What is up everyone?
Happy Friday and welcome to the WAN Show.
We've got a great show lined up for you this week.
Actually, that's a lie.
We've got nothing this week.
But we're going to make the most of it because we do have a few things to talk about starting
of course with subscriptions.
Why is everything in life a subscription?
Everything.
Mercedes is going to be locking better acceleration performance behind a subscription, nevermind
a paywall.
It's a subscription.
Also this week in Elon Twitter, we've got an update on all of that.
We're going to, you know what?
Let's not even make that a main topic.
No, forget it.
Let's talk about UfecesUPUC.
That's right.
A sub brand of charger slash battery giant Anker has been spotted sending pictures and
video to their cloud servers without user consent.
We'll be discussing that.
What else we got this week?
I'm going to call it two just randomly bolded lines of text because those are often the
most fun topics that we have.
One of them says Marvel used to be good.
And I'm interested in this.
Another one says I got a car.
What's up with that?
Did you buy a new car?
I tried to roll the intro and it broke.
Dan, Dan, Dan.
What's happening?
Way to go, Dan.
What is happening?
We could act it out.
This is, this has never happened before.
Oh, well we've got spot by new egg and Vessi footwear.
Thanks.
Cool.
Well, that was fun.
Why don't we jump right into our first topic of the day?
Subscriptions.
Come on.
Not accelerate.
Oh man.
Okay.
I want to jump in real quick here and say that the editorializing in our notes is unacceptable.
And the writer who worked on this topic, you know who you are.
Alex Clark.
Oh, wow.
Yeah.
Whole.
Okay.
I'm these are, these are not my words.
Not satisfied with just making the worst electric cars around Mercedes will now be locking in
increased acceleration under a $1,200 yearly subscription.
All right.
This is me now.
This is me so much.
Can I just say that even though Alex is so angry about this, he's, you can almost tell
that subliminally he has kind of accepted the premise of a subscription and here I will
explain what I mean by that.
He describes it as them locking increased acceleration behind a $1,200 yearly subscription.
I think that if we described this, this situation 10 years ago, we would have said holding or,
or holding acceleration hostage unless you pay $1,200 of, of ransom.
Yeah.
Right.
So the acceleration is there.
Yeah.
You were supposed to be more mad.
Yeah.
Yeah.
You weren't mad enough.
Yeah.
Come on.
So I do not agree with Alex's approach to this topic for real though, we've kind of
accepted it.
We say, we say you pay this much to get more.
We don't think of it as what I haven't paid enough and you're taking it away, but that's
what it is.
The battery performance is clearly in the vehicle.
The motor performance is clearly in the vehicle.
And unlike some situations where, and we'll talk about one in a moment where I've even
defended subscriptions to unlock functionality, there is no additional R and D in this product
that was going to be no benefit to the average user of it, but that they had to do for a
small subset of users who well then have to pay for that cost recovery.
You're buying a Mercedes, you probably want this.
Exactly.
Yeah.
Exactly.
And, and unlike some situations where maybe the cost of the product is extremely low,
like say for example, in many cases, the heart, okay, sure.
Even something like a cell phone, a lot of the time you get the hardware subsidized by
the monthly subscription and ultimately you are paying for it.
You're paying for it.
And then some.
Yeah.
But you're getting it on a payment plan.
No, this is a car you already bought.
Yeah.
It's literally just a micro-transaction of $1,200 for a car.
$1,200.
That's a lot.
$100 a month.
Yeah.
Think about the things in your life that cost $100 a month.
The internet connection to my house that gets extensive, extensive use.
Extensive use.
Oh yeah.
And is like, that's the only thing it does.
Of course it's a subscription.
It has to be used monthly.
Yeah.
I don't own the lines.
I don't own the distribution, all that type of stuff.
So.
Super frustrating.
I am really hopeful that automotive hackers just wreak havoc on all of this stuff.
I don't know if that's like super friendly for you to say.
We would hate for that to happen.
Yeah.
Definitely don't want that.
Super upsetting I think.
People went in there and unlocked this and also the heated seats and also everything
else that's going on.
Think of the poor automakers.
Wouldn't that be horrible.
Wouldn't that be a shame for them?
Well, you know why this is happening, Luke?
I don't even necessarily think that this is down to a consumer acceptance of this practice.
This is down to a shareholder expectation that when something is sold, it generates
ongoing revenue.
Yeah.
Like I was talking to, I was talking to someone, I don't want to identify this person.
So it was someone either on the doing of or receiving end of some kind of VC something.
Okay.
So venture capital.
And what they basically said was that no VC wants to even start a conversation with you
unless there's a recurring revenue model.
And you can see this reflected in the stocks of mature companies that are kind of sitting
here going, and you could describe the automotive industry as fairly mature.
Tesla came in, they disrupted because they had a value add.
They had a promise of something different.
Autonomous driving, for example, was going to be a source of ongoing revenue for them.
It was going to change them from just a car company to a data company, to a software company.
And especially at that time, software company valuations were nothing like hardware company
valuations.
And nothing like they are now.
So this is a way for a mature company like a Mercedes to say, hey, we're building hardware
as a service.
We've got recurring revenue.
We're going to put out however many hundreds of thousands of these cars this year, and
they are going to be the gift that keeps on giving for a decade, two decades to come.
Well, it sucks.
It sucks because cars cost enough already, Mercedes.
To me, this feels like a big part of the reason why so many people have been against right
to repair for a long time.
Because right to repair, I think, would shelter a lot of activities that would get people
to a point where they could bypass this type of stuff, because hardware interventions.
When you said people being against right to repair, I thought you meant consumers.
And I was like, no, I think consumers who are against right to repair are simply brainwashed.
I actually do think it's that straightforward.
Or the reason for brainwashing or whatever else, however you want to flag it.
So the advocates against right to repair.
I think a lot of it has been because of this type of stuff, because if people have full
control over the things that they own, which is how that should work, it's easier for them
to bypass these types of things.
To enable this by default, by bypassing it physically or doing whatever else.
Yeah, this sucks.
I wouldn't buy a Mercedes.
I wasn't going to anyways, to be clear.
But now I definitely won't.
Alan on Floatplane says, you just described my favorite topic, Linus, the financialization
of the economy.
It all traces back to Reagan era policy changes and deregulation.
One of the most mind boggling things, and if you feel like this is a political conversation,
you're wrong.
It's not political.
It's just math.
Math is not political.
It's just numbers.
Okay.
One of the most mind blowing things to me is the acceptance among certain groups of
the idea of trickle down economics.
It is so, I had this conversation with my dad a little while ago because he listens
to a lot of podcasts and gets a lot of ideas that I just simply, I can't follow him there.
But this was one thing in particular that I went, look pops, we got to talk about this
because you are literally a math teacher.
If you cannot follow me with the math on this and come to the conclusion that no, in fact,
this is not a good concept and not something that could ever make any sense or ever work.
I don't know if we're living in the same reality anymore.
The argument, the argument for trickle down economics is that if you tax the businesses
less, they will have more money left over to shower upon their employees.
That's the idea.
It will put more money into the economy where it will circulate, which is a good thing.
That's the idea.
Let me explain why it doesn't work.
I am a business owner and this was the only way I was able to get through to him.
I was able to get through to him.
I am a business owner.
That's rare.
Let's give me a couple of hypotheticals here.
Let's say that I had a tax rate of about 50%, just to use nice, easy numbers.
Let's say my business does a million dollars of profit.
On that profit, you only pay taxes on profit.
You don't pay taxes on gross revenues.
You pay taxes after all of your expenses and deductions, you pay it on your profit.
If I have a high tax rate, I just paid half a million dollars in taxes, which sucks.
Nobody wants to pay half a million dollars in taxes.
I can see where on the surface you might reach this conclusion that, okay, well, we should
probably tax you less so that you hire more people.
Here's the mind blowing bit.
If I hired more people, say half a million dollars worth of people, the taxes that I
would pay on the $500,000 that I was left with for profit are actually only $250,000.
Now, you might say, yeah, but Linus, 500 grand leftover is a lot better than 250 grand leftover.
It is, but, and this is one of the biggest lies of trickle-down economics, that it incentivizes,
by lowering taxes, you incentivize investments into businesses so that they'll grow.
Let's think, what would be most efficient if I had a high tax rate?
Having half of my money paying taxes or hiring people, growing the size of my business, reinvesting
in it, and ultimately making money like that by doing something productive, by creating
jobs and growing the size of my business and value of the company.
Now let's do it the other way.
Let's say the tax rate is only 10%.
So now I have that million dollars and I'm thinking, oh, I paid $100,000 in taxes.
I got 900 grand.
Well, that seems pretty good.
I think I'll keep it.
It's not like you have to do like a deep psychological analysis of human behavior to go-
With basic observation, you can see it across the board.
That's pretty obvious.
So now if I were to spend half a million dollars hiring more people, why?
You have 400.
Yeah.
Well, I just won't do that.
I'll just take more.
That's what has created this climate where people are incentivized to simply hoard wealth
like dragons because that 900 grand is very effectively deployed either in the markets
or in resources, speculative investments, whatever the case may be.
Whereas if you tell me, well, hey, if you don't use it on your operating company, I'm
going to take it away.
Well, I'm highly incentivized to invest it into my operating company.
That's how this works.
That's how the growth that took place leading up to the 80s happened.
I have no idea how receptive people are to this topic or whatever else, but it's something
that's really important to me and really frustrating to me.
Especially as a business owner who like literally runs into literally that problem.
Well, yeah.
Yeah.
As a business owner who doesn't have to put myself in a hypothetical situation to understand
how I could be incentivized one way or the other.
No successful business owner likes wasting money and pretty much every successful business
owner sees paying taxes as pretty much a spectacular waste of money.
It has no benefit to me at a certain point.
From your level of perception, you're deleting it.
I don't think anybody likes paying taxes.
Obviously I'm pretty grateful that there's somewhere to, yeah, there's somewhere to take
my kids to get an education road to get there.
There's a road to drive on.
Yeah.
But from like a my bank account standpoint, I don't think it's a wild belief or a wild
perception to say that once taxes leave my wallet, they're just, they're gone.
Yeah.
You know?
Yeah.
To bring us back to the Mercedes conversation, there's a really, really good comment in flow
plane chat.
So I wanted to bring it up.
It said the state of New Jersey banned subscription models like this for cars.
I am proud of my state for this.
Amazing.
Absolutely fantastic.
Way to go, New Jersey.
Yeah.
Can we just find more politicians like the ones who got that going and only elect people
like that?
That'd be great.
That would be perfect.
I have no idea who did that, but good job, New Jersey.
Cause that's absolutely fantastic.
Yeah.
Shout out.
Super, super cool.
Shout out.
But yeah, no, I, I don't even know how we got onto that topic, but I think that was
a good rundown.
Cause I, I feel pretty strongly about all that as well.
There was another topic that was in the chat that I had really wanted to talk about, but
I didn't copy paste it into my little notepad.
So I guess I, I guess I missed out on it.
Someone said, doesn't New Jersey stop you from pumping your own gas though?
We didn't say they're perfect.
We're just proud of them for this one thing.
Okay.
I don't know that much about New Jersey.
No subscriptions for cars is great.
Good job.
And everyone can have a win sometimes.
Yeah.
Just because they're not perfect all the time doesn't mean that we shouldn't say great job
when they do something right.
Absolutely.
I think the world needs a little bit more of that.
Yeah.
You know what?
I don't agree with you about everything, but you nailed that one.
Good job.
You know, like, yeah, we just, we need more of that man.
Yeah.
Yeah.
A lot of discussion about taxes in the float plane chat.
Yeah.
Paying taxes is good when it's spent properly.
Says Poner guy watching it get away on, you know, $6,000 a night hotel rooms makes me
want to abolish tax.
Yeah.
100%.
Taxes are great.
Misuse of taxes is really frustrating.
Misuse of taxes is infuriating.
That happens a lot.
We were talking recently.
Whoa.
I don't know if I want to go down that road.
Do you know what I'm talking about?
No.
The $6 billion a year thing or whatever.
I don't know.
We can talk about it without, I do not wish to wade into this debate because it's an extremely
complex topic.
And if anyone claims to have a simple solution, they're either a simpleton or a liar.
We have a homelessness crisis in Vancouver that I think is fairly well publicized throughout
the world.
