Bernard Murphy: Writing for the Sheer Pleasure of It

We sit down with Bernard Murphy to explore how a physicist became a trusted voice in semiconductors and why storytelling makes or breaks technical ideas. Along the way we unpack NVIDIA’s pivot, Apple’s chip strategy, on‑device AI, and the shifting media landscape in tech.

• Moving from Silicon Valley to the Sierra foothills
• Wildlife rescue as context and purpose
• Writing as a learnable craft through coaching
• Hero’s journey adapted for technical writing
• Problem-first narratives that beat feature lists
• NVIDIA’s matrix engines repurposed for AI
• Apple’s vertical integration and custom silicon
• On‑device AI vs cloud latency and privacy
• Energy costs, smaller models, and inference
• Paid, earned, and self‑published tech media
• Measuring impact beyond pageviews

Chapters

• 0:00 Meet Bernard Murphy
• 2:10 Life In The Sierra Foothills
• 5:50 Wildlife Rescue On A Mountain Ranch
• 9:20 Why Engineers Need Storytelling
• 13:45 Learning The Craft With Tough Coaching
• 18:30 Hero’s Journey For Technical Writing
• 22:40 Pitching VCs: Problem Before Solution
• 27:30 NVIDIA, Google, And The GPU Pivot
• 32:10 Apple’s Chips And Vertical Integration
• 36:40 Neural Engines And On‑Device AI
• 41:20 Power, Data Centers, And Smaller Models
• 46:00 The Business Of Tech Writing
• 50:00 Media Shifts And “Earned” Content
• 53:20 Parting Thoughts And Sign‑Off

Transcript

Meet Bernard Murphy

Roopinder 0:06

Hello everyone, and welcome to the Masters of Technology Happy Hour, where once a week I have a drink with someone I meet in the course of business, but someone I'd like to get to know better as a person. My guest today is Bernard Murphy, who I met during a press lunch at the design automation conference DAC 2025, held in San Francisco. I was there under false pretenses, a mechanical engineer who knew nothing about semiconductors, which is what DAC is all about. Across from me was Bernard, who, with his PhD in physics from Oxford and decades in the semiconductor business, had every right to be there. We didn't talk about semiconductors. How could we? It would have been very one-sided. We talked about writing. He tells me that he loves it. This I've heard from exactly zero engineers. Bernard has written a book about how to write. My curiosity was piqued. So here is Bernard to explain himself. I was thinking of the first time and the last time we met was seated across from each other. What was it? Cadence?

Bernard 1:03

I think it was cadence. I mean, maybe it was synopsis. I don't know, but I have a feeling it was cadence.

Roopinder 1:08

Yeah, I was a fish out of water. I'm a mechanical engineer. I was and seated across from you, and I find out that you are hard a fish very much in the water. You've been in this industry forever. You have a semiconductor wiki and a PhD in physics from Oxford. Do you find that people just stop talking to you after you tell them that?

Bernard 1:29

I try not to bring that up very often. I want to engage with people and I don't want to intimidate them. No reason they should be intimidated.

Roopinder 1:37

How have you been? Good.

Bernard 1:38

They've been busy having a lot of fun with AI and most recently quantum computing.

Roopinder 1:45

Is it a German Shepherd or a Belgian?

Life In The Sierra Foothills

Bernard 1:47

Yeah, he's a German Shepherd, but he's the interesting coloring. Whoever gossip thought he might Belgian Malibute or Malinwide. Kind of a cross between those two. But he's a pretty dog. He was a rescue. We got him. He'd been wandering free in Stockton after being uh abandoned by whoever got him first. He was very reactive and touchy, but he's coming around now.

Roopinder 2:10

Very good. Well, we have that in common. We have rescued dogs, and one of them is a pug. He was also found in the streets, I forget where. North Bay. We live in the North Bay. Up so up as I think it was in the Santa Rosa area. Oh. Now, Bernard, you were living in central California, I believe, right?

