own earlier this week.
Did you, did you tune into that disaster by any chance?
Were you streaming it while I was at work?
No.
Oh, well still no.
Okay, fair enough.
So I did like a 10 year anniversary stream with Yvonne
as kind of a...
You and Yvonne have been together 10 years?
No, no, we have, well, we've been together longer
than 10 years. That's really ambiguous.
Yeah, so it was 10,
the 10 year Linus Tech Tips anniversary.
Okay.
So Linus Tech Tips was started on the 25th of November,
25th, 26th, whatever it was.
25th or 26th of November, 2008.
10 years ago, this whole enterprise began.
And so I thought it might be a cool idea to do like kind of
a behind the scenes slash like Q and A,
like a get to know you for Yvonne,
because a lot of people think that like,
I brought my wife to work kind of thing.
Like there's been a lot of comments about like,
what's his wife doing at work?
And what does that mean?
Ridiculous.
It means that like, okay.
And to be clear, I get it because I worked at a place where
the boss brought his wife to work.
What does brought your wife to work mean?
Brought your wife to work means that for some reason,
the owner of the company's wife is there every day
and barking orders at people,
even though she clearly has no idea what's going on.
So in that, if someone were to do that,
does the boss's wife have formal employment there?
Yes.
Okay.
She did in this case and of course Yvonne does here.
So a lot of people seem to think that that's
how things went down, but it's not at all.
She's actually been involved since basically day one.
And so I thought it would be cool to do like a stream
to like kind of get to know her and find out,
you know, what's going on or what she's done here
over the years, cause it's not insignificant at all.
And-
Do you think it's just,
you're just lucky that your wife happened to be competent?
Is that the only difference here?
No, cause I don't see any reason
why I would have involved her if she hadn't been.
Yeah.
And it's not just that, like she drove me
to make almost every major career decision
that I have made in the last,
like we've actually been together like 13 years or something
like that, it's been quite a long time.
Only married for eight of it though.
So she was the one actually driving me.
She drove me to drop out of school,
which to be clear was actually the correct decision for me.
She only drove me to do that,
not because she doesn't believe in school.
She finished her degree.
She just knew it would have taken Linus forever to graduate.
Maybe the plan was dependence.
She figured if I didn't get educated,
then I'd be stuck with her.
Yeah, a lot of people don't know this.
Actually, that's another thing.
There's a lot of speculation that she's a gold digger.
Actually, she had much better prospects
when we met than I did.
She's a pharmacist.
Yes.
I don't know why she works here.
So she was in pharmacy school when I met her.
So she had just, she wasn't in the pharmacy program yet
when we started dating,
but she got in shortly after we started dating.
So she was on a very clear trajectory.
And I was on academic probation at UBC at that time.
So I was on a very clear trajectory as well.
Why were you on probation?
Sexual harassment?
Smoking in the boys' room?
Academic probation for getting poor grades.
Academic probation.
So it was gonna take you forever to graduate?
If I ever did.
No, I would have gotten kicked out.
The only reason I didn't get kicked out was because I left.
You can't kick me out, because I quit.
I'm outta here.
I'm outta here.
They wouldn't, I don't think they would ever let me back
in that school.
So...
Where were you taking?
I was taking general science
and I couldn't pass calculus for the life of me.
She was your tutor, was she not?
She was my tutor,
but that was only because there was an interest.
That was not because I was like out looking for a tutor.
I just wouldn't have found a tutor
and I would have probably gotten an even worse grade
if not for her.
And that would have been impressive, actually,
because I got 19% the first time around
in calc 101 or 100 or whatever it is.
So anyway, what were we talking about?
Right, so anyway, I remember making this joke at the time
because I was, around the time that I was dropping out
to work as a sales rep at a computer store.
And I forget what someone said to me,
but something like, your wife's gonna be the breadwinner
in the future, like this is speculation.
We weren't even close to getting married at that point.
And I kind of went, yeah, you know what?
We live in enlightened times, you know?
Men can go to university for their MRS these days.
There's nothing wrong with that.
Because there's this old sexist joke
that men go to school, men go to college
or men go to university for their BAs,
their MAs and their PhDs.
And what do women go to university for?
Their MRS.
And so I was like, so it's kind of like a play
on that very terrible joke.
It means Mrs.
Yeah, it means like marrying someone
who's gonna have a BA and an MA or a PhD.
So anyway, that was all that I got out of school
was my MRS.
Yeah, well, I mean,
I think it's like the trend is the other way now.
Like almost the majority of couples I know,
the woman makes more.
Really?
Like your wife's friend group, it's like that.
Huh?
Yeah.
Maybe your wife's friend group though
is just like highly educated, highly driven women.
And maybe that's not necessarily representative.
They're not highly educated.
They are highly driven.
They're all in sales.
Oh, sales.
Sales is just, that's where the money's at.
Sales is actually super underrated in terms of like,
oh, you have grade 10
and you wanna make $200,000 a year, sales.
Yeah, career and personal planning
should probably focus on sales skills.
And hold on, give me one second.
I wanna finish that thought from before.
But the point is we tried to do that stream.
