What is up ladies and gentlemen, how are you all doing?
It's Friday and it's time for the WAN Show!
At least an hour and twenty minutes ago it was, but that's okay because I was at Hoffman's
doing one of our best Intel Extreme Tech upgrades yet, that's right, same five thousand dollar
budget as everyone else, but Hoffman wasn't content to upgrade his PC.
Hoffman wasn't content to get a new TV.
Hoffman wasn't content to build a sick NAS and have like a sick studio monitor audio
setup.
Hoffman did all of those things.
I haven't done the math, but I don't think it quite adds up, and I think he might have
stolen more gear from the office more brazenly than anyone yet to this point.
Yeah, I can never have an upgrade.
Oh, because I'm gonna find everything?
I don't even know.
I don't think you own anything that didn't come from the office.
Yeah, probably not.
We've got a great show for you guys today.
Valve has partnered with iFixit to offer replacement parts for the Steam Deck, and get this, they
did us one better and they're working on replacement parts for the Valve Index as well.
Freaking A, ladies and gentlemen.
In other news, Nintendo, hey, the polar opposite, Nintendo shuts down the Wii U and 3DS eShops
cutting off the only legal option to purchase that library of games.
Thanks Nintendo.
I sure won't have to resort to any kind of piracy or privateering or yeah, you like that
ship right there?
It's got a little Jolly Roger on the top and everything.
We're gonna have some details about this a little bit later.
What else we got today?
In continuing bad news, Microsoft will soon require a Microsoft account and internet connection
to set up Windows 11 Pro.
That's good.
That's good, right?
Also, Dr. Ian Cuttriss- Dr. Cuttriss!
Leaves an antic.
Dr. Megatransferspersecond!
Which, I don't know, it might be good for Ian, depends on where he's going.
Yeah, depends on where he's going.
Maybe he's going to work at Burger King.
Yeah.
Do they have Burger King in the UK?
I have no idea.
Hey, respect to Burger King employees, by the way.
I do love me a Whopper.
Do you?
Yeah, I haven't had one in a while.
It's sort of a bad burger, but- I can't remember the last time.
Yeah, it's not that great.
I think it might have been literally when I was in high school.
We did it!
Oh man.
The
show is brought to you by Corsair.
How appropriate.
Squarespace and Zoho CRM.
I was saying before the show started, in the name of what these shirts are talking about
representing, you should have had like one, or like three or something, than just have
the Corsair logo instead of the pirate ship.
I don't think Corsair wants to get drawn into our nonsense.
Love our friends at Corsair.
And you know who we really love these days?
Valve has been just on freaking fire lately.
So this story comes from Valve's own blog, Steam Deck Replacement Parts.
Look at this, we've got a freaking amazing x-ray image.
I know, isn't that stuff so cool?
And if you watch the video as well, they go 360, they go all the way around the x-ray
image, and it looks absolutely fantastic.
Absolutely love it.
iFixit posted their teardown of the Steam Deck, so Valve linked to that as well, obviously.
No one's gonna do a better teardown of the Steam Deck than iFixit, freaking love it.
But that's not the big news.
Valve posts things in their blog all the time, presumably actually, I don't really follow
the Valve blog.
I found it kind of cool actually that they posted this in their blog with a 7 out of
10.
Yep.
Which, spoiler alert, the score that they got was 7 out of 10.
Yep.
Which is solid, especially for like an all-encapsulated device.
Yep.
But it's not like perfect.
Nope.
And Valve still posted this whole thing and was like, yeah, we're proud of this.
They're taking a pretty overall transparent approach to things, but the big news of course
is that Valve has committed to iFixit as one of the partners that they are going to be
working through for Steam Deck replacement parts.
And not just Steam Deck replacement parts, but also, and this is something that I specifically
brought up with Valve, because I was extremely frustrated about something that happened with
my personal Index, also Valve Index VR headset replacement parts.
So here's the details.
Valve is still hammering out the details.
The main complaints that iFixit had were the difficulty in removing the battery and not
having a modular charge port.
Most of the other parts are modular, entry is relatively simple.
There's a lot to like, and they are really, that's it.
We don't have a ton of details, but what we can talk about at the very least is what this
is like compared to the process that you would have to go through for something else.
I mean, if you buy a handheld from Nintendo, you buy a controller from someone like a Sony
or a Microsoft.
If you're within warranty and you have some kind of problem, whether it's a failing battery
on a PlayStation controller, less of a concern with Microsoft's controllers, I know that's
a super polarizing issue, Microsoft's use of AA batteries in their Xbox controllers.
For me, it's such a no brainer because you can use your own rechargeable batteries.
It doesn't have to...
You don't have to buy throwaways.