And there's a lot of debate on, you know, yeah, there's a, there's a lot of debate on
every side of this issue of this very complex multifaceted issue about what the best way
to tackle it is, whether it's safe injection sites or whether it's a harder stance against
the availability of the substances that lead people to this, uh, this homelessness and
opioid abuse, uh, crisis that we hear that we're facing in our city.
Um, and one of the things that regardless of what the correct solution is that came
to light recently here in Vancouver is that the cost of the ongoing upkeep and care is
so high, like so astronomically high that it sort of defies any kind of reason feels
unimaginable that they couldn't have done something more with 5 billion a year in funding.
Yeah.
Like I, whatever it is, I'm not saying that I have the answer.
No.
And I'm not saying that I have the answer either.
It's an extraordinary, complicated issue.
Absolutely.
But to see that many people still struggling in that way, suffering, absolutely knowing
that $5 billion is being spent to theoretically ease that suffering and seeing it still going
on is like, what?
I don't know.
I don't think it's the thing that you can completely solve at any point in time, but
the level of it in Vancouver is brutal.
So it's not even where we are.
Like we're not even that close to Vancouver, but you don't want something in your backyard
to be, nobody wants their neighbor to suffer.
Yeah, exactly.
They do.
Yeah.
So like-
If you want your neighbor to suffer, you suck.
It's that simple.
Right?
Yeah.
Anyways, off that sad topic.
PrimeGamingsBiggy229, that's a Twitch username if I've ever seen one, Devil's Advocate.
This extra charge on the Mercedes covers the extra usage of equipment due to that acceleration,
in parentheses, warranty costs.
So you can sell the same car, but Joe, who doesn't care for the G-Force, doesn't pay,
doesn't get zero to 60 in however many single handfuls of seconds.
But Jimmy does care and it might cost more in warranty returns, so he covers the cost
using this charge.
It's not a bad Devil's Advocate argument, but I would make the argument that if that
little bit of extra acceleration is going to make the car blow up, then you probably
shouldn't have it available at all.
Yeah, sounds good.
That's my response to that.
So if it's validated for it, then you should unlock it.
And honestly speaking, car warranties suck anyway.
They are not very generous.
And to be clear, it's not like I'm not painfully aware of the warranty debacle that we went
through recently, but it's not the same thing.
Car warranties are laid out in very black and white terms, and it's very clear from
my interactions with every dealer and every car manufacturer that I've ever encountered
that they will do absolutely everything they can to avoid taking care of you.
It's the very opposite of trust me bro, which we go out of our way to make sure that even
if something's not covered by our warranty, we take care of the customer.
It's a completely different philosophical approach to warranty coverage.
And so from my point of view, I just don't have any sympathy for car manufacturers and
their feeble warranty coverage at all.
Yeah.
That's true.
All right.
Should we talk about the other stuff in here?
Because it's not just Mercedes.
We talked recently about-
Alex had one more thing to talk about there.
And I think it's probably fair to point out.
Did I miss it?
Yeah.
The acceleration increase is going to boost horsepower and torque of the various trims
by 20 to 24%.
So it's not insubstantial.
Improving zero to 60 times by almost a second, which is a lot.
And Alex said, and I think he's right here.
I'm actually not super against users paying once for an update like this, especially in-
it could be less-
Oh man, maybe this is just him accepting again.
It could be less toxic.
I mean, what I'd like to see is if they do the R&D and figure out that it's better, then
they should just keep selling more cars and roll it out to everybody, provide extra value
for under promise over deliver, right?
But he's right.
It could be a lot less worse.
If they put in the R&D to increase the acceleration, which is not insubstantial, you have to go
and take these cars that you already worked on, already finished, already delivered, and
go do a bunch more extensive testing on them and go, oh wow, we can actually squeeze a
little bit more out of this.
Then yeah, by all means, offer that as an OTA update to an old model, but to be planning
on it.
The 2024, be planning on it and offering it as a subscription when you're clearly doing
the work ahead of time.
Not as a one-time either.
It's kind of like day zero DLC.
You know, you remember how frustrated people used to get, I just installed the DLCs on
the disc.
You already fucking made it.
I just paid full price for this game.
And it's not like they're giving you a discount on the car.
No.
Okay.
So that's it.
That's it for the Mercedes, but there's even more bad subscription news.
Let's go.
I don't know if it had this name the last time we talked about it, but we have sort
of talked about this before.
I think it didn't yet.
Yeah.
So Mercedes now has officially revealed their Intel on demand branding, which will allow
owners of fourth gen Xeon scalable sapphire Rapids processors to either pay a one-time
fee, not as bad, or a recurring subscription, horrible, to unlock.
This includes software guard extensions, dynamic load balancer, Intel data streaming accelerator,
Intel in memory analytics accelerator, Intel in memory analytics accelerator again, or
Intel quick assist technology.
That's quite a few things.
And some things that are actually pretty legit.
The it having an option for a one-time in my opinion, does make it better.
That helps a lot.
That helps a ton.
The fact that Mercedes doesn't have an option for a one-time purchase does make it significantly
worse.
Do I think Intel is going to make these processors cheaper to make it so that the full fat price
would be all of the one-time purchases plus the purchase of the processor?
No.
And that's where a little bit of the problem comes in.
And yeah, we'll also have to see what the one-time cost versus the subscription cost
is.
It doesn't say how much the one-time fee is due to discount if you buy all of them
at once.
I don't know, lots of unknowns, but yeah.
Extremely frustrating.
I don't mind subscriptions as much when they are commercial products.
It offends me.
And I'm coming at this from my dual perspectives.
One as a consumer and two as a business owner.
Because the reality of it is that anything that you are buying as a business should be
used to theoretically generate revenue.
And well, then it just becomes, it's an entirely different calculus, right?
Because if it's $100 a month, but I can make $1,000 a month, then it's a lot easier to
justify it.
Whereas I think that going past business, past prosumer, all the way to consumer grade
devices, it's less of a calculation of how much money can I make with this.
In fact, it almost never is how much money can I make with this?
And it's more about how does this improve my quality of life?
And that answer has to be, it improves my quality of life a lot.
It shouldn't be how much would not paying this diminish your quality of life?
Because that's when it becomes not a subscription to a service.
That's when it becomes a ransom for some kind of quality of life improvement that is being
held hostage from you.
And it's very frustrating.
There's another dystopian product paywall that in this situation, maybe kind of.
How does this make sense?
It's the Klim AI1 airbag vest.
So it's a, it's a motorcycle vest.
I believe there's actually some, there's some features of it that are like connected.
If I recall correctly, there's one of these airbag vest style products that definitely
did work like that.
I don't know if it's this one.
So it won't work unless you pay to activate it sensor platform.
It's $400 for permanent activation.
Okay.
Thank you for having that.
$120 for a one year subscription or $60 for six months.
It's actually cheaper on black Friday, apparently.
The positive argument in this case is that many people ride motorbikes seasonally.
So this allows them to pause their subscription when they don't ride.
So you buy a six month package, which is not discounted on the one year version.
However it is absolutely dystopian to have subscriptions tied to basically every bloody
thing you own.
And no, I don't think this one is one that has like a phone home.
There was definitely one that I saw at some point or maybe I'm imagining it, I don't know,
but that had like a home phone feature, a phone home feature so that it would actually
call someone if you crashed.
And that was part of the justification for the, for the subscription fee.
I remember forever ago we talked about this helmet that would deploy.
It wasn't like a motorcycle helmet.
It was a like a pedal biking, fixed gear helmet.
And it would, it would deploy over your head, you wore it around your neck and it would
deploy over your head when you were falling.
But it wouldn't do it if you weren't subscribed.
This was like a long time ago.
And I was not a fan of that, but yeah, you guys will have to tell me if this one actually
fires off a, I don't fully understand yet.
So you have to activate its sensor platform.
So is it sending data out and then it's getting processed remotely all the time?
That I'm not sure, but I wouldn't trust that.
Yeah.
I wouldn't trust that either, but that's a perfect segue into our next topic, which is
going to be Eufy sees UP, you see.
Okay.
Yeah.
What the heck is this?
Okay.
This is bad.
And no, no, don't read it all.
I'm going to, I'm going to read it out to you because it starts bad and then gets hilariously
bad.
Okay.
So the sub brand of charger slash battery giant anchor has been caught sending pictures
to their cloud servers without user consent to which you might say, yeah, surprise, surprise,
but wait, there's more Paul Moore.
A security consultant was reviewing the Eufy doorbell dual, a camera equipped smart doorbell
that claims that recorded footage will be kept private and stored locally with military
grade encryption.
What does that mean?
That means AES two 56, as far as I can tell, but upon some snooping, it turned out that
Eufy was sending user data to the cloud, including full resolution images from the camera, despite
claiming in their marketing materials that the files are stored locally and there's no
cloud integration.
Oh, Oh, there's a link.
We can actually check their website now.
Ready?
Have they updated it yet?
No clouds or costs.
Whoopsie daisies.
No costs because you're the product.
Anyway, sorry.
Um, the files are not only uploaded to the cloud, but also tagged with facial recognition
that ties that ties the images to a user.
Whoa.
Okay.
It also takes a snapshot of the feed before a face was recognized and uploads that to
the cloud as well.
And it's not like Mr Moore is just making things up, you know, going on Mr Moore story
time to make Eufy look bad.
Other users have tested the same thing and found that the files were uploaded even when
they had never used the web UI, but wait, it gets even better.
You might think that Mr Moore might've reached out to Eufy and been ignored.
Yeah.
Not so he reached out and they replied saying that they were aware of the photos were being
uploaded and that it was for notification purposes and that the pictures were deleted
afterward.
They also said that they plan to encrypt the API messages meaning, well, no, no, this is,
I'm sure they do because that will make it harder for users to detect that their images
are being, well, no, they didn't say the quiet part out loud, but they said that they will
be encrypting the API messages.
Further testing by Paul showed that this wasn't the case as after he deleted his pictures
and notifications from the app, he was still able to access the images hosted online.
Another user discovered that you can remotely start a stream and watch the unencrypted live
camera feeds without authentication using VLC.
This is, this is junk we used to do when I was in high school.
You can, you can remotely start a stream and watch their cameras live, no authentication,
no encryption.
Oh, Hey, what's up, Paul, I actually didn't know that we were specifically called out.
That was Paul on Twitter.
Well, great work Paul.
Yeah, yeah, great work indeed.
This is a massive, massive, not just user data, you know, mishandling scandal.
This is a legal problem.
Apparently Yuffie did initially deny to Paul M what was going on.
There's another thing in here where he deleted his, or deleted his account, which I thought
he said.
Oh, yeah.
Yeah.
Oh, so that's next.
Oh, wait.
He deleted his account altogether.
Nevermind just deleting.
Yeah.
So he deleted the pictures first off his local app or whatever.
And then later he found out that after deleting his account, he could still access his photos.
So their whole like, we're, we're getting rid of these, we're recycling these things.
He was also able to access the AES 128.
That's slightly less military grade encryption.
The key in plain text by looking at the API calls.
Neat.
So to recap, it appears that Yuffie is storing images of faces with usernames attached to
them on public facing servers without encryption.
They expose their own encryption keys in their API calls and allow users to access unencrypted
streams without authentication.
Our discussion question compared to previous breaches, how bad is it?
Bad.
Yeah.
Well, it depends which breach you're talking about because we've had like, there's the
Australian breach where everyone's like passports leaked out.
But then there's been leaks, breaches that aren't as bad.
So I, yeah, I don't know.
It's really bad though.
How do we stop companies from being so, by suing them in ways that are actually meaningful,
like not just cost of doing business fines, like when something this bad happens, you
actually sue them into oblivion.
One of the biggest problems.
So that everyone else is afraid.
Do you make an example out of them?
We've talked about this on Wenchua actually a bunch.
One of the biggest problems with tech lawsuits is it's often unimpactful amounts of money
that they have to pay.
Well, it's not just that it's unimpactful.
It's that it takes so long to reach a verdict and with all the appeals and all the legal
processes that you have to go through in order to actually reach the point where they pay
a fine, that the amount that they have probably made on that bad behavior during that time
dwarfs the cost of the fine.
It's not even just how much of a percentage of their overall revenue it is.
It's on a per illegal action basis that we're telling them it's worth it.
Go for it.
Yeah, absolutely.
Cassandra asked, are you guys going to continue working with Anchor over this?
Absolutely not.
We're here first.