Bernard 2:26

Yeah, we're in the Sierra Foothills in Sonora. So if you know that areas like Angels Camp, Chinese camp, and so on, it's the old gold rush area.

Roopinder 2:37

What made you end up there, I have to ask? Because you are far removed from not only your origin, but from your, I think your your background takes you to Silicon Valley, correct?

Bernard 2:47

Yeah, so I I worked in Silicon Valley for a long time. I'm sure this is a common story for many people. At one point I got thoroughly fed up with what I was doing and who I was working for. My wife and I decided, why don't we look for some place fun to retire to, someplace we could look forward to moving to full dying? We looked in the area you are, like the wine country area would be nice, but it was I think around Napa, it's very expensive. We didn't consider Santa Rosa, which is interesting because her sister was there. But for whatever reason we didn't look at it. We thought about the coast further south than the Bay Area, San Luis Obispo. Nice area, but I didn't like the marine layer, the fog that you get in the morning. And then we thought, okay, let's try the mountains. Talked to a couple of realtors, looked at some stuff, didn't find anything. Came back, said that was a fun weekend away. One of the realtors called us back and said, I think I found something for you. It's a beautiful, nearly 90-acre ranch in the mountains that we went out to look at. Immediately fell in love with. House was horrible, but we worked on remodeling it. I was still working in the Bay Area at that time. My wife and I would go out periodically, and at one point she said, I'm going out there, but I'm not coming back. You can continue to work in the Bay Area if you want. I commuted for a while, not every day, but three days at a time I'd go into the Bay Area. That's about a two and a half hour drive. If you do it not at peak traffic hours, you know, going over the thing towards Livermore and Tracy and so on. That can be horrible at the wrong times of day. Going Tuesday morning and come back Thursday night and stay in a hotel while I was there. And that worked out pretty well. Switched to telecommuting.

Roopinder 4:32

I moved my wife, much against her will. She had such a terrible time moving from her birthplace in Philadelphia to here. And I showed her all over the Bay Area. You know, we I was shopping for houses for a while, and I would show her houses in San Francisco, which was unaffordable at that time. This was back in late 1990s. So we moved out, increasing distance from San Francisco. And I looked at all the communities, starting South Bay, East Bay. I must have looked at North Bay, must have looked at, I don't know, 100 houses. And then I showed my wife some of them, the best ones. She was impressed. She did not want to move and was not impressed by the houses. As you know, this is a high-priced area. And you get so little for your money that and we were at the point where we're, I wouldn't say we're millionaires, but we were able to buy houses in the Philadelphia area that had acres of land, woods, stream running through it, and here we come. And you can buy a shack.

Bernard 5:31

Walk out the back door and the fence is right in front of your face.

Wildlife Rescue On A Mountain Ranch

Roopinder 5:34

I didn't understand it. And I thought, okay, so I tried to impress my wife with these sort of I thought grand houses in the East Bay, Concord area, Walnut Creek. And she was not impressed. But when I took her to Marin, how well do you know Marin? Probably not at all, right? Nevada?

Bernard 5:51

Not super well, but I've been through Marin and around a little bit on the bay.

Roopinder 5:56

Yeah. It took her through Marin and we ended up in Nevada of all places. Just because this happened to be the right distance away from Philadelphia, the value of the property had gone down to where I could meet it with my salary. We went to Novato, which I never heard of. We walked down the main street, which is Grant Avenue, and then she said, Okay, I like this place. It took her 10 years to forgive me for moving her.

Bernard 6:17

Wow.

Roopinder 6:18

How many years? Is your wife from the U.S.?

Bernard 6:20

Well, she's actually a Southern California girl, LA. She's a structural engineer. I was offered a job in Washington State with Fairchild. And so we moved up there and she thought that was wonderful. It's miles away from the big city. But it wasn't great for me because I was away from the action. So I wanted to move back to the Bay Area. So we moved to San Jose, and she started working with a wildlife organization doing wildlife rescue. Really liked being there when we moved out to the mountains. We got this huge place, lots of land, and she could set up her own wildlife rescue operation. She was really happy.