You don't have to buy disposable batteries.
Very good rechargeable batteries.
Please stop buying disposable batteries.
Anyway, that's a whole, whole separate conversation.
So whatever it is that you buy within your warranty period, if something goes wrong in
most cases, so even though they will cover you, they will get you a new one.
In most cases, as far as I can tell, there is little or no effort made to reclaim the
still working components.
I mean, I could be mistaken.
Does Microsoft sell refurbished controllers, for example?
Or are these done through third parties?
Xbox refurbished controller.
Here we go.
Best Buy.
Best Buy has Xbox refurbished controllers?
Yeah, I was going to say, I feel like I've seen that before.
But this is Geek Squad certified.
So what does that even mean?
That sounds like a returner.
Yeah.
Walmart also has refurbished controllers.
Not from where?
Where do these refurbished controllers come from?
It says the, it says the brand is Microsoft.
Okay, that doesn't necessarily help us that much.
Destroyer Samuel says, I think they do.
So that's great.
As long as it's within warranty, you're covered.
Fantastic.
But what if there was a way for even if you were outside of warranty to replace that controller
or the component of that controller that was failed without actually discarding the whole
thing or sending it away to be refurbished?
What if it was something that could be serviced on your own?
You haven't taken apart a Steam Deck yet.
No, but I have watched the whole iFixit video.
I can tell you having done it, it's as easy as they make it look, if not actually more
so.
And there is, they do point out like replacing that battery would make me cringe and not
from like the modern interpretation of cringe, but it would make me cringe because I'd be
very concerned about like breaking the screen and stuff because the amount of pressure they
have.
Yeah, the battery replacement is not good.
The battery replacement is rough, but we said we don't have a lot of details.
That's probably because to be honest, you should go watch the iFixit video, it's fantastic.
But the fact that you can individually replace the thumbsticks, the fact that you can individually
replace so many different things, it's really nice.
Like the, I understand why they lost points and what they lost points for makes sense,
but the things that they gained points on were really strong.
Like it wasn't like, okay, they got that checkbox so they get that point.
It was very, very good in each one of those categories and I think they should get credit
for that.
Okay.
Hey, thanks very much, Floatplane Chat.
Microsoft uses refurb controllers for warranty replacements and it was pointed out that Microsoft's
controller warranty is actually only 90 days, making it basically worthless.
How is that even legal?
That's pretty brutal.
A 90 day warranty on like a $70 product, sorry, I'm speaking in Canadian rubles here.
I think they were closer to 50 or something like that.
That's brutal.
That is really brutal.
I don't, I don't like it.
Surprised it's not a one year minimum.
So I want to tell my story about what happened with the index because it was actually a pretty
similar situation to what someone might find themselves in with the Steam Deck.
I have no idea what happened and this is sort of unique to VR because I was in VR and everything
was fine and I came out of VR and one of my thumb stick tops was missing.
Okay.
Did it fall off on its own?
Maybe.
Did I knock it off while flailing around playing beets favor?
Probably not.
But maybe.
But maybe.
But what was frustrating for me about it was that, A, I was out of warranty, which I was
fine with.
This is like, I feel like this narrative is going to get turned around on me somehow.
Like I've just...
That happens.
Yeah.
I've had a, I've had a fantastic, yeah.
I've had a fantastic streak lately of saying things and then replying to posts where people
are absolutely outraged that I would say a thing I completely didn't say, which is awesome.
Always the most fun because it's kind of like what happened with the iMac.
I was outraged that Apple wouldn't fix it.
Not because I wasn't willing to pay for it.
I was outraged because it's your product and you're not providing me replacement parts,
so you better be able to fix it.
That just seems very straightforward.
And you guys were happy to pay like Apple fees to fix it.
Yeah.
Yeah.
It was expensive.
They said...
They just wanted to fix it.
They said, no.
We will not fix it.
Them saying no is the problem.
Buh-bye.
Not there being a price.
Yeah.
It was the iMac Pro and there was literally nothing professional about the experience
of getting that product serviced.
So anyway, my warranty was up, so I was a little choked about that.
I contacted Valve Support and honestly, my whole experience with the Index has been terrible.
A, it wasn't available in my country, so I had to find someone in the US to buy it and
ship it to me, which then caused problems when I had not one, but two components fail.
Three?
Have I gone through this two or three times?
I can't remember.
The point is I've had to go through Valve Support every single time I contact Valve
Support about this stupid thing.
They're like, we are very confused as to why you have this thing.
It doesn't appear to be under the right account.
I'm like, okay, you're in the support ticket system, right?
So why don't you just spend four seconds looking at if I've ever contacted support about this?
