a little bit of sort of overlap so there was a like work lunch event at hometown buffet and i sat next to her and i told her that i make really good ribs because i do i make really good ribs and then like within a week i actually made her those ribs and i followed through on what i said i would do and then there was some other stuff that happened after that and then we got married what is the capital of assyria uh this is a good question about the past here's the wikipedia page i bet that has the information from 2025 bc to 609 bc and that's a trick question assyria had multiple capitals a sir carte but you didn't think you were going to learn that today thoughts on crt monitors and are they coming back crts or cathode ray tube monitors which are the big bulky ones that they used to have before lcds became popular are still popular for certain applications and especially if you're playing older games like 8-bit titles here's another area where i greatly appreciate the people who are so dedicated to sort of recreating that experience and crts will look a lot better if you're playing an older game that's like an 8-bit game than playing it on an lcd i don't think we're going to see a resurgence in popularity or like monitor manufacturers coming out with new crts or anything like that what i do see happening is the video game emulators themselves starting to emulate or reproduce how a crt looks and from my understanding some of the newer ones especially if you're on a higher resolution like a 4k monitor can really recreate that look without actually having to get an old crt monitor what's my worst rma story as a customer or worker and this is probably a follow-up to the video i did just a few days ago about newegg and the gamer's nexus rma situation and i probably relayed maybe the worst one in there which was the rattlesnake that showed up just because it was presented the most danger to me physically however i'll say just in general that you often deal with really irate customers when you're working with returns and i don't know whether it's the anonymity of the internet or just people look down on customer service service agents or something but people would often be just insanely rude and offensive and insulting and one of my favorite things to do is to reply to someone who had just like basically insulted me and everyone who i worked with and said that we're all idiots and i would say something like thank you for expressing your indignation with such effusive candor and then i would go on to sort of scold them a little bit for insulting my entire department because we're just trying to do our jobs and surprisingly quite a few people uh would turn around and come back and be like you know what i'm sorry i was upset uh let's work this out so if you're dealing with customer service whether it's newegg or anywhere else just remember that the people you're talking to on the phone often aren't the people who are doing the thing that pissed you off and treating them with just a baseline level of respect and dignity reflects well on you and it just it just makes the world a better place so try to do that like i said i'm probing myself a little bit here as well so where was i born and raised for anyone who didn't know i was born in fullerton california and i've been raised in southern california my entire life i even went to college at the university of southern california so i have traveled a decent amount and gotten away from this area to experience other things but real nice weather we have here it's actually it's like 81 today in early february that's fahrenheit by the way do you ever feel burned out after doing youtube for so long absolutely 100 and actually burnout can happen in different ways though sometimes burnout can happen where i don't feel motivated or inspired to create content and then the other kind of burnout can happen when you just feel so tired and worn out from doing so many different things that you don't have the time to invest in the projects that you do have in mind for the past few years it's absolutely been that second category i have lots to work on i have lots of projects to do it's just a matter of how much time is there in the day to get anything done and i will say that although that can be frustrating sometimes it's not quite as bad to me as just feeling like i'm not inspired i don't have anything to make content about i have lots of stuff to make content about i don't have time to do it with past probings do you go for the eye contact or just a simple petting and this is obviously going to be subject to personal preference on some level eye contact i think is very important to establish intimacy it's just you know if you've got to twist around a lot to do it that can be a little uncomfortable what's your biggest regret from the past i'm asking this of myself for some reason uh my biggest regret from the past is squandered opportunities and i'd say that mostly goes back to my early 20s when i had lots of opportunities and lots of potential uh like when i was going to school at usc i didn't graduate i often made decisions that were selfish or irresponsible and looking back on it yeah i wish i could have gone back to myself at that point be like the heck the heck are you doing just do some work just go to class if you're in college just just go to class it's really it's not that hard my next 10 questions are questions about the future so a little bit more forward-looking do you have more home improvement projects planned absolutely yes i do a short-term one is for the computer room and our bedroom we want to skim coat the walls in there because they still have the bumpy stuff and if i do that in the computer room i'd like to do some more video content in there make it a little bit more suitable for like live streaming right now the whole room is like a beige putty color and just it never looks that great when i shoot anything up there but i would like to fix that up a little bit and then our plans for the backyard have stalled for a while but that's another thing that i'm going to try to kick into gear soon so we can clear that out and have a more usable functional backyard will the chip shortage last until 2023 yes we're going to see ongoing fallout from the chip shortage that's not going away anytime soon i'm hoping things can get better this year i don't know if we're ever gonna get back to normal whatever that might be but the biggest change to my mind is going to be whether or not ethereum actually moves proof of stake and we'll hopefully see if that happens by june or so what's your outlook on the future of enthusiast pc building i think pc building will stick around for a while i've seen lots of doom and gloom reports in the past about pc building and desktop pcs going away you know back when tablets start starting to get popular i think if you look at gaming in general it's a huge huge absolutely massive market and i think even if pc gaming is a niche part of that market it's still big enough that manufacturers will still cater to that audience so hopefully we'll be able to build pcs for pc gaming for many many years to come darth radonus asks if he should upgrade his rtx 2080 ti like in 2022 i guess uh no no darth radonas you have a 2080 ti you don't need to upgrade any upgrade you do right now is going to be relatively minor and also incredibly expensive