We're done with Anchor.
That sucks because I really liked Anchor.
Yeah, I've liked a lot of their products over the years.
That blows.
That is absolutely what we should be doing, but it just sucks.
If Eufy Smart Scale is sending pictures of my balls and taint, is that a bad thing?
Sorry.
Is that one of our discussion questions?
That's a discussion question, yeah.
I started reading that before I... Okay, who wrote this topic?
This is the discussion question completely unaltered, okay?
I have a Eufy Smart Scale.
Is sending pictures of my balls and taint to the Chinese government?
That's what's written on the doc.
I should have read the whole thing before I started actually reading it out loud.
Is this one of those situations where they went on a walk with their cousins?
Wow.
I don't know if the Smart Scale has a camera pointed up.
I probably doubt it.
I know.
I think it does.
What?
I think so.
I thought it did.
Hold on.
Let's look it up.
Let's look it up.
This is talking about a smart doorbell, not a scale.
Hold on.
Maybe it has a camera.
Body fat scale.
No shot it has a camera.
Fitness, body composition.
I don't know.
I don't know.
Maybe it does.
Maybe it does.
Visceral fat.
Maybe it looks at your tummy.
Four sensors.
I don't know, Luke.
I'm guessing.
Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
When in the shower, you need to spend more time scrubbing your nether regions.
I mean, that's a notification some people could use.
This notification brought to you by the UV Smart Scale.
Be sure to check on what's going on outside your friends' doors by checking out our unencrypted
door cams.
I mean, it might have a camera.
Just because they're not advertising it.
Hey, maybe we don't know.
Yeah.
They're doing all kinds of things they didn't say they were doing.
Yeah?
There you go.
It's not like a little tiny pinhole camera costs anything, pretty much.
It could easily have one.
Yeah.
Even 1080p wouldn't be that expensive.
Yeah, that was a creepy one, right?
So I have that robot vacuum thing now, and my girlfriend was showing me this super cool
new feature of how you can call it, and you can see out the front, and you can talk through
it and stuff.
She was like, oh yeah, I think it's cool.
I think it's just so people can talk to their pets and stuff, and I'm like, this is horrifying.
I hate this.
We're taping over this.
This is not happening.
This is not cool and a big problem.
There's no reason why my admittedly quite awesome, I'm very happy with it, robot vacuum
needs a camera that is accessible through the internet and stuff.
So yeah, anyways, moving on from- Yeah, let's talk about our Black Friday deal
on LTT store.
It's big.
It's a huge- It's a pretty big deal.
Huge deal.
So if you head over to the store right now, it's the first banner you're going to see.
Get the WAN hoodies and sweatpants set for just $69.99.
That is 55% off.
All you got to do is add both of them to your cart and the discount will be automatically
applied.
This is one day only, one of our Black Friday deals, and I believe it expires either late
tonight or early tomorrow morning.
So you guys are going to want to jump on this right away.
I guess we should probably also do any... Why don't we do sponsor spots?
Just get those out of the way and then you can just chat everything else for the rest
of the show.
The show is brought to you by MEL Science.
Thank you MEL Science for sponsoring the show.
MEL Science offers safe and exciting science experiments to do with your children.
Oh, cool.
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Kids want to do things like launch rockets off sofas and MEL Science's VR courses make
that possible without any damage to your ceiling.
So you know what's safer to have in your house than Dennis and Colton?
Oh, really?
Right in the feels.
All new sponsor and they're going to do me like that?
That's really good.
That's actually awesome.
Did you know that the top performing LMG clip is me talking about the angriest I've ever
been with an employee when Dennis and Colton read my stuff?
Do you know what percentage of the comments on that video are people being outraged because
I'm asking inexperienced people to work on my house and therefore I shouldn't be surprised
that it's damaged?
They weren't f***ing invited.
So if anyone wants to help, they were invaders.
If anyone wants to help a brother out, go make sure people who are just not paying close
enough attention or just the way people assume the worst sometimes, you know?
Yeah, this is definitely 100% my fault because I'm some kind of oppressive ogre, not because
two people utterly uninvited snuck into my house and damaged it.
I don't think anyone should make that comment because now I have the right to go to your
house and mess up anything I want and the internet's just going to have my back because
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Oh good.
The show is also brought to you by Newegg.
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smart home and gaming products.
Today is Black Friday, so check out the deals and set a reminder to come back on Cyber Monday
for savings on even more items.
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link down below.
Okay, let's go have a look.
Oh man, OLED TVs have gotten fricking cheap.
Wow.
That's a 65 inch C1, so last gen for 1300 bucks.
Wow.
What the heck?
Yeah, save $800.
I was going to say that sounds like it's, that's normally a $2,000 TV.
Okay, I'm not even just like, this is not shilling you guys.
32 inch, 165 Hertz G-Sync compatible, 170 bucks from LG.
What's the resolution of this though?
That's gotta be 1080p.
You gotta love processors on Black Friday deals.
It's like $10 off.
Yeah, it's 1080p.
That's 1080p.
That's a good deal, but that's not like this TV.
160 bucks, 970 EVO, two terabyte, man, SSDs have gotten so cheap.
So cheap.
I have no, I don't understand Asus' ZenBook lineup, but I do know that that CPU is really
good and if this is a discrete GPU that has any kind of grunt whatsoever, this looks pretty
awesome.
Yeah, 3050 Ti for 700 bucks with an OLED display.
Wow, there's actually some, there's some damn good deals in here.
Huh?
You can get the Quest 2 for the price that we used to pay for it.
Because it comes with a couple of games for 350 bucks, which is kind of like 300 bucks
plus games.
If you were going, this is a weird one, but if you were going to spend a hundred dollars
on the Microsoft Xbox store anyways, this is a hundred dollar gift card that is $13
off.
Oh, okay.
I think.
I think so.
It says a hundred dollars.
Yeah.
Okay.
Oh, with promo code.
Okay.
So you have to put that in.
No, plus $13 off of promo code.
So yeah, I think it's $13 off.
Yeah.
So it's, it's free money essentially.
Yeah.
Selling hundred dollar bills for $87 seems like a pretty good play.
Yeah.
All right.
Oh man.
Oh man.
You want to see me go on another rant?
Let's talk about, let's talk about tax software.
If you guys want, I'm not going to do it, I'm not going to do it, but if you guys want
to get into it, you want to go down a rabbit hole, go learn about how through the magic
of lobbying, quick tax, basically created a moat around their utterly unnecessary business,
personal tax reporting software and made it so that something that shouldn't exist shouldn't
need to exist at all is like a billion dollar business or whatever.
There's some, there's some clips speakers.
I'm actually like, they're normally $460 around for 200 bucks.
Speakers are often something that you want to shop for around black Friday because they're
a low volume, high margin category.
And it's, it's very, they're one of those industries that is highly protective.
So they they're one of the, they're one of like, like a home appliances, they'll create
different part numbers for different retailers so that it's really hard to price compare
and stuff like that.
So that might be an amazing deal.
I just don't know.
I'm going to have to, I'm going to have to talk to some people.
I don't know.
Like any, oh, it's like the clip sale.
Yeah.
Reference cinema.
Dolby Atmos 5.1.4 system, normally a thousand dollars for 400 bucks guys.
Maybe just hit up Luke, let them know if these are actually good deals about this stuff.
Like do you want, do you want like a home theater speaker set up?
I do.
Oh, I have nothing.
It's just playing through my TV.
Right.
Oh, black Friday is the way to do it then.
Yeah.
You should, you should actually order something today.
I've been.
Yeah.
I've been waiting.
Yeah.
That's the U S site by the way.
But yeah, but you might still be able to find some good deals if Klipsch.
If Klipsch is running promos for black Friday, it's quite likely that new egg.ca also has
it.
Right.
Yeah.
I might like actually look into those.
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It can't be that early.
I mean, it's black Friday, isn't it?
Right?
Yeah.
It's black Friday.
Yep.
I thought this was black Friday.
Maybe this was written like too long ago.
Yeah.
That makes sense.
All right.
So what do you want to talk about now?
I need to get away from looking at speakers.
Oh no.
Vote plain chat is hilarious.
At Luke, you will not buy anything.
Got them.
I'm allowed to.
I likely won't, but I'm allowed to buy things sometimes.
Okay.
Got them.
I spent a bunch of money on my trip.
Jay Schmaltz, no, says, just grab something from the office.
We actually don't have a lot of speakers, but you spend money on travel.
He spends money on experiences.
He just doesn't spend money on products.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I'm still running my computer speakers.
I'm not that interested in upgrading and I'm still running that Corsair system that we
both had.
The SP 2500.
Yeah.
Yeah.
They're fine.
I don't, I don't need new ones there.
I just running like anytime we watch anything on my TV, which is not that common, but when
we do having it just pipe through the TV, like it's a good TV.
It has decent built-in speakers, but they're built in speakers, but they could be a lot
better.
Oh yeah.
You should just talk to dank pots.
Well, here's the thing.
Just because someone's into audio and knows audio doesn't mean that they've taken the
time to familiarize themselves with the entire product lineup of every audio brands because
it's basically impossible.
That is a pretty good point that I might actually just do that.
Although I like talking to him anyways, so it might be just an excuse.
Um, what should we talk about next?
Man, my hot take count is pretty high today.
You've got taxes, you fee looking at your balls.
Nothing is waterproof.
I'm doing great.
I'm doing great.
Uh, speaking of hot takes and things, should we talk about this week in Twitter?
I can go through it.
Sure.
Okay, cool.
We are going to go through in chronological order starting on Friday the 18th, Elon tweeted
out new Twitter policy is freedom of speech, but not freedom of reach negative slash hate
tweets will be max D boosted and also demonetized.
Elon clarified that this applies to the individual tweet, not the account.
Um, and what is a negative tweet?
Was asked.
Um, and it doesn't a hundred percent seem like anyone can really answer that, right?
So basically it's exactly the same problem that we've had with Twitter all this time.
Nice.
Nice.
Nice.
Um, Twitter did have some stuff that defined hate speech and he has not changed that.
So maybe that's what they're using.
This is a guess completely out of the air from me.
I have no reason to actually believe this.
Maybe that's what they're using.
I don't know.
Another option is that they're using nothing and this system doesn't exist, which is I
think is what's more real because he didn't say it said new Twitter policy is this thing.
It doesn't say that the tools to do this have been made and are being used and I suspect
that they have not been made and are not being used.
Got it.
Um, but I don't know.
Saturday the 19th.
Elon reads dates.
Can I just, can I, can I hold on?
So I'm so sorry.
Can I jump in for a second here?
Absolutely.
So the whole freedom of reach thing.
Yes.
And, and suppressing.
So I don't, I don't think it's been, someone asked in full point chat and I think this
is where you're going as well.
I don't think this is shadow banning.
Well it isn't, it's, it's shadow suppressing as close to shadow banning as you can get
without just saying shadow banning.
Pretty much.
Like I think you could go to this person's, my, my guesstimation is you could go to this
person's account and see it, which means it's not shadow banned.
Yeah, well, I mean, but I think it's just not going to be promoted on the home feed.
Well, yeah, but if it's, if it's algorithmically suppressed, isn't that exactly what many of
the groups who were so happy about Elon taking over have been mad about on other platforms?
Yep.
Algorithmically suppressing what they're saying.
So then we all agree that that's bad and that there should be, you know what, I don't know.
I just can't anymore.
It's at the very least not, not, not what he was theoretically coming in for, right?
But yeah.
Anyways, Saturday the 19th, immediately after that, he says he's reinstating a number of
prominent suspended accounts along with Trump's after 15 million users voted on a Twitter
poll with 51.8% voting yes and 48.2% voting no.
Elon claims 134 million of Twitter's, nearly 400 million users have seen this poll democracy.
Sunday was the Sabbath.
Nothing happened on Sunday.
There is something that's not in here that I don't know too much about.
There was a whole thing with like, there was a whole thing discussing like, child exploitation
hashtags or something like that.
I don't know enough about it because I've never-
Well there was stuff that went down with Balenciaga.
That I know enough about to talk outside of dog.
Yeah, that we can, that we can talk about a little bit later, but no, this was a separate
thing.
It was like hashtags that are apparently used for sharing compromising material and Twitter
for a long time had not done enough to block those hashtags from being used and have actually
done something about it now.
So I want to make sure that in all of this chaos, we recognize things that at least seem
to be going well as well.