I have, rather than me typing up this long explanation of us going through this whole
song and dance again, because the first time I contacted them, it was like two day response
times every time.
Like it was really slow and we had to go back and forth like four times.
I was like, guys, oh, it's base stations.
I had base stations fail a couple of times.
Guys, I would like to use my VR headset.
I don't even mind that we've got to work through this stuff, but at the time, this thing hasn't
even been out for a year.
So does it have a one year warranty?
Okay, then what's the question?
That's something that has always triggered me.
When you contact a company about a warranty replacement and they go, oh, well, here's
a bunch of paperwork to demonstrate that it's within its warranty period.
And you go, this product launched 46 days ago, unless I have a time machine or my name
is Marquez Brownlee, I haven't had it for a year.
Okay.
Why would it, is that a reference?
It's a thing.
It's a thing.
He opens so many of his videos with, so I've been using this for whatever and it's like
kind of a meme in the community.
The point is my, my experience with valve support has been overall positive, but imperfect.
So I contacted them about this controller and like proactively, I'm like, Hey, can we
just not do that whole thing this time?
I don't even want a warranty replacement.
I think I'm outside of warranty.
It doesn't matter.
The thing is not overall broken.
My thumb stick just got disappeared.
I would just like a new one of those.
And they were just like, no.
As a show of good faith, we will cover it for you under warranty.
But this is your last one, by the way.
I think, I think they mentioned that don't quote me on that one.
But I could tell there was some, there was some hesitation about covering it under warranty,
which is fine.
Cause it was out of warranty.
I didn't expect them to do it at all.
I expected to repair it myself.
And then they were like, and we don't do that.
We have no way of doing that.
And I was really disappointed at the time because it was less about that I wanted the
replacement.
I could just buy a new one.
Yeah.
So they swapped a whole new controller out for it.
And that wasn't the solution I wanted.
I actually was like kind of looking forward to ripping it apart and replacing it.
And quite frankly, I expect that to be much more difficult than something like the steam
deck because of all of the sensors.
Oh yeah.
Like covering the outside of the index controllers.
Like it was going to be, what are the knuckles controllers?
I think is like the, the, the cool name for them.
I expected it to be an absolute nightmare, but I, I don't know, I kind of wanted to tackle
it anyway.
I thought it might be fun.
And they just had absolutely no way to deal with that whatsoever.
Oh no, Jayden, one of our floatplane devs is like, I am presently in customer support
hell for my index that came with a broken speaker.
I'm so sorry to hear that your, that your VR headset that you will not be able to beat
me at Beat Saber with is not working properly.
That's a real shame, Jayden.
Is this challenge version two?
No, no, no, no.
There's no challenge.
I, Jayden came in, schooled me on my own headset and that's honestly a big part of what got
me like heavy into Beat Saber because you don't set the high score on somebody else's
gaming device.
Well, okay.
It's rude.
You would.
I totally would.
Yeah.
I would.
It's just, I'm just saying it's a rude thing to do.
All right.
Hey Jayden, look, at least yours isn't a US unit and you have to explain why your name
in your profile says Linus Sebastian, but the name on the invoice says John Martin.
So John, John arranged it for me.
I was like, I could tell you were going to say the person's name and I was like, hold
on.
I was like, okay.
No, it's all, it's all, it's all good.
But I was like, look, John, you know, we facilitated your relocation.
Can you do me a solid and use your special Murica powers to obtain an index and ship
it to me?
He's like, don't worry.
I got you bro.
Thank you very much.
Um, what am I even supposed to be talking about right now?
Right.
So this is great.
So they've gone from me being extremely disappointed because I wanted to be able to repair my own,
my own valve crap to working with partners to provide these parts.
And working with partners is actually such a good way to do this because something that
I think a lot of people don't necessarily realize if they haven't worked in distribution
or warehousing or retail is how complicated it can be when you've got something that doesn't
fit into your regular workflow.
At NCIX, I wanted to bring in water cooling.
And at that time, the only shops that carried water cooling stuff were really boutique.
I'm talking like ADP mods.
I'm talking frozen CPU, like those, those old school water cooling first, everything
else later kinds of shops, Tetris tech shop.
Okay.
Like those kinds of shops.
And for them, the concept of having an entire spool of tubing and just measuring it according
to whatever it said on the invoice and then packing it into the box was no problem.
But here's what you guys probably don't realize if you've never worked like in a warehouse
before is that you can't count on every single person in the warehouse to have the same
level of like game sense and capability.
If NCIX, okay, if NCIX had had a by the foot method of buying tubing, cause that's what
I wanted to do.
Cause I was like, well, obviously they should just pick how much tubing they want and then
they should get exactly that amount.
And my boss basically sits me down.