so keep the 2080 ti it's doing a great job for you still right now do you plan to upgrade or replace arctic panther that's my background pc back here uh yes do i have specific plans no i i would like to upgrade that system at some point right now it's still working just fine but i will let you guys know once i start developing more specific plans for what to do there well you and kyle stream together again uh i agree with you guys i do miss streaming with kyle and we are still streaming at least a couple times a year uh for our awesome hardware charity streams we have no immediate plans to start any other regular streaming thing between the two of us uh but you guys might be happy to know that kyle and i do still hang out uh pretty regularly at least every two weeks or so and we sit together and we drink some beer and we talk about stuff we just aren't live streaming which honestly is kind of nice from time to time not everything should be all about work will building computers for bc gaming ever die i kind of already answered this question i guess about the future of enthusiast pc building i think the only thing that would make pc gaming die is if people stopped being interested in building systems to that extent where you can choose individual parts for them there are lots of companies who much rather deliver you a completed product or a laptop or something like that where they can decide all the internal components and make sure that they're establishing a nice healthy profit margin for themselves but i think as long as there are enough of us out there who want to tinker and put together our own systems pc gaming will never truly die i wasn't quite sure what to make of this uh from perfect agent 07 what is your mission my mission is to make tech videos on youtube telling people how to build computers so that they can build computers for their own personal use maybe run a business maybe play some games and to try as much as i can to do that with a customer oriented mindset and try to view things from your guys's perspective rather than the perspective of the manufacturers who create the products because you know they can be shady sometimes and i still don't know what this reference is so let me know in the comments if you guys can figure that out could you make build compilation or lapse montages in the future or have joe do that zord and zeg you are probably completely unaware but because of that comment that you made a couple months ago i asked joe like hey maybe we could start doing this and he put together this little montage that i posted over on instagram about a week ago basically an assembly montage that's all white pc that i put together it turned out really nice joe did a great job so the answer to your question is yes uh we already did that and uh hopefully we'll do that somewhere in the future have i ever actually been abducted and or probed by aliens to my knowledge no again to my knowledge but i did put this in the questions about the future segment so um you know make of that what you will my last set of questions i'm calling the back nine and these are just all kind of random mecca tortoise asks if you could but not really haven't anymore and how then why i completely agree joe doameem when will be your tech related netflix stand-up comedy special uh i'm hoping to put that together at some point i could maybe just do again like a montage of all my best jokes from tech news that i do on sunday because that's where i like make the most effort to try to make jokes and be funny from time to time i never really considered that to be my forte but people really seem to be enjoying that so who knows who knows maybe i'll keep developing my skills do you wear linus tech underwear no i do not i have the opportunity to get some back at the last ltx events instead i got one of their hoodies which is a very good hoodie but like i mentioned before i i need to make tech briefs people requested that just a lot so far so we'll obviously be in direct competition there so why would i want to wear inferior linus tech underwear when i have tech briefs like waiting in the wings who would win robocop or terminator i gotta go with terminator sorry joe uh but whether you're talking about the original t800 or especially the t1000 they just don't have that soft fleshy core that seems to me to be a point of weakness like robocop has what's the weirdest tech item that you've ever seen for that i gotta go with all the advances recently in robotics and this expands to other areas like i don't know deep fakes and stuff like that but like some of the stuff that was shown off at ces 2022 is just absolutely mind-bending and really getting to that point where like before we had sort of the uncanny valley when it comes to like tech stuff and especially like cybernetics and robotics now these are getting to be so well made we're starting to get into that category where like it's like ai or some things we've seen in movies so i don't know if that counts as weirdest maybe scariest but this is the best answer i can come up with for now which is worse a purple nurple or a wet willy i had to double check what a purple nurple was because i know what a wet willy is between the two though i'd have to go with the wet willy purple nurple is like physical pain wet willy is just like uncomfortable and gross which just sounds a little bit more tolerable to me what is love baby don't hurt me don't hurt me no more what's your favorite color mike we agreed at the beginning of this episode not to do any more monty python references but it's blue no yellow and the 69th question from adam ramsey how are you a very simple question but one with a lot of depth and actually quite a few people asked something similar to this so thanks to all of you guys who did ask that i am doing pretty good i would say if i were to go back i don't know a year to two years and people asked me this question how are you instead of telling them how i was i would answer with whatever i was doing at the time because it was something that i just didn't want to discuss honestly compare that to now where my answer is i think i'm doing pretty good and although that's not the best answer and everything's not hunky-dory hopefully that's at least some evidence that things have been improving for me a little bit and i really hope that things have been improving for you guys as well thank you guys so much for watching my videos for all of your feedback for all the questions that you asked and for taking the time to get to know me a little bit more on a personal level versus just the regular tech videos that i do really really appreciate it if you enjoyed this video of course you can hit the thumbs up button leave me some more comments i'm going to be bringing this segment back to doing it monthly so i will be answering those in the next month's probing paul i guess now that we've finally gotten past episode 69 we can look ahead to episode 100 maybe but other regular end of the video things check the description down below for time stamps and links and that kind of thing a link to my store at paul's harbor.net where you can buy shirts mugs pint glasses and all other manner of high quality stuff you can spend money on subscribe to my channel of course if you're not already thank you guys again one last time cheers and we'll see you in the next video you\n"