Yeah, so I heard about that during the reading about the Balenciaga thing that went down.
And so yeah, that is actually, that's fantastic.
The fact that is something that I hated about Twitter in the past was that they were just
like openly refusing to deal with obvious pedophilia on the platform, which is just
ridiculous and unacceptable.
And now it has been dealt with, which is great.
At least somewhat, right?
At least somewhat.
I mean, to say it's dealt with, I think is pretty optimistic.
Yeah.
But at least some amount of step has been done to make it not as bad as it was, I'll
say that much.
Wednesday the 21st, Elon delays relaunch of Blue Verified, previously set for November
29th, until there is high confidence of stopping impersonation, mentions using different colored
check marks.
Good luck with that.
Yeah.
Wednesday the 23rd, Buddy tweets another poll, asking if Twitter should offer general amnesty
to suspended accounts, 3 million votes, 72.4% saying yes, 27.6% saying no.
It's interesting that he's tweeting it and it's not a poll that the platform is sending
out because I wonder what the demographics following Elon are moving forward.
Friday the 25th, Elon tweets, what he's now calling verified is tentatively set to launch
Friday, December 2nd, now with fun new colors.
Companies get gold, government representatives get gray, individuals get blue and can also
have a secondary tiny logo, whatever that means, showing that they belong to an org.
All verified accounts will be manually authenticated before check activates.
Have fun sending your personal identification to Twitter.
That is already something you had to do, but still.
Also if Apple slash Google boots Twitter from their app stores, Elon will just make a phone.
What?
Nice.
Yeah, that went really well for the zuck.
Cool.
Discussion question.
Can any social media platform owned by a private corporation really be a town square or do
we need a almost certainly worse government owned platform?
I just threw it from my mouth a little bit.
I have said that before too.
No.
There's problems across the board.
It has to be decentralized and it has to actually be outside of any individual's control at
which point it will turn into a cluster.
Basically it doesn't work.
We should all abandon social media.
Nice.
Wow.
I thought I was going to be the one with the hot takes today.
I hate it all.
You just won.
You just won the hot take Olympics.
As much as Mastodon is not going to work, Mastodon's idea of joining servers I think
is the, and like Facebook's thing where you theoretically just interact with people in
your friends group, Google's old thing where you theoretically only interacted with people
in your circles, stuff like that.
I think that's the only form that is really going to work.
Mastodon, to be very clear, tons of massive issues.
I saw some people tweeting out recently like, I wish people didn't talk down on Mastodon
being hard to use because it's not that hard to use and people should use it so we can
get off of Twitter.
Yeah.
If you join someone's server thing, as weird as that is, they can read all of your personal
messages by the way.
Hope you knew that.
There's lots of problems with Mastodon.
It's garbage.
Don't use it.
In my opinion.
That is entirely just my opinion.
Wow.
He's spicy today.
They all suck.
They're all terrible.
Just because Twitter is up in fire doesn't mean the rest aren't on fire as well.
Okay.
Come on.
Oh, we don't need this type of thing.
People act like the only possible way you can get news in the modern era is to look
on Twitter.
That is not true.
There is lots of other ways that it can work, including Reddit, which has been around this
whole time.
You think people don't get news on Reddit?
Are you crazy?
You think Reddit isn't fast as heck?
Would you have ever in a thousand years imagined yourself saying, no, Reddit will be our station.
We did it.
Read it.
I just, it's better than Twitter.
Oh man.
Yeah.
I don't know.
Okay.
We don't need Twitter.
It is not a requirement just because you can't get off.
It doesn't mean that we need it.
Okay.
Busters 123 in float plane says Balenciaga needs to be boycotted.
Can I jump in with a hot take?
Okay.
Why the fuck were you ever buying anything from Balenciaga anyway?
Not a hot take.
Are you made of money?
It's so...
The amount of Balenciaga shoes I saw on my trip was disappointing.
I would see someone walk by and be like, what is that?
Why is it doing this on your foot?
And then I'd be like, oh, it's one of those Balenciaga shoes.
Not those.
Those just look like Converse that are way too expensive for no reason.
This is 950 Canadian dollars.
It looks like Converse with a Hitler stash.
What's on the front of it?
Okay.
Did you see that?
Oh, it's just the text.
Are you okay today?
Do you need...
Do you want to stay alive?
Yeah, I'm fine.
Because you're spicy.
I'll be all right.
I'll be all right.
The point is, the way that I see a garment like this, and it's funny to me that in the
mainstream it's okay to flex by spending $950 on basic ass shoes, but you're an idiot for
spending $8 on a check mark on Twitter.
Yes, that's funny.
They're the same thing.
They are both just spending money to demonstrate that you had money that you couldn't have
possibly used for anything else.
That's the only reason they exist.
Do we talk about what happened with them?
Yeah.
They apologized and stuff.
Did you see that?
I saw they apologized, but like...
How did it possibly get that far?
They had a campaign for something.
I don't even know what it was.
I don't even really care.
It was these weird purses.
It was a doll thing.
Yeah, they were purses that looked like stuffed animals in like S&M garb.
But the photo shoot had kids in it.
Like actual young children.
Very small children, which is really weird off the bat, just due to the subject matter
of what they're trying to sell, which was already really weird off the bat.
Two really weird things.
Two things should not be together.
Right?
Yeah.
Okay.
Sounds good.
But I think that was the point of the campaign.
On the desk, there was papers.
Yes.
And without intense levels of sleuthing, but by zooming in a little bit and turning it
so that it was the right side up, you could see that these were papers about court cases.
And basically were loopholes for the, I forget if it was the distribution of or the ownership
of a base, but basically child pornographic material.
Now what I will say, I haven't seen their apology.
What I will say is that it is possible.
Think about the kinds of artiste people you've met in your life.
It is possible that at somewhere other than Balenciaga's legal executive level, it is
possible that somewhere someone was trying to be edgy and made that decision without
informing someone.
It's just so uncomfortable.
However, the campaign, which was obviously designed to generate shock, must have been
approved at a high enough level that I'm just not really willing to give them a pass on
it.
That's kind of where I'm at on it.
I do think that certain aspects of it might've happened by accident, but what I don't think
is that this was a, Oh, Oh, we had no idea this was going to be controversial.
No, no, you knew you a hundred percent knew that's why you did it.
Like I've had the experience being the executive of a company where something happens, a decision
gets made, something gets communicated and I didn't know, and I'm furious and that's
not what I would have done.
I've had that experience and I'm sure for some people at Balenciaga, that's what's happening
right now.
They're going, how could this possibly have happened?
But they also can't pretend that people who have been entrusted with the brand, some of
them at least were not involved in this happening.
Where's the parents of these kids?
There's like, I can't find it, but they like Instagram doubt some, some things apologizing
or whatever.
And, and I think they are going after, yeah, they, they, so they filed a $25 million suit
against the producers of the advertising campaign.
So theoretically it was done outside of company.
Yeah.
Okay.
So then, yeah, I told you I hadn't seen the apology, but that sounds like, yeah, the kind
of thing that would happen.
But the thing is someone must have seen it.
We've talked, I think we've talked a lot about the agency structure, right?
Where companies hire agencies and they hire agencies so that everyone who works on their
marketing is a contractor who works for a separate third party.
And so that they can quickly and easily a get rid of them or be absolved themselves
of any responsibility for what their agencies do.
That's the whole point, but it doesn't work.
You're still responsible for it.
So you might as well just have a team of people internally who understand your brand and know
what the they're doing.
And this is case in point right here.
This demonstrates why I was right about that all along.
That's why we don't have an, that's why I don't have an agent.
That's why we don't have an outside marketing agency because who could possibly understand
us and our story better than the people who work here and interact with us every day.
Yeah.
Then you don't have this problem.
Yep.
You're welcome Balenciaga.
It was a lesson on how to not be just utterly irresponsible.
If people are wondering like how the heck we got onto that topic, a lot of that went
down on Twitter.
So that was a thing that happened on Twitter.
That's what we were talking about before it was Twitter stuff.
So yeah, that was disgusting.
We didn't screen share any of the images and stuff and I highly recommend you don't look
them up cause they're honestly very disturbing.
But moving on to a more potentially positive things.
I don't know if you're ready.
Maybe it's, is it in my email as well on here?
We have images of things that might be interesting to see.
Oh, Oh, Oh, right.
I forgot Nick was there.
He crouched and then I totally forgot about him.
I don't think they were sent to my email.
I'm sorry Nick.
Uh, what email am I supposed to be checking for this?
This one's doesn't have it.
Yeah.
This one's also,
Let's see.
Hey, here we go.
All right.
We got some stuff to talk to you guys about.
We were thinking of making a wallet and I suspect you're pretty similar to me in that
the only wallets I've ever used in my life are ones that people gave me.
That's actually not true.
Really?
Are you a wallet guy?
I had, no, I had a wallet, uh, break in half while I was on a trip for work.
Okay.
So I bought a new one and it's okay, but other than that, it's still here.
I've had it for eight years.
Okay.
Um, actually here, one sec, Hey Dan, do you mind, uh, moving the camera a little bit?
I think when we adjusted things earlier, I wasn't sitting how I usually sit.
And so it's really, it's been looking really dumb.
I'll show.
Thanks.
Just go that way a bit.
Oh yeah.
No, the other way.
Yeah.
That way.
Thanks.
Uh, any who, so, okay, well I am definitely the kind of person who just uses whatever
wallet people give me for Christmas because I just cannot be arsed before this one.
It was one of those.
Yeah.
So what I'm saying now is that your wallet is like a huge status symbol because I think
it always has been.
No, no, I know.
Well, Oh, it always has been.
I just am an idiot and didn't know that.
Oh, I just didn't care.
Yeah.
So, so, so your wallet's a status symbol because it's like the thing that you use to carry
your money and you, you, when you pull it out and pay, it's like good for it to have
like good pictures on it that mean like good money inside, right?
Yeah.
Like the person who owns the company that sold you the wallet is really rich because
you're dumb.
That thing.
Got it.
Yeah.
That's a good one.
Nice.
So we were going to do a wallet that was, you know, I don't know, high quality, but
not outlandishly priced, but because I, I just kind of use whatever people give me,
I don't have strong opinions about what makes a good wallet.
So we had Matthew from the creator warehouse team, uh, mock up some wallets, fire them
over to me, and I'm going to try to find a safe way to show these to you guys without
doing anything stupid.
Uh, how about like this?
Ah, yes.
This looks pretty good.
Okay.
Yes.
Oh, whoops.
Well, spoiler.
We're also thinking about doing a tie.
Hey, that's cool.
That goes with the party shirt.
Yeah.
That was kind of the idea.
It's a, the party shirt print.
Okay.
I guess we're going to talk about the tie first.
The thing with the tie is I want to make sure that we are, we're differentiating in some
way.
Like we're okay.
So comments under the video are going to be the way to interact with this discussion.
By the way, guys, um, we want to differentiate in some way.
Like one of the ideas that I thought of is that it could come pre-tied.
That's actually not a bad idea.
Yeah.
Okay.
Or, or instead of being like a cringe clip on or like having a zipper down the thing
like this, uh, one idea I thought of is that it could, this could be like a separate piece
that goes on over top and it just like kind of runs through here so that you can still
adjust the length, but it's, you never have to tie it.
I'm, I probably exists already, but like I just wanted to, I wanted to make it us in
some way.
But anyway, these are some designs that Matthew threw together that he thought you guys might
like to look at and give us the second one.
Yeah.
Give us some feedback on here or some more kind of fun ones.
This is, there we go.
That's a bit like fun ties.
Yeah.
I don't know.
Who wears a tie anymore?
I don't know.
Like, do you want to do it with that float plane pole maybe?
Sure.
Like do people, do you actually wear ties?
I think a lot of like nerds and developers don't wear ties, so this might be skewed.
Well, that's the thing, right?
That's our audience.
So fair enough, fair enough.
And we're already working on some just really clean, like, like comfortable like office
attire, you know, that hides pit stains, you know, like really practical stuff.
Yeah.
I don't know if we need a tie.
Wow.
A surprising amount of people just right off the hop are saying yes.
Oh.
30% of people are saying yes off the hop, 34 it's going up, 35.
Okay.
Well, all right then.
Interesting observation.
The people to vote yes to wearing a tie came to the polls slower than the people to say
no.
Huh.
Okay.