I managed to fail three times
over the course of like four days.
We finally got it done last night.
Go check it out.
Like calculus.
Yeah, actually my grade in streaming
is slightly higher than calculus, 25%.
It's so weird because in this world,
in this studio and in the YouTube world
and this computer world,
like you're the master of your domain here
in this little Linus world we live in.
And it's weird for me to think of Linus
like looking at a piece of paper and just being like,
I don't get it.
I don't know what to do.
I'm failing.
I was so frustrated.
It's like, forget it, I give up.
I can't think about this right now.
I'm just gonna go play Counter-Strike.
That was, that was.
And she was like, well, you should just give up.
You should drop out.
It was less that.
It was more that I was sinking worse and worse
into depression and clearly what I was doing
with the painting business and school
where nothing was a success was not helping.
And this actually segues so perfectly
into our talk about how important sales is
because all of a sudden I had this opportunity
to take this job at the computer store
that was not a ton of money,
but because there was a commission,
there was the potential to kind of scale it.
And I was really passionate about it.
Like I got a job at NCIX because I was that kid
on their forum that was constantly already a salesman
and an ethical one.
Like I wasn't about people just buying more.
I wasn't, I wasn't even on commission.
I didn't need, I wasn't even on the company payroll.
I was just hanging out on their forum
because the NCIX forum was quite frankly,
the shiz back in like the mid 2000s.
It was awesome.
It was super active, great community there.
Fantastic people, can't say enough.
Cam, you know who you are.
You're awesome, anyway.
You're Cam.
You're Cam.
But anyway, so I was already this kid hanging out
on their forum, basically doing the sales job,
which is advising people of what the right thing to buy is
and helping them pick it and making them,
making that relationship to NCIX,
make it more likely that they probably buy it from NCIX.
So even though they thought I was too young
and they were looking for full-time people
and I was only available part-time,
they made this kind of this weird exception for me
and I started my job there.
And it was, it's amazing how much of life is sales
and how applicable the sales skills that I kind of gained
just by being an enthusiast and getting a job
where my whole job was just to talk
about my passion all day.
It's amazing how that is actually a big part
of how I was able to end up where I am today.
And I'll preach sales training and sales skills
all day to anyone who will listen
because if you think about it, what in life is not sales?
Engineering.
Yes, but I would make the argument that without sales-
There's always aspects, right?
The engineers are probably in trouble.
You gotta make your pitch.
You gotta make your pitch.
To get the funding to build the thing, sure.
Get the project approved.
There's sales and engineering.
Come on, YouTube chat, give me something here.
It's synonymous with communication
when you're gonna be abstracted like that.
Yes.
So, and everything's communication.
Finding a partner in life, sales.
You've gotta sell them on what's-
Have I got a deal for you.
What's good about you, you know?
Why they should care,
why they should go on that first date.
That's sales.
Sales is all about persuasive communication
and calling it sales, I think is sort of unfair.
It's just that that's usually the word
at the end of whatever job title it is
or associate or whatever.
It's like the whole secretary receptionist thing.
Garbage man waste management technician, whatever.
If we're being honest with ourselves, it's sales.
But I think that also isn't really fair
to the complexity of that position
because it's all about building relationships
and getting to know people.
And if you are genuinely good at it, actually caring,
actually building real relationships that still exist
beyond cutting the PO and making the payment transactional,
that's not real sales.
And I think that's where a lot of sales training sucks.
Well, actually sales has changed
in the last couple of decades
because there used to be an information disparity
between the customer and the salesperson
where you walked in to buy a car,
you were dependent on the salesperson
to tell you everything about the car
because you had no way of finding that stuff out by yourself.
Now we have the internet,
everyone has access to information.
You walk in the store knowing more
about the thing you want to buy than the salesperson does.
So where in the past extroverts,
they really thrived as salespeople before,
now it's more of kind of,
you need to be in the middle of that spectrum
so that you can listen to what the person already knows
and what they want and then just help kind of funnel them
in Plinko game to the best solution.
Mathematics research Linus,
even then like you probably have to apply
for like research grants and stuff.
You have to get a job and like get tenure
at a university or something
before anyone's gonna actually pay you
to do mathematics research.
I don't know.
Yeah, it's a little tenuous
because what you're talking about is true,
but it might be like 2% of their actual day to day job.
Yes, that's true.
Plus they're gonna get the tenure after publishing a bunch.
Fair enough.
Fair enough.
People haven't really-
Are we gonna do news today?
Are we gonna roll the intro?
Sure, let's roll the intro.
No promises on the news though.
Oops.
Oh, right.
Okay.
There we go.
Yeah.
Run your books on.
I'm gonna roll the intro.
MOS, MOS, MOS-O, MOS-O-GONIZER.
Dang it, James.
Take his face out.
MOS-O-GONIZER.
All right, all right, all right, all right.
All right, all right.
I don't want James to be upset.
So we will do one tech news topic today.
The one that upsets me the most.
The one that upsets not just you, both of us the most.
Oh crap.
That, well, that's my docu-
I mean, I guess I kind of spoiled it
without actually going to the bizjournals.com.
Jibo is dead.