He goes, look, if it's on the invoice tubing per foot times six, half the time, they're
going to end up with six, one foot chunks of fricking tubing.
And the other half the time, they're going to end up with six whole spools and we're
going to end up with like a $600 shipping bill.
And I'm like, right.
So that's actually, that's actually one of my like proudest innovations in like, it's,
it's one of those hilarious things that nobody would ever know if I didn't bring it up, but
I am the driving force behind why water-cooling tubing comes pre-packaged in 10 foot length.
The 10 foot box.
The 10 foot box.
That's me.
I, because, because our warehouse could not be trusted to measure length of tubing and
put it in a box and because to my knowledge, we were the first component first water-cooling
second retailer to actually sort of try to ship any kind of volume of this stuff.
I pushed back on every single supplier and that, and so SwiftTech would actually pre-cut
the 10 foot things for us.
And they were just wrapped in like, like kitchen cling wrap, like, exactly.
Right.
Because they didn't have a system for it.
They were like, this is the stupidest thing ever.
It comes in bulk from Tigon or like a ClearFlex or whatever, why would anyone, why would anyone
want to have like two feet of extra tubing leftover after they finished their build?
This is so dumb.
And I was like, look, if you guys can't figure this out, either I'm going to have to stand
in the back of the warehouse and cut these things and wrap them up and I can't, I have
other things to do, or your warehouse is going to have to do it because I trust you to be
half burn, halfway near competent.
And then my warehouse can just have one thing with one label to put in the box and ship.
So that, that is my, my innovation, because I remember the transition of like stupid problems
need stupid solutions needing to buy from frozen CPU.
Yeah.
And then being able to get it from NCX, but it was like, and then being able to get it
from NCX and it was in those like black boxes.
I don't even remember who that would have been PrimoChill, I think was the first one
to have like really nice, often like a little thing of colorant or whatever.
Yeah.
It was like a pre-prep thing that they put in.
Oh, no, wait.
There was someone that we did dies with.
I can't remember.
It might've been PrimoChill.
I actually, I don't quote me on it.
You said PrimoChill.
I remember their name on the box.
I think that was right.
Yeah.
It might've been, it might've had both options.
It might've been PrimoChill, but yeah, that's, that's the whole story.
And the rest is basically history.
It's pretty funny actually.
That's the whole start of it.
And that's interesting insight because before the show, we stopped talking about it because
we were like, save for the show.
But I was wondering, I was thinking, I was like, they're clearly shipping hardware.
Like it's not a company that has not shipped hardware before.
Why don't they do the sub components?
There's probably a reason, but I don't know.
And that's it.
And that makes sense.
That's exactly it.
When your, I fix it, there is a certain level of aptitude that you're going to be expected
to have.
You will be, you will be expected to recognize, Oh no, this is completely the wrong joystick
assembly.
How did this end up in the wrong bin?
Let me put that away.
This is the right, like you will be expected to have that degree of knowledge valve.
Can't necessarily expect.
This is a gigantic box that says index on it.
Blanc.
Exactly.
This is a decently sized box that says one barcode, one line item on the invoice.
It has to be that simple when you're operating at scale.
So that's why you need to build partnerships with smaller, more boutique distributors when
you want to do something like this.
So I understand why it didn't happen overnight and massive respect to valve for figuring
it out, getting it done.
I'm so excited.
And I have another thing to tell you guys, I'm really excited about here.
And that is that the privateer shirt is live.
There's a lot of really cool stuff to go over with this particular shirt first and foremost
is that this is the first design in our new colored, our own branded t-shirts.
That's right.
Ladies and gentlemen, we are no longer simply printing on American apparel shirts.
These have been probably about two years in the makings.
That's not about right.
Basically, basically two years in the freaking making.
We went through, oh my God, over 10, well, probably over 20 different suppliers all told
trying to, trying to get this nailed down at least round.
Yeah.
At least that it was not freaking simple to get a basic high quality t-shirt.
Like why is it this hard?
Well, because you're the customer.
Okay.
I'm a difficult customer.
I will grant you that, but they are good.
I wasn't willing to settle for almost as good as what we had.
We were only going to be able to start doing our own blanks if they were as good or better.
And the skin feel is absolutely freaking fantastic.
I think the fit is great.
The fabric hang, just the, like the way it hangs, I think is absolutely awesome.
And this is our first design on it.
Sarah did this actually, if you're subscribing to on float plane, there's a VOD of it.
Sarah did a four hour stream.
Did you know, do you know about this?
Yeah.
Yeah.
So Sarah did a design stream where she really went into her creative process, how she, how
she goes start to finish, how it goes when she creates a design.
So she worked on this whole thing with her, we had her, her drawing tablet, like capture
it.