So we know who feels strongly about no ties.
We're at 37 now.
It's slowly increasing.
We're passionate about no ties.
Yeah.
All right.
That's fair.
That's fair.
That's a very surprising amount of people.
So this is the wallet.
We were thinking...
That actually looks pretty sharp.
Either leather or the same material as our, yeah, the same material as our backpack.
Matthew was thinking of doing a zipper around it.
I personally find the zipper to be a little late nineties or mid nineties.
I don't know if I'm that down for the zipper wallet.
I also am not super into the square wallet, but one of the things that Matthew brought
up is that around the world, money is shaped very differently and square wallets, even
if we don't do only square wallets, could be a necessary evil for people who, for example,
use euros, which are quite, quite square compared to like Canadian, U.S. I think Australian
money is...
I don't remember if euros do this, but there's some that change size depending on denomination
as well.
I believe euros are different sizes.
Yeah.
Okay.
Yeah.
And just, you know, any feedback you guys have in the comments under this video, that's
where we're going to want to see it.
This is the Smollett.
Oh, okay.
Interesting.
So this is just a card wallet basically?
Yeah.
This is more like what I would probably use, although I carry a lot of cards and they were
asking me, they were like, why do you have so many cards?
I'm sitting here going, well, I don't want to.
Yeah.
Personal debit, business debit, personal Canadian credit card, personal U.S. dollar credit card,
business Canadian credit card, business U.S. dollar credit card.
My identification, my Costco card, my AAA membership, my Parks and Rec card.
I'm up to 10 cards already.
I don't even have any money in my pocket yet.
All the same for me minus two of the business ones, but not all four, just two of them.
Yeah.
Yep.
Okay.
Yep.
So I got to carry a decent amount of cards.
So what I kind of want is like a thick Smollett.
I think that's the one that I'm most into.
This one I've already approved already.
I love this concept for a passport case.
So you can have all your cards in there.
It's just, it's a, it's, especially if it's, you already said it's the same material as
the backpack, right?
That'd be pretty sweet to have the pairing or, or it might be leather here, backpack
material here or something like that, or two different dyed leathers.
We're experimenting with different kinds of leathers.
Some of them are like vegan leathers, but like not bad though.
I've seen mushroom leathers that blew my mind, like pineapple leather, like apple leather.
It's it's getting really good.
So we'll see.
And then this would be more like a card holder one.
So if you have any, if you have any feedback on any of this stuff, we are, we are absolutely
looking for it and would love to, love to hear what you guys have to say.
Yeah, I think that's it for that part.
Should we talk about the bonus topics?
Or should we go into meta?
Let's go into meta.
Okay.
It's long.
We should do a couple of merch messages.
Okay.
Poor Dan has already dealt with 200 merch messages.
How are you doing over there, Dan?
My fingers hurt.
No, I'm doing well.
It's a, lots of good questions coming in today.
All right.
That's awesome.
Good deal.
That's awesome.
Yeah.
We're also, yeah.
A lot of orders coming in for the, the WAN show combo.
I mean, you guys can see them flooding in down here.
So yeah, let's do, let's do a couple of merch messages.
Get me, Dan.
What is on your Christmas list this year?
Ask Jason.
My whole family just perked up cause I have not posted my Christmas list yet.
I don't know what I want.
I don't want anything.
Well, you just said you want to surround sound speaker set up.
That's too much though.
Yeah.
That's my problem.
Everything I want is something I could never ask anyone else to give me.
Yeah.
Cause if it's like 20 bucks, I'll just get it.
If I actually want it and most of the time I don't want it.
Yeah.
And if you don't want it bad enough to spend 20 bucks on it, you kind of feel bad for someone
else to spend 20 bucks.
Yeah.
You know what I asked for for Christmas?
I asked for us to not do a gift exchange.
Whoa.
I hate gift exchanges.
Wait, what do you mean by gift exchange?
I hate exchanging Christmas presents.
Gifts at all?
Yeah.
I just, I don't want any and I don't want to buy any.
Or if, if we buy you something like there are people in our lives that we buy things
for a lot actually, like my aunt, Yvonne's parents, we've gotten both of them cars.
We've gotten both of them multiple vacations.
They do a lot for us.
I've talked about this before, but with the amount of childcare that they do for us, we're
probably ahead on the deal.
Childcare is so expensive.
So like there's people that we absolutely buy things for, but I don't like buying junk.
I don't like, I don't like just getting people junk to put in their house and I feel like
a lot of the time with the reasonable, with a reasonable budget gift exchange, that's
what everyone ends up doing.
You just go to some gift guide, find some junk and then expect it to be in someone's
house when you visit them.
And it just creates all this pressure and like this guilt if your junk is not as good
as their junk.
Like I just, I, I hate it.
My family's Christmas has always been very epic.
But even when we like didn't have money and didn't have a lot of gift exchange, it was
always, we just found other ways to make it cool.
And the gift exchange has been become a little bit more serious as people have become a little
bit more successful.
But like myself and my dad are the notoriously like ridiculously hard people to shop for.
And whenever I complain about my dad, everyone snips at me cause they're like, you're just
as hard.
So like, I can't imagine other people that have to shop for both of us cause like neither
of us want anything.
And just to clarify, Ken K over on Floatplane says no adult gift exchange, right?
Oh yeah.
Christmas is for kids.
Oh yeah.
Like my, oh man.
I'm excited about buying for the little one.
My side of the family has been doing a gift exchange all the way into adulthood for us.
And as soon as Yvonne and I had kids, we were sitting here going, why on earth are you guys
spending any money on us?
This is ridiculous.
We'll participate in stupid, the stupid secret Santa stupid gift exchange, but don't buy
anything for us.
Buy stuff for our kids.
I do like, I do like buying stuff from my mom.
I do like buying stuff for my brother.
My brother and my mom, everybody else seems to have a, when they, when they do figure
out something for me, it's usually like, oh wow, I never really would have thought about
that.
Which is why I don't have it.
Which is why it's so hard.
But sorry for the intense labor of trying to figure something out.
So I like feel bad, but it's, it's cool.
So I don't know.
Conrad.
It's tough.
Conrad goes, I like giving gifts a lot.
Receiving gifts is okay, but it's way more fun to give people things.
What you're giving them is an obligation.
You're giving them pressure.
That's how I feel.
But that's the thing.
I know that's how you feel.
You should respect how other people feel about it.
Yes.
When people who just love giving gifts, give me stuff, it makes me uncomfortable.
I don't like it.
I don't want it.
And when I say I really don't want anything, I'm not like, oh, I really don't want anything.
But like, oh, if you got me something, ooh, no, I really don't want anything.
Listen to the words I'm saying.
And I don't, I don't know.
There's just, there's, there's been, there's, there's a lot of frustration because, and
I mean, maybe part of it is just like my upbringing, right?
Because I've run into situations where people have given me something that they thought
I would love.
And then it's like extremely hurtful and puts like strain on the relationship when I didn't
want it and don't like it.
When I said I didn't want it and I didn't like it, give me a break.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
That's I think it helps in, in my family that I don't think it's like that for, for anyone.
But that's also a reason why you and I have never done gift exchange between us ever.
Yeah.
There's lots of good suggestions in the chat though.
Like, uh, you can donate, um, to like, you know, uh, a shelter.
That's a cool one.
In people's names and stuff like that.
Totally, totally, a hundred percent super down.
Give food.
That's our fallback.
Whenever we're not sure what to do is we just like give people fancy food.
Um, to be clear, I don't want that either.
Like the amount of food that arrives in my name here every year, I don't, I, I, I promise
you, there's only one thing I eat.
It's the little chocolate covered cookies from Noctua.
Everything else.
And I usually don't even finish them cause I don't want like that many treats in my life.
And that's almost because it's more of a tradition thing.
All of the rest of it, all the rest of it goes straight to the staff, like kitchen and
other people eat it.
So if you were thinking that you were sending Linus some kind of like special treat to try,
I'm not eating it, I'm giving it to the people here, which is fine.
Like by all means, like send stuff and people will, will eat it.
I'm talking to brands.
Don't make things.
Yeah.
I'm talking to brands right now who are sensible enough to send things that are sealed, um,
buy Twitter blue, buy people Twitter blue for Christmas.
Okay.
That's pretty funny.
Oh no.
Anyway.
Uh, moving on.
Should we do another one?
Should we jump back to topics?
Yeah.
Let's do another one.
Question for Luke.
If the roles were reversed, would you have hired Linus for Luke tech tips 14 years ago?
No.
Yeah.
Yes I would.
And Linus, uh, six fifties and silver look amazing.
Why would I not have?
I don't know.
Yeah.
I mean.
That'd be kind of dumb.
Okay.
But the roles are reversed.
So you're the one with the channel and I'm just like a guy, like, would you have gotten
along with me that well in an interview?
Like would you like, that's what people are asking.
Do you remember how long our interview was?
Oh yeah.
That's true.
We chatted for like a couple of hours.
I think we got along pretty well.
Yeah.
Okay.
Yeah.
I mean, that's what happens.
You meet your soulmate.
I think it was more, I think it was more than a couple hours.
Cause I showed up when I mean immediately after school and then the bus systems were
closed by the end of the interview and you had to drive me home.
I think it was like, like a day.
Our interview was like eight hours and it was after hours.
So it didn't matter.
And I wasn't being paid for the time anyway.
So yeah.
Okay.
Yeah.
That rings a bell.
I think it probably would have worked.
Like I, yeah.
I don't, I don't see that not having happened.
Okay.
Yeah.
Fair enough.
Yeah.
Should we get back to topics?
Sure.
We ought to leave some merch messages for the end.
I mean, there's a lot, but okay.
Yeah.
Anyways, Meta is going hard on AI as if we didn't already know that and we're probably
doomed.
I'm not sure what that means yet, but we'll get there.
Oh, we'll get there.
Meta has been struggling lately with a layoff of 11,000 employees following economic forecasts
that, you know, didn't quite come true.
But along with the metaverse, meta, I hate this name, is putting its resources into AI.
Oh no.
Can I jump in by the way?
I didn't know this is where we were going.
You weren't present for this, but during one of our writers meetings, we had a conversation
that went, Hey, there's a couple of things that we want to kind of take a stand against.
One of them is prices that end in 99.
We will still represent them that way and we're still going to price things on our store
that way.
I'm sorry, it works.
But when we call out prices verbally, when we're reviewing items, we want to keep things
very factual.
And the fact is something that is 69.99 is $70.
So that's one.
And another, this was a me initiative.
The other one was James.
He really hates the 99 thing.
I personally am a little more indifferent about it cause I don't care.
But he doesn't like it.
The one that I don't like is using AI to describe machine learning.
I want to stop doing that.
If it's not AI, we're not going to call it AI anymore.
So to be fair, I didn't, I don't know what this is about.
I would say this is somewhat closer to actual AI once you get a little bit further into
it, but it's also not.
And I want to draw a clear distinction between machine learning and AI moving forward.
You're probably going to see us mix things up a little bit as we get this kind of implemented
and get in the habit of just seeing the letters A and I and saying machine learning.
But they are not the same thing.
An artificial intelligence should be able to reason.
Machine learning is just basically like an algorithm that runs against the wall over
and over and over and over and over and over again until it gets a good outcome.
And then does that more until it gets a better outcome and then does that more until it gets
a better outcome.
It's not intelligence.
It's not thinking.
It's just creating an enormous data set with which it can eventually find an outcome.
It's learning.
It's not intelligent.
Someone in a fellow playing chat said everything is AI when you're the sales guy.
That's pretty good.
The most immediately terrifying of which is Cicero.
I don't know.
An AI that negotiates, persuades, and cooperates with people to achieve its goals as an agent.
Going beyond the simple Turing test, Cicero successfully demonstrated its abilities to
reach agreements with other people, including creating partnerships and alliances.
I have no idea what that means, but okay.
You'll find out.
Using web diplomacy as a testing ground.
You know the game diplomacy?
No.
Oh, okay.
It doesn't really have a lot of pieces.
It's more about building alliances.
It's a social game and strategizing.
I've never actually played a full game of it, but I do understand what the game is.
And it's helpful for people to know what diplomacy is.
Context matters there, yeah.
Cicero developed plans in context and convinced real players to go along with them so successfully
that it ranked double the average score of human players and ranked in the top 10 participants
with more than one game played.
Whoa.