No!
No, anyone but Jibo!
Not Jibo!
He was an innocent.
He was terrible.
I don't know how pure he was with all that.
All that twerking that was going on.
He was not Jibo!
This was Jibo.
Oh, rest in peace, Jibo.
Okay, I know that half of you are gonna get banned
from the chat floor, but can we all please just-
Press F?
Press F to pay respects to Jibo, please.
Poor Jibo.
And this is about what it looks like to me.
Okay, stop the crying voice, it's annoying.
Whenever other YouTubers do apology videos.
Zing.
They're so bad, they're so fake.
Anyway.
Yeah, so Jibo as a company doesn't exist anymore.
This is why I never apologize for anything,
because I know you guys are too smart
for that kind of crap.
Actually, I apologize.
You should apologize for pandering.
Who do I pander to?
Okay.
So-
No, I'm serious, no, no.
I meant just now.
We'll do the news later.
Just now.
Who do I pander to?
You guys are all too smart.
Well, they are.
I think our audience is genu-
Okay, tell you what.
I have an exercise for you.
Set aside 20 minutes, okay?
Spend 10 minutes clicking on random LTT videos
and reading the top 10 comments
and just kind of going through.
Then log out of YouTube and fire up a VPN or something
so that it doesn't know who you are
and just start clicking on top videos on YouTube
and reading the top 10 comments on each of them.
Come back and tell me our audience isn't a little smarter.
Okay, you're right.
This is objective, okay?
This is not pandering.
This is just actual fact.
Anyway, tell me about Jibo.
What happened to Jibo?
Oh man, okay.
Well, let's just go through the points here.
Just a year after Jibo landed on the cover of Time Magazine.
Let that sink in.
That was a whole lot.
This is a whole other rant that I have.
Whole other problem.
Time officially-
Is a rag.
They made a listicle of their 10 most innovative
tech products of the year.
They didn't even try it, obviously.
Not only did they not try it,
they didn't even read a review or watch a video
because everyone was unanimous.
It was so bad.
It was just so useless.
Sorry.
Yeah, Jibo sucked.
Okay, anyway, there's parts that were good.
Just a year after Jibo landed on the cover of Time Magazine,
the company has closed down for good.
Jibo apparently sold its intellectual property assets
to New York-based SQN Venture Partners,
who apparently are like the vultures of the venture world.
And evidence of Jibo's decline has been accumulating
for months, including a round of layoffs in June,
an empty office space in July.
These are, these are, these are evidence.
These are flags here.
These are flags.
These are red flags.
The blog hasn't been updated since May.
There's no longer an option to buy Jibo on the website,
although the website is still operational.
Okay, is it really?
Okay, I'm gonna fire that up now.
Go ahead, carry on.
Founded in 2012, I believe by a,
was it an MIT professor who studied social robotics?
Yeah, something to do with like robotic movement as well.
Her last name was like similar to the word Brazil.
Anyway, founded in 2012, the company raised
more than $3.5 million during a 2014 Indiegogo campaign.
Didn't you?
I backed it.
You backed it.
I have the shirt.
You know what?
Hold on a second.
Go get that shirt.
I'm gonna go get that shirt.
All right, he's gone.
And it went on to collect about $70 million
in institutional venture capital.
Who invests in this kind of thing?
You, literally you did.
Well, I don't think, no, I mean,
I mean the venture, okay, I mean the venture capitalists.
Are they that, like, do they just have nothing
better to spend money?
I'm gonna go get the shirt after that.
The thing is, it was 2012.
Do you know what we could do with $70 million?
Nobody has ever offered us $70 million.
You can't even pass calculus.
But we could hire people.
But we have more revenue than Jibo.
Boom.
I actually, I actually don't know that.
They actually seem to have sold a fair number
of these stupid things.
So, and they're like $700 of these.
Okay, I don't actually know that.
They're more than that.
It was 2012 though.
So it's a little different because anyone can see today.
It's even less realistic.
You backed, he's yelling, saying like, who backed it?
It was unrealistic.
But he backed it.
So obviously.
I mean, in 2011 or 2012.
No one can hear you.
Silence.
It's stupid to make no sense.
But the thing that you didn't know in 2012
was that there was gonna be inexpensive,
fairly intelligent virtual assistants in every home.
Like.
Yes we did.
Siri already existed.
Linus is saying that Siri already existed.
True.
We knew this was coming.
You.
I mean, we thought Apple was coming.
Stop, no one can hear you.
I'm coming back.
Stop yelling at me.
I can't, I can't find the, I'm not yelling at you.
I'm yelling, I'm yelling to you.
You're yelling needlessly.
So here's, so here's the thing.
We, we didn't, we didn't know that like Amazon
was gonna win or anything like that.
But we knew that inexpensive digital assistants
were coming because they already existed.
Siri already existed.
What were the odds that this weird robot
that doesn't move, like, like the demos made no sense.
Like, oh, Jibo will take a picture for you.
Right, I'm gonna go get this thing,
plug it in and position it.
Why don't I just go get a camera at that point?
Why?
There's just no reason for anything that it,
that it was in the, it just made no sense.