It was using an iPad, I think for this one.
Yeah.
So that was really cool.
And then finally we've got colors.
We've launched the first colored shirt on the store in, since constellations, because
the problem is that aside, okay, honestly, I never would have needed to switch away from
American apparel if they had managed to keep their distribution in order, but we couldn't
get consistent.
There is another issue.
I do know about that one.
Yeah.
You're, you're not on mic if you don't come a little closer though.
We placed an order for black shirts in August and I'm still waiting on like 2000 of them
to show up now.
Yeah.
Like it's, it's bad.
Yeah.
And that's black shirts.
That's black shirts.
So we've had to stock, like I remember Nick and I having a conversation where he goes,
this is a lot of money.
And I know it's really stupid for us to essentially be a t-shirt warehouse, but we have to order
in this volume because the supply is so inconsistent that if we don't, we will be a t-shirt store
with no t-shirts, which is essentially what American apparel is at this point.
The nice thing is with these t-shirts, it's only going to take like three months to get
a restock, even though we're literally shipping them from like China.
So yeah.
And, and because we're dyeing our own raw fabric, we can get them in any color we want.
They don't have to all be black.
Like Oh man, it didn't even matter how far ahead we ordered any color other than black.
It was just, it was a joke.
Like it was an absolute freaking joke.
So we're launching our first colored shirts and we're going big or going home here, ladies
and gentlemen, because we've got six different colors that I kind of want Nick here for just
in case he has any insight.
It says, so the shirts aren't American apparel anymore.
I love how your American apparel shirts fit personally disconnected from the store.
I don't talk about any of this stuff ever.
I can't really tell a difference in terms of fit mission accomplished that it was exactly
the goal because consistency is your hand doesn't fit in it at all.
Not even slightly.
I love it.
Consistency is like honestly 80% of the battle.
We wouldn't have, we actually had a lot of internal debate around different, different
materials.
There was, there was a lot of push internally for like a bamboo based fabric.
There was a lot of push internally for playing around with the cotton poly blend.
The blend that American apparel uses, it turns out is extremely unusual.
It's a 50 50 and what's way more common is a 60 40 or a 70 30 blend a 60 40 is the big
one though.
And so if there were cases where we would go to fabric fabric wholesalers and they'd
be like 50 50 what's that?
No, we literally cannot create it and we're sitting here going, well, do you make fabrics
or not?
Isn't that your entire job to make fabrics?
I forget where I was going with this story, but it's like ridiculous.
So anyway, so because, because it was so important to me that the feel be consistent because
people love our shirts.
Like have you seen the reviews of any design of shirt?
There'll be comments about the design, but a lot of it is just like, especially in like
mystery shirt, some people get upset cause they get like three of the same one.
They order like three mystery shirts and they get like all the same one.
We've mostly resolved that.
By the way, guys, we actually go out of our way to print like old out of print design
sometimes so that mystery shirt will just have like kind of fun, random stuff in it.
If you get more than one of the same one, you have reached out to support, we'll get
you sorted out.
This is a 60 40.
This is a 60 40.
Oh, I didn't even actually realize that this is a 60 40, but it feels basically the same.
So the point was we needed to find something that had the same field because people love
the shirts and we didn't want to put ourselves in a situation where people are going to go,
man, these guys shirts used to be really nice.
Yeah.
Yeah.
How much would that suck?
Yeah.
I don't need that in my life.
So it's launched, it's launched, it's out there.
The privateer shirt will be your first, this will be your first opportunity to try our
own label shirts.
There was actually one other reason for us to do this and it had to do with getting our
trademark application sorted out.
So if we didn't have our own label on the garment, it was going to affect our ability
to get our LTT or LTT store or whatever the trademark application was through because
there's a big difference between printing your logo on someone else's garment versus
having your own garment with your own labeling and your own, um, your own, your own care
tag, your own, like not, you know, product makeup stuff.
Um, anyway, so pretty cool.
So it's in your eye for mine.
I was shooting with a prime and you need to, and I have a hard time not laughing.
So half of these things, half of these shots, I'm pretty sure I'm like literally mid laughing
because he would tell me like, I'd be trying to make an angry face and I feel like I'd
be doing an okay job and he'd be like, look constipated and I would just burst out laughing.
Two eye patches.
The world's on luckiest pirate.
I have no clue what's happening with my left hand in that photo.
I don't remember doing that.
I feel like I was going to like do something else and he just took the photo.
I mean, you clearly couldn't see what you were doing.
So there's that.
True.
Yeah.
I think my favorite for me is definitely this one.
Yeah, that one's good.
I was talking to him about it.
Cause that stupid gun had like an orange, you know, this is definitely a toy tip on
it.