Diplomacy, Facebook says, was seen as a grand challenge for AI because it requires understanding
and reacting to other people's motivations and perspectives, the ability to plan future
moves and adjust strategies.
Their previous AI achievements in chess and Go were entirely logical.
Cicero's diplomacy exploits required natural language and the ability to recognize bluffs
and aggressive posturing.
That's why I said this is getting a lot closer to an actual AI than to just machine learning.
Yeah.
The ability to recognize these things would quickly be fatal in diplomacy.
The inability to recognize these things would be fatal in diplomacy.
That makes sense.
Cicero also displayed the ability to show empathy, build relationships, and speak knowledgeably
about the game, leading players to often prefer working with it over other humans.
It's not infallible, however, it can sometimes contradict its own objectives.
For example, asking Italy to move to Venice, then saying the move wasn't good.
The end goal for Cicero is only capable of playing diplomacy.
Only to be capable of playing diplomacy.
At the moment.
Which is only capable of playing diplomacy at the moment is to improve natural language
generation and planning to ease communication between humans and AI powered agents like
Siri, Google, and Alexa.
Which would be good.
I had a really frustrating experience with the Google assistant this week.
I was sitting with my son and I go, call Yvonne.
And it's like, I call Yvonne Ho and it goes, sorry, I don't have a home number for Yvonne
Sido.
I'm like, well, I didn't ask for it.
It even transcribed it correctly.
It said Yvonne Ho and I'm just like, see, see son, this is what I'm talking about whenever
I complain about this.
And then I went to record it so that I could talk about it on WAN show.
Cause it's like, it's infuriating.
And it worked.
And it worked perfectly.
Okay, sure.
The less directly threatening AI that I guess they've been working on is Galactica, an experiment
with the goal of helping organize science.
Yeah, this was interesting.
Inspired by the mass numbers of papers.
This is a thing published on COVID during the pandemic Galactica was hoped to be a way
of gleaning real information out of the noise, basically an evolved search engine specifically
for science, a user could ask what is quantum computing and it could filter and generate
an answer from multiple sources.
Kind of a noble goal.
That's actually really interesting.
Yeah, unfortunately it instead quickly went off the rails, leading some to consider it
a random generator.
When asked do vaccines cause autism?
It responded to explain the answer is no vaccines do not cause autism.
The answer is yes.
Vaccines do cause autism.
The answer is no.
Mission failed successfully.
Thanks Galactica.
Anthony says the text beneath the query seemed apt warning outputs may be unreliable language
models are prone to hallucinate text neat.
It also struggled to perform kindergarten level math providing answers suggesting that
one plus two does not equal three.
What is this all about?
What are these random things that it's listing?
Why?
Oh, we're still on the following output thing?
No way, okay.
Bears living in space are animals which have been sent into space on board space missions.
Terrific.
Oh, that's amazing.
The reason for this problem appears to be in its roots as a large language model which
can read and summarize vast amounts of texts to predict future words in a sentence.
GPT-3 is one example.
This is especially problematic because it's able to produce authoritative sounding and
convincing information that is often incorrect which basically misinformation.
This is a great tweet from Thomas Wins by the way.
It might be a great resource for writing sci-fi novels by offering plausible sounding explanations
on sci-fi topics.
A quantum engine is a hypothetical device that uses the principles of quantum mechanics
to extract work from a single heat bath.
See quantum annealing, principle of quantum tics, yeah, single heat, okay, sure.
That actually is kind of, that would be kind of cool.
You could just use it to do all the science lore in your space exploration game.
How do we know this WAN show topic was an AI generator?
Well, part of it was really hard to follow so maybe it was.
Yeah, maybe it was.
We tried.
Yeah.
So the point is that I've had a lot of people taking issue with my stance that I don't want
to call anything AI unless it's actually thinking and they've talked about how actually the
term AI gets used to describe machine learning and deep learning all the time.
Like yeah, that's the problem because like Tesla's autopilot branding which I also took
issue with, AI has a connotation that is simply more advanced than what machine learning or
deep learning are capable of ever being.
This is also why I've had a problem with it personally because you'll see people post
things and be like, look guys, we don't have to be worried about AI taking over because
I trained this model for four seconds and I have a video of it running into a wall.
Because that's not an AI.
No, that doesn't mean anything.
Come on.
Yeah.
I don't know.
Speaking of meaning something though, Marvel used to be good.
Oh.
Well, I don't know.
This was a desperation topic.
Did we need it?
Yeah, I didn't really have a ton to say.
I was just going to point out that like, or not point out, I was going to talk about how
I've been watching Marvel movies with my son because he hadn't seen any of them.
Which means movies because as far as I can tell they're the only things that release
these days.
Yeah, anyway.
The point is we've been watching them and so last night he was on Endgame and I was
like just sucked right in and I had kind of gas lit myself over phase four, whatever phase
we're on.
Are we on phase four or five?
I don't know.
I don't know.
I had kind of gas lit myself into, you know, maybe I've grown out of it or something or
maybe I'm tired of it or maybe I don't like them anymore.
You know, whatever else, right?
And it was, it was really disappointing for me because watching the ones that I've sat
down and watched all the way through with them, like Civil War, Captain America's Endgame
and Infinity War.
Winter Soldier or whatever.
Yeah, yeah.
The ones that I've sat down and watched with them, like they've sucked me in so hard.
There are great movies and I still love them and it made me really sad because what that
means then is no, it's not me who changed.
I still love this stuff.
It's them who changed.
These movies just suck and it sucks because they didn't, we didn't have to have bad superhero
movies.
We actually could still have good ones.
I mean we didn't for a long time.
I've been pumping out really high quality ones for, for quite a while.
I think, I think they've just done, I think it's that issue where like this happened to
Assassin's Creed.
I think this happened to a bunch of other games where they start releasing too many
too fast.
So the, the, the, the potential pool of really good quality ideas starts to dilute a little
bit.
Well, I think it's partly that and partly that, you know, the, the, the danger of the
threat always has to go up.
Yeah.
You always have to raise the stakes.
Oh yeah.
And there are no higher stakes than half of all life gets wiped out.
So what do you do now?
What do you do in a post Thanos universe?
Yeah, but they just, they don't have the balls to just stop.
I haven't seen Black Panther 2 yet.
I hope it could be good, but that's part of the problem too is that with all the shows,
it's just, it is overwhelming.
I can't watch every show and I can't see every movie.
Yeah.
I saw, I saw a meme the other day that was like, it was some person that looked sad and
it was like Marvel fans in, in what was it like 2085 when they, when they learned that
they have to watch 300 movies and like 47 TV shows to figure out why Peter Parker ate
cereal in the morning or something like that.
It's like, yeah, this is actually kind of becoming a problem.
It was like too much.
Yeah.
Doctor Strange 2, Captain Jinyu says I might enjoy Doctor Strange 2 more on the second
viewing.
I'm never watching it again.
It was stupid.
That bad, eh?
Yeah.
It was just pretty stupid.
Doctor Strange 1 I thought was pretty good.
Oh yeah.
It was really good.
Yeah.
I liked, I liked that one.
But that's the thing is like once you've, once you've got an origin story out of the
way, you kind of have to rely on the characters themselves to actually be interesting.
Right.
Meh.
Meh.
Uh oh.
Do we want another, uh, expansionary topic or do we think we're good?
Uh, I think we should do some merge messages at some point here.
Oh, we really have to talk about this.
Um, Solidworks is sponsoring a video soon where I need to use Solidworks, obviously.
Okay.
Uh, but the, the concept that we pitched them is something that could actually be beneficial
to other people because they might want to replicate the project when we're done.
We want to design like a, a media console, like a cabinet that can accommodate actual
proper cooling in it.
So we're going to design and build it.
Um, and like we could just, you know, mod fans into an existing cabinet, but I don't
know if you've ever shopped for one.
It's all garbage.
It's like all particle board junk.
And I'm sure I'm not the only one who's sitting here going, well, I don't know.
Like I would, I'd love to have something made of, you know, proper, proper wood.
Even if it's like a home theater cabinet thing.
Yeah.
My dad made his own.
That's like, awesome.
Exactly.
Yeah.
So we, we want to, we want to upgrade it LTT style.
He had fan holes in the back for where the consoles were and like all this type of stuff.
Yeah.
Like why isn't this a thing?
So we want enough space inside it that it's not ridiculous to get things in and out of.
We gotta be able to keep things cool.
So active cooling is a must.
We want to metal back for our cable management magnets.
Controllers need a place to live and be charged and it's going to have RGB for flare or more
practically to see when you want to get at things and plug and unplug them.
Most importantly, it's got to hold all the stuff the current one does with room for growth.
Our base cabinet had to have curb appeal to fit in with the rest of the furniture.
And after letting, Oh, Linus and Yvonne have a look, they settled on two choices, both
from Crate and Barrel.
So we are modifying them.
So what, why is this in here?
Hold on a second.
Once it arrives, we do CAD magic from there.
It's time to go to town on modifications.
That's probably going to get no discussion.
There's no discussion questions here.
Why is this a topic?
I thought we were asking people for feedback on this.
Oh, okay.
Well, I don't know why this is in here actually.
Do we want people to vote on the Crate and Barrel things?
I don't know.
No, I think only one of them's in stock.
I think we're settled on this one.
Okay.
Well, I don't know.
This is one of those video projects that apparently got away from me a little bit and I have no
idea what's going on.
And so that's what we're using.
So okay.
It has a marble top.
Ugh.
That's really expensive.
Yeah.
Um, I don't know.
I hope.
Well, maybe I'll have to talk to them and see if there's an alternative.
Let's do some merch messages.
Okay.
That's a fake topic.
Sorry.
Debated.
Written by an AI.
All right, I got another one in here for you.
Uh, hey guys.
Stoked for the beanie and the wan set.
For all of you, including Dan, what's the most egregious injury you have sustained?
I've had a life threatening injury or broke a bone.
So I'm curious what your experiences are.
Injury.
Mm-hmm.
I've had a lot of injuries.
I have never been grievously injured.
I've never been grievously injured.
No.
Um, what is the most egregious injury?
Oh, oh, no, I had the, um, uh, the, the torn, uh, whatchamacallit meniscus in my knee.
That was actually really bad for a long time.
Like years.
I wasn't egregious, but it was lingering.
Yeah.
I've had lots of things that are lingering at someone spear me in the back when playing
hockey and then I got banned from playing hockey cause it was so much of an attack.
Um, and then I had weird minor back problems for a while that are gone now.
So that's great.
I had a squatting accident where I messed up my knee and I was on a cane for a couple
of weeks.
Um, like actually had to use one.
Um, but my knee is mostly good now.
Every once in a while it's kind of a problem.
Um, I got pushed off the road by a car and had shoulder issues for years.
I still have lots of shoulder issues cause of that.
I don't know, but I wouldn't like, I'm fine.
I don't know.
Uh, drop table employee says, what about that time Dennis landed on Linus's leg?
That aggravated the existing ongoing meniscus problem that I have in my left knee.
I've been kind of considering, uh, getting like stem cell injections into it.
Apparently that's a pretty good treatment for it and it could go back to like new, which
would be pretty cool, but it costs five grand.
That's a lot, but those are the, those are the type of things where my brain goes to
like, yeah, maybe that's worth it.
Yeah.
I'd rather spend five grand fixing my knee if I had knee problems than I would on like
headphones in a new phone or something.
I don't know.
Home theater speakers.
Yeah, exactly.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I don't know.
Um, moving on.
Okay.
Here's another one.
What's the story with the audio production video?
Will it be just a PC build or will you go more in depth with things like real time performance?
Nope.
I'm coming.
I'm coming at this viewer.
Chaos five.
Sadly, most LTT content these days is just top end everything completely out of touch
for the everyday person cost wise.
So I just spend the time finding open source alternatives or learning how to do without
all the expensive stuff.
Let's go to this channel.
Hmm.
Okay.
So yeah, this is pretty, this is pretty random.
I, we've got this car radiator that we use to cool a server rack.
Okay, fine.
I wouldn't necessarily call it top end anything, but it's definitely not applicable.
Yeah, this is top end.
This is not.
This is switching to a mid range graphics card from an entry, a new entrant to the market.
Here's building a computer for the price of a steam deck, $580 certainly not top end anything.
Here's HD video on cassette.
Here's a new memory standard that you can learn about that will be applicable to basically
every laptop at some point.