I backed Jibo because I knew that if it was ever delivered,
it was gonna be a dumpster fire.
And I wanted to be the first one in on the action.
That's why I backed Jibo.
I would say, I would say you burnt your eyebrows right off.
The thing that sucked about Jibo in the end though,
was that by the, yeah, I think there's a crux of it.
By the time it arrived, it did have, I think, fantastic,
what would you call the animatronics?
The way that it moves, the way that it dances
was super like, it was like looking at a Pixar character
in front of you, it's super awesome.
That's true, and the way they did that
with just the three, four sections,
four segments of the body, really cool.
It was really elegant.
And the thing that sucked was the onboard computation,
the AI, the, and by the time it arrived in 2017,
that had been figured out by Google and Amazon
and maybe even Siri.
And if- To a lesser degree, Apple.
If they had just plugged in, like if it was just Jibo
operated by the Google Assistant, it'd be way better.
It still wouldn't have been enough at that price point.
It still would have had to have been three or $400.
It would have had to be a decent music speaker at $399
with like, oh man, what else would it have had to do?
An OLED screen, because that really ruined it.
If you look at the, can you put up that onto the screen?
All the pictures that you see are like that,
where it's like, wow, it's this pure black screen
with just an eyeball that moves around and has
all this emotion.
But when you actually had it in front of you,
you could see the LCD screen.
It was like light gray instead of a black
against the background.
And it made, people thought that it was a big,
they thought that it looked like a big mouth.
They thought the square screen looked like a mouth
and that its eyes were like-
Yeah, there, the time picture.
Yeah, the time picture, you can see it.
So you can see, see those circles at the top?
Those are the cameras.
And people thought that those looked like eyes
and that the big square was a giant mouth.
And it looked like that big, I'ma charge my laser.
Bah!
So OLED screen, necessary.
We actually talked to them about that at CES.
And they said that they just couldn't buy the OLED screens
because they couldn't meet the minimum order quantities.
They had to buy such a volume of them
and they weren't making enough GBOs to justify it.
Well, it's a good thing they didn't push
for that minimum order quantity,
because they would have had a lot more GBOs
that they wouldn't know what to do with at that point.
I tell you, man, the amount of venture capital money
that just gets thrown at stuff
that obviously isn't going to work-
Yeah.
Is just mind blowing to me,
because that money is just gone.
It's just gone.
It's not just gone.
It is just gone!
No, no, no, no, no, no, no.
A lot of it was paid to the employees.
They worked on it since 2012.
Those people put it back into the economy.
Okay, it's not gone.
But if you wanted to just contribute
to putting money back in the economy,
why don't you just donate to a homeless shelter or two?
Obviously, there are better ways
to just put money back into the economy
than creating a weird plastic AI landfill filler.
Well, that is sad.
Imagine just making a mass market product
and all the environmental damage part of that,
and then they're just in a heap,
getting liquidated, nobody cares.
Yeah, like ET for Atari or whatever.
Just literally bury them.
Yeah, that's brutal.
One thing that I feel really weird about with this one
is that I've never before felt such a visceral connection
to free market capitalism.
This thing failed for lots of good reasons,
but in a way, we definitely played a role in it failing,
because, well, they made it suck.
It arrived at our desk.
We told the whole world that it sucked.
We weren't the only ones who said it,
but we're a very visible channel.
And so in our own small way,
we contributed to these people not having jobs anymore.
And that's kind of crazy.
I feel like, part of me feels bad,
but then I'm just like, well,
I'm just like cog in the wheel of evolution
and free market capitalism.
Sink or swim, you guys should have done a better job
and I wouldn't have had to do this to you.
That's an interesting take on it.
You know, it's funny.
I don't normally think of myself as having a,
this is weird.
Like playing a role?
Yeah, as sort of playing a role
in people not having a job anymore,
but that is an interesting take on it.
I just, I guess maybe I should feel bad
because I'm sure there were very smart people,
very intelligent people who worked at Jibo.
No question.
No question.
But like, I look at it and I go,
this was so obvious to me that this wasn't going anywhere.
Like, why didn't you get out?
Like, I feel bad because yes,
I guess we contributed to the downfall though, to be clear.
In this case, I don't feel that bad
because I don't think we played that large of a role,
but like, couldn't you tell, you know?
Well, I mean, for a lot of people, it's just the job.
They know it's not gonna be an awesome product,
but they're fleshing out the resume.
Right, but here's the thing.
Like, I quit my job when it was clear to me
that the direction of the trajectory of the company
was not competitive.
And the thing is, is that it's easy.
A lot of the time people say,
well, it's easy for you to say, you know,
you had an opportunity to go and do something else.
And it's like, right.
But if the trajectory is bad
and the foundational aspects of the business are bad,
which it should have been obvious
to anybody who worked there,
but this company was not profitable
and not hitting key milestones.
So investor money was gonna run out.
What do you think is gonna happen?
So when you can see that the foundation is rotten
and the trajectory is bad,
why not go now rather than later
when all your other colleagues
are trying to find work too?
Well, because the part that you're working on might be good.
Like the person who did the animatronics,
his or her resume is still awesome at the end of it.