Roopinder 6:58

I was doing a little bit of research and preparation for our conversation and notice you do something with wildlife and with what wildlife now rescue operations, correct?

Bernard 7:07

Well, I am on the board of she does all the heavy duty work, but I'm on the board secretary, and I help her periodically. I'll hold a bird of prey while she does an examination on it. But mostly she does that. Oh you specialize in the birds of prey, raptors and well, birds of prey, yeah, raptors, but also squirrels, owls, which are also birds of prey, a variety of things, but mostly small mammals and and birds of various kinds, and songbirds, but all native.

Roopinder 7:39

There must be a fair amount of wildlife out there, I imagine. We're we're happy to see the occasional varmint that goes across there. Can't walk. Yeah, we were so excited the other day. The camera caught a bobcat with a squirrel. It had jumped the squirrel. I was a little upset because it was a squirrel I was fond of seeing on top of the fence, but I was quite amused by it. But then it ended up in the jaws of this bobcat. I didn't know we had bobcat.

Bernard 8:05

Well, bobcats have to eat too. The public bring us animals that they've found, animals and birds that are distressed in some way. It could be babies that the mother has been killed, or things that have been hit by cars, and so on. So we we take them in. We've got fairly big facility on our property, all licensed by the state and feds. We raise them or rehabilitate them, get them vet help if they need vet help, feed them, get them flying again. They we have big of these big flight cages they can fly back and forth to build up their muscles, and then we take them back to where they were found and released.

Roopinder 8:42

This is the Mother Lode Wildcare. I think you had already written a book. You were saying how important it was for people like us, technical people, engineers, to be able to tell stories. I found that quite by accident, but you seem to have made a study of it and have written a book about it.

Bernard 9:00

I started out thinking I was God's gift to writing. I had all these cute turns of phrase and ideas and so on.

Why Engineers Need Storytelling

Roopinder 9:07

I have to say that may be an English trait, because most engineers of this country have said writing is of no consequence to us. And we'd rather just skip through all our English classes to get to the real engineering. Almost to say that my language is mathematics.

Bernard 9:23

I shouldn't have classified so broadly, but of the ones that do write, they think they're God's gift to write. And I was in that class. Yeah, yeah, exactly. So yeah, a lot of people either don't think writing is necessary or they're terrified of writing, and they're absolutely freeze up when they decide to write something. But I thought, I guess, kind of like an engineer, you know, if you're doing something, then there has to be a process to it, and you have to be able to get better at it. But I'm not going to get better at it on my own. I need to work with someone who is already good at this. And so I got an invite from Forbes Books, who I mean, they're in this to make money. They wanted to help me write a book. And in a lot of cases, what they do is they'll ghost a book for you. But I didn't want it to be ghosted. I wanted to learn how to become a better writer. So I signed up with them to do precisely that, to write a book. But you don't just write a book and they review it and make a few edits. You go through a very intensive coaching process where you write something and then you your coach and it tears it apart, and you write it again and it tears it apart again and on and on. And this went on for a year. And I swear there were times that I was thinking, I don't want to do this anymore. This is no fun. Just getting my what little belief I have in myself trampled every time I we have these meetings. But I hung on in there.

Roopinder 10:55

You had already written, correct? You had written short form, as they call it now. Right. Okay.

Bernard 11:00

Blogs, short articles, some white papers, but nothing, nothing extending to a book. Okay. And so I my coach is an English language major from Southern California, somewhere towards San Diego, I think. He writes his own book, but he makes money on the side by working towards books, coaching people like me. So he got me hooked on Journey. There's this quite famous book written maybe 50 or more years ago, who wrote about most stories having a common theme based on a journey. So if you look at Star Wars or many other film scripts, big-hitting film scripts, they're based on this concept of a journey for a hero and someone who advises the hero going for these steps. He got me into writing in the styles. You write about something that starts out with a really exciting vision, then you run into problems. And more problems, you overcome those problems, then you run into a big problem. And somehow, with the help of whoever is there, you get through that problem. There's maybe another problem at the end, and then finally you get to the resolution and some manifestation of the goal you are aiming for. Almost every big story, Lord of the Rings, is written in this kind of pattern. Now, doesn't work very well for short form because you just don't have enough words. So I had to come up with an abbreviated version of that. What's the goal? And then what are the challenges? And then how do you get there? Which is very different from the way I was writing before, because as a technical guy, I would start out with, here's this great technical solution. Let me tell you all about how it works. With who cares? No, put that on its head. You start out with who cares, and then you move to what are the challenges? Finally you move to here's a possible solution. And that's the pattern I've pretty much followed since then in everything.