Man.
When we were kids, like toy guns were still cool.
They didn't have to have like, and it's not just an orange tip.
It's like this big around like it has like an orange plunger on the end of it.
It's so dumb.
Anyway.
I was like, Hey, can you Photoshop that off?
And can you actually give me like a, like a muzzle blast on it?
And he's like, sure.
So we also launched the, oh, that's right.
This isn't the only launch I forgot about that home.
So our first lady's garment is finally here.
I'm sorry for everyone who was excited for the underwear.
It's not the underwear yet that is coming.
But our first lady's garment to sir is going to be this, the women's crop sweatshirt and
the women's high-waisted sweat pants.
So we asked the ladies in the office to model this up for us.
Got Yvonne Nicole.
Oh, that's so cool.
They all coordinated to go be on set together.
That's awesome.
Oh, and Hey, how does the, um, how does the, how does the mouseover thing work where you
can, Oh, that's not on this one yet.
Okay.
So the stuff for today doesn't have it, but every other item on the store says the size
the model is wearing now.
So it'll give you a better idea of, uh, whether you can expect it to fit or not.
Oh, this is so fun.
Look at these guys in there matching.
Actually beautiful guys probably don't know some of these people.
So Sarah, obviously, and then we've gotten Nicole and then that's Emily, uh, who's one
of our editors.
There you go.
Um, did, did, uh, did my picture where I ambushed Yvonne end up in here?
It's there.
There's just a million photos.
So it's hard to find.
I snuck up on her.
She didn't know I was coming.
That one's funny.
She's wearing the black one anyway.
So yeah, we've got the women's crop sweatshirt and we've got the, uh, high-waisted sweatpants.
There they are.
Do do do do do do.
Sure.
I'll show you the swacket thing.
Is there logos on the women's clothes?
I don't think there's anything on these.
Also the Rose color on the store.
We need to today was a little crazy today was a little hectic.
I think power went out.
I think this had like 40 images or something like that.
I mean, we never go, we never go easy on the images.
So yeah, sometimes it takes some time and there was a power outage today.
So that was pretty cool.
Anyway, there it is.
Oh yeah.
Yeah.
Okay.
Nick insists.
Nick insists that I show you guys insist that I show you guys the sizing thing.
It is very cool.
So model size, model Linus size medium.
So as you go through, you can see who is it, what's Oh shoot.
Yeah.
Sorry.
Who is it?
What size are they wearing?
And then we're, I think working on a feature where you're going to be able to see other
LTT items that are also pictured no ETA on that, but yeah.
So a lot of the time when I'm modeling a new shirt, I'll also be wearing a toque.
So if you're able to be like, Oh yeah, here's all the things that are in here.
So there's Anthony with our triple XL.
So this is, this is going to be really great because it's a lot easier to kind of put yourself
into like, Oh, I'm more of a plouffe or I'm like more of an Anthony body type.
How do I want it to fit on me and kind of looking at how it hangs on them and, and imagining
that for yourself.
I mean, we're going to obviously continue to revise this, keep, keep trying to do better.
Keep adding more variety, but that's kind of the update for today.
Pretty exciting freaking day.
I'm super stoked.
Yeah.
Thank you.
Thanks Nick.
Toby G asks, can you put the model's height as well?
I mean, yeah, we'll, we'll get you guys more detailed as time goes on.
Obviously with, in some cases we don't want to get too granular.
I think we're not going to get to the point where we're like, yeah, here's everyone's
measurements and height and weight and you know, shoe size and blood type.
Like I don't think we're going to get that detailed, but we just want to get really interesting.
Yeah.
So we want to get you guys as much detail as we can.
All right.
All right.
Why?
Will there be more designs coming down the line in that particular color combo asks W.D.
Stevens?
I have no idea.
I quite frankly don't know.
Like this one?
Really liked the aqua yellow color combo that you're wearing.
Oh yeah.
Yeah.
The other two are the pink and pink and aqua, I guess.
And the, and the purple.
I actually really liked the green one, but a prime said I should wear this one and I
don't.
I like this one.
I just, I really liked the dark green one.
Yeah.
Oh, the olive.
Olive.
This is, this is all of Luke.
Okay.
All of drab.
Sarah's my, uh, it's like the idea of a pirate shirt being in all of drab privateer shirt
higher.
I have a tear.
Yes.
Get the words right.
Yes.
It's very important that there's a distinction there.
The word matters a lot.
It's extremely important.
Okay.
It's a big deal.
Yeah.
All right.
Why don't we jump into our next topic?
Whoops.
That's not what I meant to do.
Why don't we jump into our next topic here, ladies and gentlemen?
Yes.