They'll probably find a job.
And there's lots of things.
Like I made all the APIs that connected
to iHeartRadio or whatever.
Like when you compartmentalize it,
they maybe still are proud of the work that they do.
Yeah, but here's the thing.
Like you had a pretty long runway here.
You could kind of wrap up your current project,
get the resumes out there.
Well, it's a startup.
So maybe they had vested chairs,
like a lot of their pay structure
could have been staying there.
Okay, yeah, that could be true.
See, okay, that's something I didn't really consider.
Like when I think about employee retention,
I really think about making sure that I maintain
and making sure that everybody who works here
knows that we are maintaining very strong,
like foundational strength for the business.
Like Linus Media Group is built upon rock,
not upon wood that is eaten by a carpenter.
Limestone?
Granite.
It's talc.
It's granite.
That's number one on the Mohs hardness scale.
Hardness scale.
It's granite.
You know the hardness scale?
Yes, I know Mohs scale of hardness, thank you.
What's 10 then?
I don't, is it diamond?
Yeah.
What's the only thing that can cut a diamond though?
More diamond.
Yeah.
Ow.
iPhone users.
Yeah, grade three facts.
I don't even think that's grade three facts.
It's more like grade nine facts.
Mohs hardness scale is grade eight,
but like the whole like what can cut a diamond,
that's young, that's kid stuff.
Okay, all right, all right, all right, all right.
Anyway, I just, I feel bad,
but I also feel bad in the same way
that like I feel bad for some of my colleagues
who were left over at NCIX.
Like I feel bad this sucks,
but like some of them,
and this is the funniest thing about it sort of,
some of them I had conversations with,
like, hey, it's been another year, you're still there.
What gives?
I'm like, yeah, you know, it's good for me.
I'm like, right, but like, this clearly isn't sustainable.
Why are you still there?
You know, like it's, I'd rather be the rat
that abandoned the ship than like the one
that goes down with it personally.
And I think that's-
You sound more like you were the rat that was like,
I'm gonna get into this container
and get shipped off of the ship before it hits an iceberg.
And then all the other people will still work.
They're like the rats scurrying away
from the water in Titanic.
You know, when they're trapped at the bottom
and there's those cages, the Irish people.
I am proud to say I have not watched that movie
since its theatrical release.
I do not remember.
Hmm, and you would have been, wait, 11 years old.
Yeah.
Hmm.
What, 94?
Was it 94?
No, it's later.
96?
Later than that.
I was in the third grade, I believe.
This is an important like event in your life.
Like you remember Titanic.
97.
97, okay.
I'm guessing.
Yeah, so I would have been 11 in 97.
Yeah, 1997, okay.
Boom!
All right.
I'm pretty good at that.
It's one of my like pet superpowers.
Okay, all right.
Guessing dates.
Years that I've lived through of things.
You got a good one for me here?
Um.
No.
It's a bad superpower.
It's rarely useful.
And even when it's useful,
all I get is little brownie points for myself.
Date guessing man.
Exactly.
He's no fun at parties.
What year was 9-11?
2001.
Okay, so that's easy.
I know because that was like.
Wait, I'm so stupid.
I tried, that was supposed to be a joke
where the answer was built into the question.
No.
But none of those two numbers
even have to do with the year.
Yeah, no, that was like,
that was one of the most surreal moments of my life.
So living on the West Coast,
like everything that went down was very much in progress
when my radio alarm clock.
Like when you woke up.
So my alarm clock was tuned into news radio
because I found that that woke me up better than music.
Someone like talking at me.
And the way they were talking at me that morning,
I thought I was still dreaming.
I was sure I was still dreaming.
I was like, this is the weirdest dream.
Holy shit.
Now you said a swear word.
I've never said a swear word in my life.
Look, in the.
It was 2018.
Yeah, so it was like going off next to me
and I was just like,
I just kind of lied in bed.
Is this real?
Like, yeah.
Yeah, I'm awake.
And like school all that day.
So like, I remember my grade nine science teacher
was just, he didn't really even say.
Did they wheel the TV into your classroom?
Yeah, he didn't,
because the science class always had their own TV, right?
So he didn't really say
we weren't gonna do class that day,
but he had the TV on and loud
so that like he could hear
and like we didn't have class that day.
Yeah.
Yeah, it was bizarre.
Anyway, we could do another.
There's no way to nicely segue out of that.
So let's just do sponsors.
Yeah, let's do our sponsors.
So the first one we've got is,
oh wait.
What the heck?
Oh, sorry.
So you are an Nvidia show.
The first one we've got is Moss.
Yes, Moss Organizer.
Ah, so this is the Moss Grande previous generation.
You can hold that one.
Oh, that's exactly what it says.
And I will take the Moss Grande 2018 updated version.
I want the black one though.
So this pack is expandable up to 40 liters
and I'm just gonna try and find the expandable zipper.
I'm sure it works similarly to mine,
but I can't find it right now.
Ah, it's this one.
So you can, wait.
Yes, it's this one.
So you can expand it like that.
Personally, I just don't really use that feature,
but whatever, it's up to you.