So it's not really top end or not top end.
Here's talking about how buying the top end thing can actually screw you over.
Here's the team talking about stuff that they are passionate about.
For one of these people, it was like retro CRTs and consoles, not exactly top end anything.
Here's a review of a GPU.
Here's a USB drive that costs just a few dollars and can be used for all kinds of automation
and hackery.
What are you talking about?
What is the point of saying something that is so objectively clearly provably wrong?
This happens a lot.
We cover all kinds of things.
Yeah.
We've got Pi KVM, DIY router, eBay being full of cheap hard drives.
How yeah, well this, okay, WFPS for free.
That's got asterisks on it.
How AMD is going to have better value GPUs.
I got to say, I don't know what to tell you.
You know, I don't know what to tell you.
You got to actually look at the channel.
Sometimes around techtober, it's going to maybe feel like that just because there's
a bunch of new product launches and product launches almost always happen, halo product
first.
So those almost all launch at a very similar time.
Yeah, I could see that.
And that time is around now, but that's not like the creator's fault.
Those things are releasing.
Like what do you want them to not cover the like 40, 90, 40, 80, do you want to not have
videos on that?
Cause I don't know.
And here's the thing, anything that we cover today that's top end is going to be cheap
someday.
That's the beauty of technology.
You can just buy it later when it's cheap.
Yeah.
I mean, Luke and I forever have been advocates for buying used.
The whole point of why we made Scrapyard Wars was to try to make it entertaining.
And then we didn't stop doing Scrapyard Wars because we like didn't believe that anymore.
We just it's, it's tired.
Yeah.
It's a tired format.
It is tired.
It is very tired.
Um, it doesn't get as many views anymore and it's really hard to make.
It takes a long time.
It takes a lot of editing.
It's uh, it just about kills us every single time actually.
And the videos don't perform that well anymore because there just aren't really interesting
stories.
It's tired.
Yeah.
Yep.
Yep.
That is what it is.
All right.
Hit me with that.
Super chat.
Hit me with that message again.
No, we don't do those.
Um, okay, what's the story with the audio production video?
Will it just be a PC build or you go more in depth with things like real time performance
latency?
What we need to do is create an audio production, uh, benchmark suite.
And that's something that, uh, was on the writing team, but is going to move over to
the labs.
So I, it's something that we will test everything that comes through using, uh, not a specific
video.
You know, once we develop a suite and yes, we will absolutely be focused on real time
performance performance and latency because as far as I can tell, that's the thing that
matters.
Okay.
Here's another one sick deal.
Why do you guys think companies are becoming so abrasive to their customers wallets more
now?
Um, AKA these microtransactions, uh, just getting greedy or are people just rolling
over?
No, I think, I think he addressed that.
It's shareholder expectation shareholder expectations because if you don't keep your share price
up, you like literally get fired.
Yeah.
And so public companies, man, that is what it is.
Like on the one hand, I don't feel bad for multi-billion dollar corporations.
Oh, we had to oppress them.
What else were we going to do?
Otherwise we would all lose our jobs.
But like, okay.
Yeah.
That also is not good either.
Try to find more mom and pop non-public company solutions.
If that's something that you want to go after, if that's a cause you're, you're interested
in supporting.
Okay.
Okay.
Got another one here.
Um, happy Thanksgiving.
What are y'all's holiday trend traditions?
Uh, I would love to hear about them.
Well in Canada, uh, for Thanksgiving, uh, one of the things that we start with is the
beaver hunt.
So basically it's, there's not really enough beavers left in Canada because we've hunted
so many of them.
So what you've got to do is you like, not everyone can go out and hunt a beaver.
And I mean, it was especially problematic.
So like back in the late eighties, um, children would actually hunt like young beavers.
Yeah.
And so the beaver population got absolutely decimated by the practice.
Like cause they were, they were getting hunted and killed when they were still growing up
so they couldn't reproduce.
So nowadays there's really only enough beavers left here that it made sense.
So cause the beavers were like, Hey, fight someone your own size.
Yeah, yeah, exactly.
So, so now, uh, entire communities get together to, to, to hunt the beavers and it's kind
of like a, it's, it's less about eating them and it's more about like a, a catch and release,
like fun community activities.
So um, for, for, for Thanksgiving, uh, which, which in Canada is actually in April, um,
that's yeah, that's, I, I, I, I, I think fair to say one of our, one of our proudest, most
longstanding traditions.
Absolutely.
It's, it's been going on forever.
Most people don't know about it outside of Canada just because like, it's extremely Canadian.
It's a Canadian thing.
Yeah.
Right.
It's kind of like how no one else can play hockey.
Yeah.
Like we've tried to explain it to them, but they just suck.
Yep.
Yeah.
Yeah.
In all seriousness though, it's not Thanksgiving here.
Thanksgiving here is in like October and we eat turkey is kind of same as you, not beaver.
We could start eating beaver.
Uh, hello Linus and Luke timestamp guy here.
Hey, I appreciate the gift card.
My main issue with car manufacturers is them attempting to find ways to limit functionalities
while it's calling it cutting edge.
I understand costs of development and profits, but there must be a better way than subscriptions,
right?
Yeah.
It's cutting edge cause they cut the edge off.
Got them.
Yeah.
I mean the better way is to charge a higher price, but then the flip side of that is a,
you can scare people off with a high sticker price when your competitor is advertising
something lower, but with gotchas later and your shareholders don't like it because they
want to see that recurring revenue.
So again, I sympathize with their situation, but that doesn't mean I have to like it as
a consumer.
It sucks.
Yeah.
Pretty much.
Next up.
Y'all were the reason I got into tech six years ago and why-
Thanks Dan.
You're welcome.
This is for Elia.
I think.
Thanks Alayna, that's okay.
Oh yeah.
Merch messages.
Yeah, that's right.
You're the reason I got into tech six years ago and while I'm a majoring in electrical
engineering in college today.
Thanks for being an inspiration to many.
What do you want to accomplish and expect from LTE-T in 10 to 20 years?
High hopes for the future.
10 to 20 years.
That's pretty expansive of a timeline.
You guys going to hold me to this?
We've only been going for 10 years.
Oh man.
Okay.
All right.
Creator Warehouse has reached the point where it has an iron grip on the creator merch industry.
All creator merch must be made by Creator Warehouse, otherwise it's punishable by hefty
fines.
We're so far in the future that you actually just buy blank shirts that have like this
weird woven fabric screen and then you buy microtransactions to change what it displays.
Yeah, yeah.
And it's RGB.
Yeah.
It's RGB, we have either crushed or acquired every other tech media outlet and we are the
tech media monopoly.
Of the world.
Of the world.
Yeah.
In every language.
Yeah.
And we have a base on Mars.
Yeah.
Because Elon and I have reconciled and we're chill now.
Yeah.
Flow plane's chill though, we're basically doing the same stuff.
We have Merch Messages 2.0.
Yeah.
Merch Messages on the moon.
Moon messages.
Yeah, perfect.
AJ asks, with LDT Labs, would you guys consider making a more trustworthy competing website
to user benchmarks since UBS is notoriously biased and untrustworthy?
We've sort of talked about that if we let Markbench out into the world, being able to
have user submitted scores from Markbench specifically.
I think that would be- That'd help a lot.
That would be it.
If we do that, that would be how we do it, I think.
We also do intend to publish through a comparison feature our own measurements so that you'll
be able to quickly and easily compare hardware against other hardware.
It's going to take time.
It's going to take time.
Oh, hey, do you have the thing?
Do I have the thing?
Remember I said I wanted to show it to the people.
You did say that, but I don't really want to.
I want to show it to the people.
I don't really want to, though.
He's being like this about it.
Look.
Look at him be like this about it.
I am being like this about it.
Why are you being like this about it?
Because it could be cooler if it was closer to being ready.
This is really early.
Yeah, but the people.
But the people.
The people want to see.
The people.
Show it to the people.
Okay, but then there's the kindhearted people, the good people that are going to see it and
understand- That's all these people.
That it's really early on.
That's float plane chat.
And then you'll have... I've talked on WAN Show before about how games and software that
puts themselves in the same situations as Star Citizen are kind of shooting themselves
in the foot a bit because then instead of being able to focus on development, then they're
focusing on feedback.
And one of the benefits that the Lab's web dev team, which is very new, one of the benefits
that they have right now is they have no tech debt because there's no tech to have debt
on and there's no external feedback and there's no maintenance and there's anything like that.
They're just blasting and I don't really want to interrupt that flow because we're trying
to hit a particular deadline that is hard to hit, but they're trying.
But the people want to see it.
Oh my goodness.
A poll.
There's no point in making a poll.
You're all going to vote yes.
That's not-
Exactly.
Ugh.
That doesn't always mean it's a good-
So then we know the answer.
That doesn't always mean it's a good thing to do.
It could be good.
Probably not.
Well, good for the people.
I don't even think it's that.
Okay.
How about this?
Half of it's cat pictures that we probably don't even own.
There.
We can't show it.
Oh.
Get owned.
Come on.
Get owned.
That is such a cop out.
Yeah.
Well-
I think it's real.
It's almost sort of functioning build of the lab website.
We have the first actual like generated-
Generated page.
Page.
Yeah.
And so it's not art.
Like it's actually a browser can read it.
Yeah.
But I guess you guys don't get to see it.
Got them.
The point is we're making progress.
I will try to-
What a jerk.
What I will commit to is I will try to get stuff that we can share soon for the future.
Fine.
He's not happy.
No, he's not.
I think it's legit.
I think this is the right way to do it.
I will very possibly, I will tentatively agree to having something for next week.
Okay.
Cool.
Does that make you happy?
Yes.
Good.
All right.
There's some potential merch messages here, which means I'm the one who has to read them.
You know what?
I've already read this one.
I'll curate it.
Go ahead, Dan.
Okay.
Can do.
Hi.
Lucan Linus.
How do you foster, and it's gone.
Oh, there it is.
It's just up.
Ah.
How do you foster an environment, home and work, where people can freely give you constructive
criticism?
I ask this because of the whole Elon Biling.
You just don't?
No.
Do you know how many people are going to take that at face value and then my Twitter feed
and the video comments are going to be full of like, yeah, yeah, he's a jerk.
I can tell he never listens to anybody.
Sorry.
Okay.
Keep going.
I'm sorry, Luca.
I'm sorry.
I try harder.
I ask this because the whole Elon buying Twitter thing has me feel like no one was there to
tell him no, and that's a bad idea.
I feel like this is better answered by someone other than me.
Do I create an environment where people can tell me I'm wrong and stupid?
Yeah.
Okay.
I think I do it.
How?
I think I do it.
I don't know how to answer for you.
You just don't fire people that tell you you're wrong and stupid.
Well, you don't fire them for that reason.
You might fire them for some other reason, who knows?
But like, yeah, I don't know.
I don't really know how else to answer that.
It doesn't seem very complicated.
It doesn't seem complicated to me either.
Being needlessly combative and just a jerk is also not good, but it did say the question
was framed as constructive criticism.
I think constructive criticism has always been welcomed Conrad in chat.
I've told Luke he was wrong before.
Yeah.
I'm pretty sure that's true.
Most people on the dev team have told me I'm wrong before.
That's fine.
If they didn't, why like what?
What's the point of hiring them?
Yeah.
Honestly.
No, that's, that's good.
Yeah.
I don't know.
I think people have been asking me like, which one of these things do we do?
I've had this conversation with people before and I'm like, well, you choose and they're
like, why?
I'm like, well, this, this is your thing.
Like I got, I got you to do all this research for you to figure out which was the best one.
You've had the same conversation with me before.
I was just regurgitating it.
Like I don't know.
Why are you coming to me for a decision?
We know we're going to do one of them.
You're the one that's more informed on this.
You did all the research.
I'm pretty sure you know which one you want anyways.
You know which answer you want out of me right now.
Just why don't we skip the song and dance?
Yeah.
Yeah.
Like it's fine.
I don't know.
I don't know.
Again.
Yeah.
Like Luke said to me, it's, it's pretty straightforward.
I think over the years I've grown more accustomed to being in charge.
Like I really noticed it when we did that behind the scenes of the, the star forge systems
shoot and I watched it and I was like, yeah, I, I issue orders a lot.
And it's something that I've been trying to be cognizant of since then.
Like I try to not forget P's and Q's and just that sort of thing.