Nintendo pulls on opposite of valve and makes your old device worse instead of helping you
make it better.
Nice.
No, I mean there was dozens of us that owned, we use, so why don't, why don't you honestly,
I'm, I'm kind of upset.
So one of the things that prompted me to ditch our Wii, which was the kids only cared about
Wii games anyway for a Wii U and do the migration thing because that was actually kind of cool
in its own sort of Nintendo, very locked down kind of way.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So I did the migration.
It was unique from the Wii to the Wii U.
One of the things that prompted me to do it was the shutting down of the Wii eShop.
And I was like, Oh, okay, I can't buy like retro games or anything anymore.
So this thing is sort of deprecated.
So we gave it away and we switched over to the Wii U and it's like, Oh great.
So now that's gone too.
Like this sucks.
Is the overhead of maintaining this really so high that it doesn't justify, I really
don't think so.
That it doesn't, that you can't justify the occasional, like if people are buying this
stuff from time to time, I doubt there's almost nothing to any amount of people buying that
type of stuff.
And I seriously doubt the overheads very high at all.
I really think they're just trying to get people on newer devices that are better at
pushing things towards you.
That's my, things are bad.
Well, talk us through it.
Talk us through it.
So yeah, eShops are shutting down Wii U 3DS late March, 2023.
So you've still got a while.
The shutdown will remove access to the online libraries for both consoles where many games
are still eShop exclusive.
Among the games that are going to be lost in regards to being able to purchase them
legally.
I mean, there's a long list.
I don't think I need to go through all of this.
Maybe pick some highlights for us.
Some of them are kind of surprising.
Like there's a Phoenix Wright game, Phoenix Wright, Ace Attorney, Dual Destinies, Pushmo
slash Crashmo slash Stretchmo, which I don't know what that is, but it's highlighted.
So I'll go with it.
Also there's a Mario and Donkey Kong game, Mario and Donkey Kong minis on the move.
I don't know what that is, but it's a Mario game and it's no longer purchasable, which
is surprising.
And a bunch of other kind of mostly smaller games, but still that you won't be able to
access properly anymore.
That sucks.
All the, all the like really big names, all the really recognizable titles are accessible
somewhere else.
But some are getting locked and even if you purchased them or wanted to purchase them
legally on the previous platform, you won't be able to in 2023, so you have a while until
then.
Yeah, kind of brutal.
Apparently Nintendo started and then removed a preemptive and defensive Q and A basically
saying that they don't have to justify anything to anyone and people are being unreasonable
and to just buy Switch Online and any remakes that make it into the, I'm sure they didn't
word it that way.
I think the person who wrote this is a little upset.
Is it Anthony?
It's Anthony.
I knew it.
I don't think the person who wrote this is wrong.
To be fair.
Anthony.
We could just say Anthony at this point.
I think he's out now, but, but, but I think that was, I think there was some, some charge
behind that and Anthony's take is that they, they do make one good point.
Switch Online is pretty good for finding titles you've never heard of by putting them next
to titles that you have.
But it's a bit like saying hand in your old game cartridges and pay us to keep playing
them, but not all of them.
That is absolutely true.
That is what they're doing.
And it's brutal.
For that matter, 3DS and Wii U emulators are unlikely to join Switch Online anytime soon.
Very true.
But they are likely to be available elsewhere.
Like the computer.
Oops, dang.
While online storefronts have always had this problem looming over them, absolutely.
They will always be deprecated eventually if they are fixed to one console.
This one seems to have stirred the hornet's nest among fans.
It's always going to happen with Nintendo fans.
It's always going to happen with a console that has an install base of like over a hundred
million units, like the 3DS.
Like the Wii U.
Yeah, sure.
Fair enough.
You could kind of go, ah, this thing doesn't really matter anymore and will never matter.
Except that it, that it will.
It's going to be this piece of gaming history that in the same way that the Virtual Boy
is great, or sorry, what's that?
What's the move?
More units than Virtual Boy.
Yeah, that's the red one.
Yeah.
No, I mean it moved more units than Virtual Boy, but I just mean that Virtual Boy is sort
of this, this curiosity.
So no matter how successful or unsuccessful something is, it's still going to be part
of gaming history.
Due to how they marketed it, I think for pretty much ever, people are going to look back at
Nintendo's historical consoles and go like, wait, what?
That was actually its own console because so many people thought it was an add on to
the original Wii.
And to not be able to go back and get content for it, like it just, oh, it sucks.
And it's just so unnecessary.
This is a big part of the reason why I buy physical Switch games.
That's the thing that makes me so mad.
It's not that it's a bad thing.
It is a bad thing, but it's how unnecessary the bad thing is.
Obviously in the world, there are much bigger problems than some game marketplace not being
available a year from now.