It fits up to 17 inch laptops.
It fits a 40 ounce water bottle.
You're the type of dude that always has a full backpack.
Not anymore.
Wow.
When I was riding my bike this summer to work,
I just got so sick of carrying so much stuff on my back.
Cause it's really uncomfortable in a sport bike posture
to carry a heavy backpack that I was like, you know what?
I work hard.
I'm gonna treat myself to a second one
of all the stupid tools that I keep in my backpack.
One for work and one for home.
So that's why I bought myself this other orange screwdriver.
I bought myself another pair of side cutters,
another pair of pliers,
another pair of Jewish screwdrivers,
like all those stupid things that I always keep in my bag.
So I'm actually down to,
I don't even think this is the same model.
Is it the same model?
Yeah, I think it is the same model.
Okay, well, whatever.
So this is my bag.
So the only things I have in it are my blade,
my mouse pad for my blade, blade stealth.
Oh, these phones that I've been meaning to return to work.
Tyler.
That's in the tablet pouch.
I've got my power bank.
I've got my sunglasses and the handy dandy
sunglass like armored pouch there.
Yeah, the top one.
That's a sweet pouch.
Yeah.
Oh, wow.
It is armored, hey?
Yeah, I've got my mouse.
Is that four sunglasses?
Mouse down the one, yeah.
Mouse down the one side.
I've usually got my Powerball on the other side,
but right now I have some aspirin
because my knee hurts and it's inflamed.
And then I've got my power adapter,
which is not supposed to be there.
I've got some, there's a zipper here.
Sorry, you guys aren't really able to see this,
but I've got some USBs, some chapstick,
my Angelbird portable SSD, some business cards.
This was actually a nice like best man, groomsman gift.
It's like got my name on it.
Yeah, they got divorced, but.
Oh, they spelled your name wrong.
I still have, they did not.
I know for a fact.
Isn't it S-E-B-A-S-S-T-I-A-N?
Sebastian.
Anyway,
It is.
The new one has improved strap materials
for greater comfort, a stronger ripstop nylon lining,
improved power adapter mounting and cable management use.
And you can use offer code MinusTech25
to save 10% over at MossOrganizerLOL.
Didn't have that up the whole time.
Dot com until Christmas.
Organization.
It's truly a great gift for the OCD nerds in your life.
All right, so we've also got Seasonic as a sponsor today.
Wow, since when does Seasonic sponsor the WAN Show?
And they are featuring the,
where'd it go?
It's the-
The power supply that we had over here.
Yeah, where'd it go?
Hold on, is this it?
Oh no, sorry, that's not it.
Ah, do you have the power supply?
I have nothing.
Oh, wait a second.
Do you have it?
Is this it?
No, that's not it.
Okay, well, I guess I can't really show it.
So the Seasonic Prime Ultra Ti-
Oh, I know what we're supposed to do.
I'm supposed to click this.
Dun, dun, dun, dun, dun, dun, dun.
My screen.
There it is.
Can we use cookies?
Yes, continue.
Yes, use your cookies.
Yes, you can have all the cookies.
The Prime Ultra Titanium, it's 80 plus titanium.
It has a 12 year warranty, which is ridiculous.
It's fully modular.
It's super quiet.
How many builds would you use over 12 years?
Is that two, three PCs?
That's like three to four for me anyway.
Like every three years, I'd say it's pretty reasonable
to refresh your computer.
Maybe not the whole thing.
Well, exactly, you're keeping the power supply.
Like graphics, for sure.
There would be no reason to upgrade this power supply
that I can think of for at least,
like I'm just trying to think like 10 years ago,
what was a top of the line power supply?
Like it would still be usable today,
even if it's not still top of the line.
Like I see no reason why this couldn't be the same thing.
So it's got a fluid dynamic fan, fluid dynamic bearing fan.
It's got premium hybrid fan control
so you can keep your fan noise minimal.
It's got micro tolerance load regulation,
whatever that means, basically it means good regulation
and Lambda noise level A++.
So that means the noise output stays below 20 decibels
during operation.
Pretty cool.
So check it out at Seasonic's website
or at Amazon at the link below,
leading us to our final sponsor of the day,
FreshBooks.
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So visit freshbooks.com slash wan
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Thank you, all right.
Has anyone spoken to FreshBooks?
Do they like it when I do that?
I have no idea.
I've heard feedback from other sponsors of ours
that are like, who's that James guy?
What is he doing?
I haven't heard from FreshBooks.
I don't know, they seem pretty chill.
Someone came up to me at LTX and was like, do FreshBooks.
Really?
Yeah.
All right, a Chinese scientist claims
to have created the first designer babies.
Basically this was posted by a captain to fire on the forum
and it's like kind of hard to cover this
because the actual information is a little bit spotty.
So he claims that he's created two twin girls
that are resistant to HIV virus
through some kind of mutation
that is more common in a people of European ancestry
who are survivors of like the bubonic plague
or something like that.
Like it has to do with some resistance
that was built in Europe,
but that wasn't built over in Asia.
Now, pretty much everyone is mad.