Roopinder 13:01

Do you think it's peculiar to Silicon Valley where you have to have the elevator pitch? You have only a few moments to attract the attention of a venture capitalist.

Bernard 13:09

So you lead with the what I think that's what people believe it ought to be. But I think they're wrong, especially today when everybody's looking for unicorns. Telling a BC my great technology and how I build it doesn't work, even if you can do it in five sentences. How am I gonna turn this into a billion dollar enterprise? What problem are you gonna solve for a pretty broad range of enterprises or the general public or whatever? How you get there is kind of a second order problem.

Roopinder 13:41

What do you mean by that? Second order problem.

Learning The Craft With Tough Coaching

Bernard 13:43

Think about things like Uber. The foundational value of Uber is not the app or anything else behind it. The foundational value is what new opportunity are you creating? And the new opportunity is essentially a taxi service. So that's not a revolutionary idea, but it reaches a lot of people. If you can find a better way to deliver it, then you can make a lot of money. And I talked with a VC who said those are the kinds of ideas that are opportunities hiding in plain sight.

Roopinder 14:15

Same thing with Amazon, wouldn't you say? Not like they invented the store, but they invented a way to engage more people.

Bernard 14:21

I'll give you another great example, NVIDIA. Here is a company whose main business was selling graphics accelerators for gamers. What they figured out is that the core of that engine, a big matrix engine, would actually turn out to be very useful for AI. So they, you know, did a bit of a pivot. They still support the gamers. They did a bit of a pivot and stripped away a lot of the gaming only type stuff and said, here is an acceleration engine for AI, particularly for the kind of AI that OpenAI and Google and others provide. So now your Chat GPT is running on NVIDIA hardware, not because NVIDIA came up with some revolutionary idea, but they figured how to repurpose what they already had.

Roopinder 15:09

Now the new Google chip or SOC or semiconductor, Google actually gave NVIDIA a shock, didn't it? And earnings or revenue?

Bernard 15:18

Yeah. When you think of the mountain, the only way you can move is down. Yeah. So everybody, all the analysts want to see, oh, here's a challenger to NVIDIA, Google, and now AWS is a city they're going to sell their stuff. I think it's uh pretty ephemeral. These companies are not in the chipmaking business. They might make a little bit of money selling their stuff to customers, but I think it's about lock-in. They're never going to make a lot of money selling chips because they're not chipmakers and they've got they have no background and all the, you know, all the complexities of being in the semiconductor business. It's a tough business. It's cyclical. And you have to stay up with the late process technologies and TSMC and all that jazz. Those guys are not in that business. They're in the make something for themselves that's perfect for their needs. And maybe try and leverage a little bit to get some lock-in with some. But that's part of this whole cyclical NVIDIA's investing in these companies and OpenAI, they're all exchanging money with each other. That's why everyone's worried that this is a bubble because no new money is being created.

Roopinder 16:26

Apple series of chips, the M M series, and they're up to M M5 now. But it surprised me that a computer company, a new not a chipmaker, right? But a computer company is all of a sudden able to come out with a chip that's better than Intel's chips, a hardcore chipmaker. How did a non-chipmaker acquire this sort of expertise and abilities?