But in spite of that, I like to think that I create an atmosphere where people can tell
me I'm wrong.
Oh, okay.
Uh, one of the things that I do a lot is if I'm explaining something, I'll say, does that
make sense to you?
Because that leaves, um, like that's something that I think I've coached you on before too.
Whenever you're trying to, whenever you're trying to win someone over or, or sell your
ideas, uh, you have to do a comprehension check because there's two possibilities.
Well, there's three possibilities.
Either you are right and they've understood and you've got a direction to go in, or you
are right and they don't understand, in which case you don't have a direction to go in or
you're wrong and they understand just fine.
And it's you who needs an adjustment, in which case you've still got more work to do.
So if you don't do comprehension checks, then you don't have a path forward.
So by doing frequent comprehension checks or a, how does, how is it that I phrase it?
Does that make sense to you?
I think is what I usually ask.
I don't, you saying that rings a bell.
I know that the, the, the meaning of that question is said a lot.
I don't know if you always say it the same way though.
Okay.
Yeah.
I'm not sure if I always say it the same way, but that's really important because asking
questions invites feedback.
And then if they ask you a question and you don't get angry or don't punish them, then
uh, it, it's all about behavioral conditioning, right?
It conditions people like if you praise them for, uh, reward them for giving you feedback
that is constructive, well then they'll do it more.
Um, yeah, yeah, yeah.
You want people on your team that will step up when something like that's going on because
there's, there's pretty much no way that you are omnipotent.
So even if you're super good, you might not have optics on everything all the time and
someone else on your team might see something, see a reason why something isn't working or
whatever else.
And you want them to, uh, not fearing, uh, repercussions for it.
Be willing to step up and show that there's a problem so you can fix it.
Because even, even if you're like, well, I wouldn't have gotten mad at them about this,
this thing, this one, this one time, they don't know that.
Does that make sense to you?
Isn't a good question to ask because people often don't want to come off appearing stupid.
So they just say, yes, sure.
If you create that environment.
But I like to think we don't have that environment.
And you can also do a comprehension checks in other ways.
So you can ask them to demonstrate or explain back to you or ask them if they think, if
you think there's anything that we could do to make it better.
And that's where you'll, that's where you'll root out those problems.
This is where I was going.
I think you sometimes phrase it in other ways, but the general meaning, I think, yeah, well,
I'll especially phrase it in other ways if I think you actually don't understand.
That makes sense.
You've probably heard me phrase things a lot of different ways.
What a jerk.
No, but like, and it also makes sense from an optics standpoint because does that make
sense to you might in some contexts come across as aggressive or whatever else that you rephrase
it.
You make it make more sense for the conversation.
But I'll also ask, or am I just an idiot?
I ask that a lot actually.
And obviously, no, I don't think I'm an idiot.
I don't think that, I think I've been very lucky, but my success also isn't accidental.
I'm not stupid.
But you're giving them the opportunity to, even when they say like, no, to give an explanation
as to why or, or be like, but there's this context that I think you're missing or whatever
else.
Um, so it, it, it makes it really easy to transition into, uh, them expanding on potential
problems.
Yeah.
Self deprecation is such a powerful tool to get people to open up to you.
It's like, am I crazy here or is this the obvious approach?
Well, no, you're not crazy.
Like it invites people to, it makes them open their mouth, right?
It makes them start talking.
And when people start talking, they start to share ideas.
And when people share ideas, well then you get lots of ideas.
And when you have lots of ideas, it makes it easier to pick the best ones.
Yeah.
I don't know.
I mean, I just kind of do without, um, without thinking too much, but, um, yeah, this is
a really good one.
Mid and forge.
Uh, maybe I misunderstood is a really, really good phrase.
Um, that's on, that's on float plane.
Um, that's why we've talked about that on one show a little while ago.
Like that's one of the easiest ways, particularly by email to defuse a situation I must've misunderstood
or this might be a misunderstanding.
Uh, framing things as a misunderstanding is such a good way of inviting a dialogue or,
or giving someone who was wrong, uh, an opportunity to back down without losing face.
Uh, so that's another really big one is giving people who didn't understand something or
who were wrong about something, an opportunity to, uh, shift their position without feeling
humiliated.
All right.
We're going to move on.
I guess to, uh, to comment on that.
There's no go XLRs on the table.
Is there Linus?
No.
Yes.
Why?
Linus is good to work with.
All right.
Why?
Because you can just ignore me.
I can ignore you and I could win.
We've been battling for, I don't know, months now.
It's great.
Um, I will say fired yet.
I will say I finally got, uh, my go XLR installed and set up at home and stuff.
Um, and the, the reduced footprint, cause I had a really big mixer, the reduced footprint
has been fantastic, but, but it's not perfect.
I think it's doing some stuff.
Oh, I can probably help you with that.
Okay.
Yeah.
Their dashboard is like not perfect either.
I spent a considerable amount of time, like understanding what all the stupid little things
are doing.
I think it's like cutting me off at the end of sentences and stuff.
Like it seems like voice detection, like why is my mixer doing voice detection?
I don't.
Oh yeah.
Like every piece of software that I would use this through will have that, why is it
doing it as well?
Yeah.
Yeah.
I can, I can, I can help you with that.
Okay.
Okay.
Yeah.
Sorry.
Okay.
Last one.
Arla asks, listening to old WAN show podcasts on my way back to and from work.
One episode you talked about watching the new star Wars movies and commenting like mystery
science theater, still interested in doing it.
I mean, I'd be down, but you can see the enthusiasm.
We started out super enthusiastic and then we've made our way to where you saw just now,
which is why it hasn't happened.
Yeah.
That's where we're at.
Yep.
I think the problem is the main response to it has been disappointment.
Yeah.
And the main response is disappointment.
It's not a very motivating thing.
Yeah.
I don't want to just sit and like commiserate.
Yeah.
It was like rage or deep enjoyment or whatever.
It's like, okay.
I don't know if I can handle that much rage either.
Yeah.
It's a long period of time to be raging for people are saying and, or is great to the
point where I'm almost kind of tempted to Riley Riley is like really into and, or he's
got me convinced.
I want to watch it now.
And I I've, I'd given up, I've watched nothing for so long cause like, I just don't care.
Maybe I'll give it a shot.
But I've heard, I've heard from a lot of people that I know that don't like new Disney star
war stuff that Andor is good.
Okay.
Pretty much everyone that I have talked to about it has said, yeah, I don't like any
of those stuff, but Andor is good.
Okay.
It was interesting.
I'll be interested to see what direction things go with the Disney bringing back their old
CEO Bob Iger is back.
Bob Chapek is gone.
Interesting.
Yeah.
He was only on the job like a year and a half or something like that, I think wild.
It's insane to me that Kathleen Kennedy is still in charge of star wars.
Absolutely bonkers dude.
Makes no sense.
Did you see, they were thinking of giving, um, Oh, what's his face.
Uh, Ryan Johnson, a whole trilogy.
Yes.
I thought that I thought they were doing that.
I thought that wasn't even a thinking.
I know.
I think it's a rumoured that they are or something like that.
I thought it was definitely happening.
Maybe they are.
I don't know.
The point is what stop hiring people that hate the thing that you're hiring them for
because you think it'll make it more different or interesting.
That has never worked.
Anytime I've ever seen anyone talk about that happening, that happened to halo and it just
made it worse.
That happened to Disney star wars and it just made it worse.
Stop doing this.
If they hate what it is, they're probably not going to make something that is interesting
for the fans.
So you can find, you can find someone who likes something or someone who is neutral,
who can bring in new and interesting ideas that can absolutely happen.
Look at the EU.
There's a bunch of stuff in the EU that's kind of junk.
There's also a bunch of stuff in the EU.
That's fantastic.
Come on.
Laddie says he did the best one of the three they did by a mile.
No, he didn't, uh, because the problem with the three, I mean, okay, there's a lot.
A lot of problems.
But the main problem with the three is that there's no coherent together, um, arc at all.
It's just, it's random.
And so what he did is he took the story that was left with him and yes, there weren't really
a ton of notes apparently, which was a big problem.
But instead of working with what he had, he spent the next movie subverting everything
he had.
That's bad.
That's really bad.
That's not good.
Almost any time I've heard subvert in the context of we made a sequel to something,
it has pretty much never been good.
So Hasselhoff says Ryan is fine.
JJ is what killed star Wars.
No, no, no, no.
They together together.
This was a tag team match tag team for sure.
So bad.
All right.
What else we got?
Oh, I think that's it.
Oh, okay.
I guess I have to look through these potential ones, um, about a year ago on wan show says
Alex N you guys talked far too briefly about float plane as a service.
I know it could be a huge revenue stream.
Um, so how does the conversation around fast look today?
It hasn't been given up on, um, but there's some extremely large updates coming to float
plane that are coming relatively soon.
Um, I don't, it's on a temporary pause for things that I don't, for the reasons that
I don't really want to talk about because they come down to people's like personal life
and health and stuff like that.
Um, so I'm not going to go into it.
It's not like a gamified business decision thing and we'll come back to it eventually.
Um, but yeah, yeah.
All right.
Last couple here, guys, we're almost done.
Um, I don't really have a ton of thoughts on the arm versus Qualcomm lawsuit.
That's a very complex legal issue and I think it's just outside of my pay grade anonymous.
Brian T says thoughts on Twitch losing streamers to YouTube, allegedly paying less, et cetera.
Do you think Twitch will slowly lose its crown on streaming?
I think Twitch is already slowly losing its streaming crown.
That's what I was going to say is, so I think it's already gone.
Yup.
It's a, it's a matter of the writings on the wall.
Nobody does online video like YouTube because nobody compensates creators like YouTube for
better or for worse.
Right?
Like YouTube has lots of problems.
It's a, it can be an unpleasant platform to use as a user, but man, do they ever take
that money that they make by increasing friction on the platform with ads and dump it back
into creators pockets and that's content is King.
It's going to win.
They're going to do it.
That's how they win.
Yeah.
I think Twitch is going to very rapidly become the platform that people used to be on.
Yup.
And anonymous says, does Linus expect to take a swim in his pool in 2023?
Not anymore.
I would in 2023.
Oh, in 2023.
Oh yes.
Yes.
Yes.
I forgot what year it was.
Yes, definitely in 2023, but Luke was supposed to go for a Canadian Thanksgiving hot tub
with me and that did not happen.
Nope.
Not at all.
Thanks for watching.
I think that's it.
This is a cool idea.
Jake P asks, have you considered making an agreement with other channels so that if a
company tries to not give them a review sample, you would all delay your videos of that product
till they get one.
Like kind of like a collective bargaining.
No, I can't say that's ever come up.
And it's one of those things where I doubt it ever would because as friendly as friendly
as the entire tech review industry is, it's not like we're not aware that there's a limited
number of eyeballs and it's good to have content up in a timely manner so that those eyeballs
will look at your content, right?
Like we're friends, but also we're covering a lot of the same things and trying to stand
out from each other.
What happens if someone in that like union goes off the wall and does something reprehensible
or whatever else, like, yeah, it could reflect badly.
You don't want to be too allied.
There's a lot.
There's a lot of weird pitfalls there.
Hi Emily.
Oh my goodness.
Why are people, why are people dumping so many merch messages in right now because we're
reading it.
Oh man.
Backpack bundle might happen at some point, no time particularly soon because of screwdriver
limited stock.
Okay.
It was just the last, last couple here.
Finally got my backpack in Australia.
A giant pocket holding is no joke.
Heck yeah.
Uh, I had to pick up my sleep apnea machine and it fit.
Okay.
Well that's cool.
Last one.
I promise.
No, this is, Nope.
This is one I already read.
Awesome.
I, uh, I took my back.
I took my LTT backpack on my trip and thrashed the heck out of it and it looks absolutely
brand new at home.
Nice.
I was actually pretty impressed.
Yes.
We finally gave everyone backpacks.
So everyone on staff has them now.
Yeah.
Okay.
Go for it.
Okay.
Let's hope this outro works.
Oh wait, wait, wait.
Thanks.
Thanks for watching.
We'll see you again next week.
Same bad time.
Same bad channel.
Bye.
Oh man.
The queue.
There were a lot still coming.
The queue was long.
Sorry guys.
That doesn't mean they were still coming back.
Now what happened?
Oh wait, is this frozen?
Gosh, darn it.
I thought I fixed it.
Do Mel Science, New Egg, Vessi Footwear.