The university that he was currently on unpaid leave
from the scientific community at large,
the tech community at large and like the university
was unaware of the project and its nature
and is calling on international experts
to form an independent committee to probe the matter.
Like people be mad.
Is there anything else to kind of say about this?
Well, we can talk about what actually allegedly happened.
So the best way to get acquainted,
I thought our good starting point
is actually look at a YouTube video
that the doctor whose last name is He,
which is actually kind of confusing,
but he uploaded this video
and he gives his perspective on the whole thing.
He doesn't call them designer babies.
He thinks that this is totally ethical and moral.
And I think he makes a compelling case for that here.
And he explains the process,
which is this is fertilization by IVF.
And so what they did was they inject the father's sperm
into the mother's eggs.
And shortly after that, they inject some proteins
and they carry out the gene surgery using CRISPR technology,
which I understand that there's enzymes are programmed
to look for particular patterns in DNA.
And when they find them, they just snip that out
and only that.
So what they did was they sequenced,
they did whole genome sequencing on the,
I guess the cells on the babies
before doing the genome surgery and after.
And the reason they did that is then they can compare
to see if any genes were affected
that weren't intended to be affected.
And according to this person's, the doctor's statement,
the scientist does say that they didn't alter anything
that they didn't intend to alter.
So it was a success in that regard.
So if it's all true that these children are alive now,
they've been born and they will be the first living people
who have had their genes edited.
If it's true, dang.
Crazy.
So it's gonna be an interesting,
it's gonna be an interesting couple of decades.
Where do you use,
I see you scrolling over to other topics,
but where do you sit on that?
I'm like, wow.
That is a pretty big question, isn't it?
I think it's, I am far more comfortable
with cybernetic improvements to humans
than I am with genetic improvements to humans.
I think we open ourselves up to a lot of potential problems.
I mean, even this one already has problems.
Like I believe West Nile virus
is more likely to infect these little girls.
Ooh, that's hairy.
So you're gaining resistance to one disease,
but you're actually losing
some of your resistance to another.
And of course they're not consenting to that.
And of course they are not consenting to that.
That's a whole separate issue.
I'm sort of talking 10,000 foot view right now.
What does it mean to humanity?
Now, as long as it takes place
on a relatively limited scale,
I doubt that we're opening ourselves up to mass extinction
through having edited all of our own genes,
like of an entire,
if we edited an entire generation's genes
and then all of a sudden something came along,
we made ourselves weak against it
and piff, humanity is dead.
Like, I feel like that kind of thing
is very, very unlikely.
Most of my discomfort, like so, right.
So in small doses,
I actually don't see it necessarily being a huge problem.
The issue is that, yeah, I broke it already.
The issue is that it opens itself up
to all kinds of misuse.
And I don't have a ton of inherent trust for people.
There is nothing that I have seen in my life
that would lead me to believe that people as a whole
will take some kind of technology
and use it only or even primarily for good.
Are you, if you take a step back
and let's say everything was executed perfectly
and maybe we're not even considering the fact
that the alterations are inheritable
by that organism's next of kin,
if you just answer the question,
is it okay to remove conditions
that are just objectively harmful
to someone, like take away the muddying
of the fact that this may have increased their likelihood
to contract a different disease.
So I have to ignore that we might not know
what the hell we're doing.
Yeah, like let's just say in a vacuum,
it's like this procedure is guaranteed
to only remove something harmful.
I guess your slippery slope arguments still remain.
It sure does.
That's the thing about a slippery slope
is it starts really high up
and you actually don't know that it was a problem
until you're face down in the mud at the bottom.
So yeah, right.
So like I said, I am far more comfortable
with cybernetic upgrades than I am
with actually making changes at a genetic level, but-
Does that apply even if those cybernetic upgrades
are happening to an infant?
Like the baby's born and you put an implant in the tank.
We already have that.
It's called a cochlear implant.
You can use it to restore hearing to an infant
that was born profoundly deaf.
So we have that.
Now, the funny thing about that is you might think
as a hearing person, as someone who was born
without what at least some people
would describe as a disability,
you might think, well, this is so obvious.
If they couldn't hear and now they can hear,
then that's great, cochlear implants for all.
But there are actually people out there
who feel like they've kind of had
their identity robbed from them
because a cochlear implant does not make you hear
as well as a hearing person.
In the installation of a cochlear implant,
they have to remove, and this might be outdated knowledge,
but as far as I know, they have to remove everything
that was left of any hearing capability that you had
before they performed the operation,
making you sort of not whole as a person,
depending on how you kind of define that.
And so they can end up feeling kind of robbed
of a community because if they hadn't had it,
they would have been part of the deaf community
versus if they just hadn't been born deaf,
then they would have been part of the hearing community,
but they're kind of in this weird limbo.
And you could make objective arguments all day
for why their position is wrong,
but it doesn't ultimately matter
because if we remove the emotional component
of being human, then why even bother?
Wow, I have a perfect emotional segue for that.
We've got a $100 Super Chat over here we should read out.
Oh, really?
Wow, who does that?
Thank you in advance.
Hey, thanks for the everything during my job.
I hope you remember me.
Shoe 125, probably not.
LOL, still never got float plane working.