Hero’s Journey For Technical Writing

Bernard 16:48

Well, good question. First of all, it's not that Apple is a non-chipmaker. They've been making components of their phones for a long time. They've gradually had the boundaries. They're vertically integrated. They're making stuff only for their purposes, only for their phones and their iPads and their watches, things like that. And, you know, the the what they call air buds, AirPods. So it's still very vertically integrated, designed purely for their purposes. They're not selling those chips to anybody else. And they never will. For the same reasons. They're more purists than AWS and Google, but they don't want to enable someone else to be as good as them because what they're really selling is the end-consumer products. So how did they get there? They acquired design companies or they bought up smaller design companies. AWS did the same thing. Google did the same thing. They buy in talent, design talent, to build these chips. Over time, they do more of this compute. Initially, they'd use Intel chips and then start getting rid of the need for the Intel stuff. Then lost Intel, that one customer, but Intel was still doing fine selling chips to PC makers, big cloud providers. Over time, Apple started to bring in more stuff. One of the key components in phones and all of these devices is the modem. The modem is how you communicate with wireless, how you connect to the internet. And they had a real struggle building modems. Modems are very difficult to build, and for a long time they were getting their modem from Qualcomm. I'm not sure yet if they still got off of that or whether they, you know, if they built their own modem or they're still depending on Qualcomm for that. So I think it makes total sense. Apple has always had this walled garden philosophy, not just in terms of keeping customers in that garden, but keeping all their own development in that garden. And it's always been consistent. They'll expand within that garden, but not try to go out and sell to other people. It's not just changing with Apple. If you look at the automakers, all of the automakers, or at least their tier one suppliers, are now building their own chips. The communications infrastructure people like Ericsson and Nokia building their own chips, those are interesting companies because they were in the chip business originally and then they got out. They were just using FPGAs that programmed their own FPGAs. They got back into chip making again.

Roopinder 19:21

Tesla, I think, also.

Bernard 19:23

Tesla makes their own chips. And the reason all of these companies are doing it is differentiation. They feel the need to build something that is better than everyone else in some respect. Not a general purpose computer, but something that's particularly good at communication or case of the car makers in detecting pedestrians across the road or navigation. They want to be on the leading edge. They don't want to be trailing using standard off-the-shelf products.

Roopinder 19:54

The M series chips Apple had devoted a quite a bit of their real estate was devoted to a neural engine, right? Yes. What can you say about that? We have to talk about AI. Any conversation between techies has to talk about AI. So let's do it. What part of a chip can be a neural engine? Tell me how that works.

Pitching VCs: Problem Before Solution

Bernard 20:11

There is an interesting transition going on right now. The neural engine is essentially a small version of what NVIDIA does. It's a piece of hardware that is really good at doing matrix multiplication. That's fundamentally what it is. Okay. And the reason that's important is if you look at the ChatGPT or anything else in that class, perplexity or cord or whatever, what they're all doing is this large language model analysis. And large language models basically do a lot of linear algebra, which means multiplying matrices. If you're going to put hardware into something to accelerate AI, the core of what it has to do is matrix multiplication. The challenge, though, is that if you're doing something that's going to run on a you cannot compete with these mega GPUs and backup storage in the cloud, you know, in AWS or Google Cloud or Microsoft. They all have this giant hardware disks and memory. You can't replicate that on a phone. It's a tiny thing and it has to run for a day at least on a battery. The view on phones was that all the phone could do is basically front-end. If you wanted to talk to Chat GPT, you could front-end on the phone, but then it had to pass the heavy duty work off to the cloud to do the really hard AI stuff and then send the results back. That was the de facto use model that everybody thought was going to happen for phones. But there are problems with that model because there's a whole list of them. There's latency, or even before that, there's reliability of the phone link. If you're driving from here to LA for a long time, you're not going through areas that have a lot of cell towers. So you don't have a very good phone connection. You're driving through a heavily forested area or a mountainous area, or if you're out in the middle of the ocean on the shit, you don't have cell towers. How do you get a reasonable connection? And then how do you minimize latency? If you ask ChatGPT a question, you have to wait five or ten minutes before you get an answer. And then what kind of subscription fee do you have to pay for that? Is your communication with this thing going to be private or can somebody hack it? There's a lot of questions around this. You got to go from the phone to the cloud and back again that worry a lot of people. There's been a big push to put more and more of this capability on the phone itself and only have to go to the cloud occasionally for just a few things that are too heavy to do on the phone. That's a relatively recent switch. And I think it may be a durable switch.