Ah, thanks for the everything.
Is this a person from the NCX forum?
During my job, I don't know.
Or someone just watches LTT at work.
I don't know.
Jules asked, how was the cake?
I actually didn't get any.
I did.
How was the cake?
Very tall.
It was like, how wide do I have to make this piece
to get a regular amount of cake here?
And I was like, I'm just gonna go a regular width.
And it's like, shh, shh, shh.
Was it yummy?
It was like an almond style cake, right?
Or almond or something?
Isn't that marzipan?
I don't know, was it good?
Yeah, there's lots of custard in it,
which I'm all about, many layers.
It was like, I had this tiger.
Wait, did I take a photo of this?
Whatever.
It was good, thanks for the cake.
May Cal says, make a computer that is made
from chip to chip transistor and resistors from scratch
that equals something from 1995.
I think Alex is actually working on a DIY CPU
at the moment.
By the way, hi Scott.
No, it's like, there's like a guide you can follow.
Like he doesn't have to invent it or anything.
So yeah, we have Rick from Rick and Morty working in.
Oh yeah, he's just over there making a flux capacitor.
Defibrillator, wait, what?
Space time, space time defibrillator?
When you're time traveling
and someone's under cardiac arrest.
All right, one more topic.
The most important one of this week.
That's what you're picking?
Starbucks.
Starbucks says it's gonna block porn
on its public wifi next year.
So if you wanna jerk it in Starbucks,
you're gonna have to do it sometime
between now and December 31st.
Hey, you don't have to.
I vote for Christmas day
because it'll probably be pretty empty.
Yeah, there's not really much else to say about that.
Well, there's a little bit actually.
So there was, they're late to the party.
There's some people who are actually kind of mad
because Starbucks took up to two years longer
than other chains like Subway and Chick-fil-A and McDonald's
who have already implemented this.
And there's actually a petition that circulated
that got 26,000 signatures
that was circulated by an organization
who fights with this kind of stuff.
And they have some pretty compelling arguments
of why this should happen sooner.
So they'd say that it helps teens and underage people,
like when they don't have these filters at Starbucks,
these kids can go to these public wifi places
and watch stuff that they otherwise couldn't watch at home
under their home wifi.
And that also applies to sex offenders
who by law can't visit certain sites,
but apparently they can when they go to these public spaces.
Actually, there is one more topic.
YouTube is bringing down the paywall
on their YouTube originals.
Apparently they have determined that the ad supported model
that has sustained YouTube
basically since its acquisition by Google anyway,
is the way to go.
So YouTube originals are still getting funded,
but they will become free and ad supported
rather than only being available to YouTube premium members.
Personally, I think this is a good move.
I mean, for my part anyway,
YouTube premium is already a compelling enough value ad
or a compelling enough value
just based on that I don't have to watch ads.
Like I don't even watch much YouTube.
Like half the time I'm blocking the ad on my own video
with my premium, stupid premium membership.
The fact that like YouTube or Google play music is included,
like it's already a great value.
I don't really understand why we need these originals,
like original series.
But what this will probably mean
is that YouTube is gonna be cutting back the kind of funding
that they had put aside for YouTube originals.
Like it seems to me that they've just done some
re-cojiggering of the math on the backend
for how this YouTube premium money is getting distributed.
And they've gone,
well, we're spending a lot on these originals,
but they don't seem to be actually driving subscriptions.
So what if we just kind of cut
that entire part of the equation
and like we can still do YouTube originals
and that's like cool,
but let's just make it accessible to everyone
and then maybe it'll get a lot more views
and then like maybe people will care more about it
and we can go like mainstream with this whole thing
and then there's like merch and licensing
and like other platforms that we can license it to
and like they could take a more conventional approach
to high production value content.
That's right because even though it was a ton of money,
hundreds of millions of dollars,
that's still a drop in the bucket
compared to the tens of billions
that other services like Netflix and Amazon Prime
and Hulu are spending, so.
And no offense to ourselves and other YouTubers,
but like quite frankly, I would pick,
you know, the actual experienced Hollywood production people
that Netflix works with over like YouTubers
for these kinds of.
Well, the thing is you lose the spirit
of what you like about the YouTuber.
Like I love Vsauce.
I didn't, Michael, if you're watching,
I didn't really care for the mind frame that I watched.
And the reason, even though the concepts are cool,
is because it's no longer Vsauce.
Because the cool thing you like about Vsauce
is Michael's cool entrance and like it's just one camera
and he sets it up in a weird location in his house
in a weird way.
And then suddenly I just feel like
I'm watching Discovery Channel or something
with these epic sweeps on booms
and it's like, it doesn't have the same character.
So this is gonna start, it's actually starting in 2019,
but it won't fully affect all originals until 2020.
There's probably some contract stuff going on there.
So some of the originals will be free to watch with ads soon
and others you'll have to wait a little while.
Speaking of things that you'll have to wait
a little while for, the WAN Show.
You're fixed next week because we are done for the day.
It's, wow, it is 20 after six.
We are super done for the day.
We will see you again next week.
Same bat time, same bat channel.
Bye.
See you next week.