Roopinder 22:54

Do you find yourself worrying about the long-term effects of AI? I'm not talking about willing the robots kill off humanity. I'm talking about all the excessive heat that comes out of these computers and massive data centers, and it's predicted to change the climate that's going to suck up all the power we have and change the Earth's climate.

Bernard 23:13

Do you sleep over this? It's a reasonable concern. And I think there are already things working on trying to mitigate that problem. The AI on the endpoints, like the phones or the AI in your car, already has to be very power efficient because you don't have a giant battery in your car. You can't be running down the battery in your car rapidly. It turns out that if you split AI into two pieces, there's the training and the inference. The inference, which is what happens in your car phone or watch, is much more power efficient than the training. The training is the big power. That's what's happening in the data centers. And you can already see moves towards dramatically reducing costs. There's a move to much smaller models, so like Lama and GPT. I mean, GPT keeps pushing towards these bigger models, but I think the idea now is that bigger is not necessarily better anymore in AI. Not just because of power, but also because of capability. So now you see these much smaller models. You have these distilled models that are coming from China that are much smaller, basically trained on the big models, but could be trained much more efficiently. That's one trend. I do believe there's going to be more push toward intelligent power saving. A lot of AI going into how can you reduce the power in the data centers by intelligently turning things off when they don't need to be on or running at lower speeds. A lot of the techniques used today managing power in your phone. I think more of that's going to be happening in the data center. I think it's still a problem. It's a little blurry because we've got this phenomenon of these major players all building giant data centers and everybody getting upset because their home power bills are going up. Data centers are sucking up so much of the power. I don't know whether that is a blitz or an ongoing problem, along with the AI in a bubble question. How many of these giant data centers are actually going to survive? That's quite unclear to me.

Roopinder 25:22

It's just amazing how big they're getting. And I don't know if it's over. It was just critical in the last year. You know, I don't know. You must get this IEEE Spectrum. I don't know if that's the right issue, but they were talking about a computer. This is IEEE Spectrum now, which I place a lot of faith in. It's that computers get up to the size of the earth. You'll need a computer the size of the earth soon. That's what mankind is heading towards. It's just mind-boggling, isn't it?

Bernard 25:49

Yeah, there is definitely a trend right now in technical writing. Spectrum gets sucked into it, which is you gotta get eyeballs. And the only way you can get eyeballs is make more outrageous claims. And they're not doing it unsupported, they're drawing on opinions from other places. But I'm looking forward to the day when the outrageous claims calm down and we get back to some form of sanity.

Roopinder 26:14

I'm trying to leave the established industry and do my own thing with the writing. You did that with semi-wiki. How's that going?

Bernard 26:20

Dan Nenn1 founded it. I was just an add-on writer, although I seem to have become more my profile has grown within semi-wiki. I'm still doing it as a gig. Dan is the real brains behind semi-wiki. I do it full-time opinion writer. I don't edit anybody else's material. I write my own pieces. Companies in this space ask me to write about what they're doing. That's a kind of pay-to-play sort of deal. My own opinion pieces I don't get paid for, but I enjoy writing them anyway.

Roopinder 26:52

You enjoy it, you get pleasure out of it.

Bernard 26:54

I really do. I can combine the joy of writing and refining and checking that I'm not getting too geeky with the joy of communicating to non-technical or less technical people about topics that are usually far beyond their grasp, but I want to make them understandable.

Roopinder 27:13

And then also staying in touch with the technology. What's the most joy thing about writing specifically?

Bernard 27:18

There's a question of how you determine whether it's successful or not. So fortunately, in semi-wiki, I can look at views on a piece.

Roopinder 27:26

How about judgment of your peers? Is that important?

NVIDIA, Google, And The GPU Pivot

Bernard 27:28

I get that more indirectly, but it seems to be quite effective. So on the views, I look at trends. I do kind of a waterfall graph, and I what I continue to try to do is keep pushing the views up by what I do. I do an opinion piece or a technical piece. I'm trying to change the mix to keep pushing the views up. The popularity I get through LinkedIn, I can look at views on LinkedIn. LinkedIn is a very small number of views, but the trends are interesting. Invitations to moderate panels. So I potentially got one coming up early next year. And then just the what people tell me is hey, I read everything you write or of the way you write, and could you write about this? There's not a lot of comment feedback. It might be the PhD from Oxford thing again. I think people might be afraid to comment. I hope not. And a few do comment. If you're talking about quantum computing, how many people know much about quantum computing? Not many. There's a trend away from the comment section being a useful place to go. If you look at the comment sections in the Wall Street Journal or Washington, it's all submerged third type stuff. People who just want to rant, and I think most people have lost interest.

Roopinder 28:44

By the way, your dog, what's his name? He's lost interest in our conversation. You probably have better things to do than talk to me. But I wanted to ask you. I promised my wife I would never do this, but I can't resist. What movie star do people say look the most?

Bernard 28:59

I think somebody said something about that a long time ago. I don't remember. I have no idea who I look like. Oh, okay. That's an interesting comparison. Not an unflattering one either.

Roopinder 29:10

That's okay. Thank you. Good. I'm glad I got away with that one. My favorites movie with him, actually. I've done with this before. I'm sure you don't want to hear me blabbing. Three Days of the Condor. Have you ever seen that?

Bernard 29:22

Oh, it rings the bell.

Roopinder 29:24

You should watch it. Tell me if you see resemblance.

Bernard 29:26

Three Days of the Condor.

Roopinder 29:28

Next time I see you, I hope to have the book with you and I hope you'll sign it for me.

Bernard 29:31

I'm not going to DAC next year. That's in Long Beach, I think. But the following year is in San Jose. Some of these guys are moving away from working with outfits like SemiWiki just because they're trying a new spin on how they do their outreach.

Roopinder 29:45

Interesting that you say that. I've noticed that in my case too. I'm trying not to take it personally.

Bernard 29:50

Yeah, it's not personal. I think there's a trend to what do they call it? Earned content, which means they don't have to pay for it. They can get it picked up by magazines or journals that will do it for free because they're making their money on advertising.

Roopinder 30:06

For a long time there's been this disturbing trend to self-publish. These companies think that maybe because of the failing industry media, they choose to create their own content. And I often thought it's like, really? Do you or chipmaking? Do you really think you're gonna be a good chipmaker when you're not in the business? Do you really think you're gonna be able to publish because you're just a company that wants to cover their products? I don't think they're doing well at it, but it's been a trend that they just publish.

Bernard 30:31

I think it's a cycle to figure out that they're not very good, is it? And then they'll swing back.

Roopinder 30:35

Yeah, and leave it in the hands of us pros because honestly, who would believe anything that's written on somebody's website? It's like holding a baby up and saying, Isn't my baby pretty? Like you can't do that.

Bernard 30:47

It's the mood of the times when your leadership is unimpressed by expertise in anything, and then more motivated by gut feel everybody else maybe moved along with that a little bit, and eventually they'll figure out oh, there is a reason we have experts. Until that fever passes, we're maybe stuck with it.

Roopinder 31:12

You never know who's listening.

Bernard 31:13

I never know who's listening.

Roopinder 31:14

It's been great. I'm glad I got to know you better. You have a good rest of the day.

Bernard 31:18

Thanks for the opportunity, Roopinder. And uh I'm sure we'll meet again. I hope so. All right, bye-bye. Thanks. Bye.

Roopinder 31:24

And that concludes this episode of the Masters of Technology Happy Hour. I hope you enjoyed our chat and will join me as we talk to some of the most interesting people in the design and engineering software community.