And I've got a year to save my, to put quarters in my swear jar and save up to buy whatever
it is that I'd like to buy and download it to my console.
Part of the problem is though, and I know you're making a point, but part of the problem
with that though is like, it's an old console.
It's an old portable console.
It's an old home console, whichever one you have.
It might break.
You might still want to play that game.
So you go buy another one and what?
You can download it.
Nothing.
Nintendo has this extraordinarily anti-consumer approach to game data.
It's still like, honestly, if there were, if there was literally a single gamer in the
entire United States Congress, there would be some kind of law against what Nintendo's
doing, holding your save game data, just a hostage.
And there's most people seem kind of on my side, but I saw at least one comment go by
talking about like, Oh, they're not going to do that to Switch.
They sold so many units.
They sold that to the Wii.
Yeah.
Do you know how many Wii's they sold?
They sold so many units of the Wii.
I think there are more Nintendo Wii's than there are like actual Wii's on earth.
Just kidding.
There are a lot of penises on there.
Yeah.
The world's full of dicks, if you know what I mean.
Yeah.
It'll happen to the Switch and there's, there's like, I want to be able to go back and play
the games that I paid for on the Switch.
Yeah.
But you know what sucks is that again, back to good guy valve, to be clear, not everything
valve does is right.
Absolutely.
Just want to make that abundantly extra super clear.
All right.
Also give them credit when they do things that are right.
We have to give them credit when they do things that are right.
Valve has come out and said, if we ever deprecate this platform, we will, we will engineer a
way that you'll just still have all your stuff.
Like I don't know what that would look like exactly.
And I doubt even they know exactly what that would look like some type of peer to peer,
some kind of, okay, download it before this day.
And it goes, it goes good old games, DRM free.
I don't know.
I don't know exactly what that would look like.
And since they made that commitment, that commitment has gotten exponentially more complicated
to actually follow through on.
Oh yeah.
Especially now that they've got, you know, partner software, like a halo infinite is
a perfect example.
I own halo infinite on steam because I can't be arsed to deal with Microsoft spectacularly
broken launcher crap.
I fortunately you still have to deal with their accounts and their matchmaking and networking
and all that because of how intertwined they are.
The experience is terrible and this is with all the services still like running properly.
Yeah.
I'm afraid to know what that would look like when you know, valve doesn't exist anymore
and valve not existing anymore is actually like kind of a scary proposition to me because
aren't they privately held still as far as my understanding goes, yeah, I believe they,
I believe they're privately held, but the, the thing is that, okay, no, I know they're
privately held, but what I don't know is who the shareholders are that I'm not sure.
And I don't guys feel free to let me know in the chat.
This is just one of those things that I've been curious about, but never gone out of
my way to look up because um, one of the things that I've done as part of owning a business
is estate planning.
If Yvonne and I get hit by a bus at the same time, do you know what happens to Linus media
group?
Uh, no.
What would be your assumption?
I, if I remember correctly, cause I think we talked about, no, no, no.
Give me an assumption.
Give me an uneducated assumption though.
Okay.
What would be your lay person's assumption?
Honestly, if I didn't know some of the context that you guys had told me, I would just genuinely
have no idea.
Um, I would assume that it would go to, uh, like next of kin inheritance.
Okay.
And then I have no idea how that would work because you're like offspring are too young.
So the way that that would typically work is when your offspring are not of legal age
yet, there would be some kind of trust.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And, and they would be responsible run the trust.
Like there's a lot of things that I, I, yeah, so they would be, they would be part of them
agreeing to be our trustee.
I can't remember exactly what the term is.
I think it's trustee, but part of them agreeing to be that would be that we would leave behind
a letter of wishes for how we would want the company to be run or, or whatever the case
may be.
But here's the problem.
The way that inheritance laws work, and to be clear, there's a lot of Canada, there's
a lot of good things about this particular type of law.
I'm not a huge fan of, uh, of, you know, aristocracy, just intergenerational wealth that creates
like a, uh, uh, like a, a Lord class and a surf class.
Like that's that, that's not a period of history that we need to go back to.
Although there are strong arguments to be made that we are already there and have actually
managed to zoom past it with the current level of wealth inequality in the world.
But that's a separate conversation is beyond the scope of this one.
So I'm not necessarily against inheritance taxes.
The problem is that in the case of an asset like Linus media group incorporated bequeathing
it to a successor is extraordinarily complicated.
So instead of me being able to, to gift shares or, or leave the company to a next of kin,
like a mine and Yvonne's children, what would happen is the asset would be placed, um, like,
like in, in escrow or in trust, it would be, it would be held by, by a neutral party in,
it would essentially have no owner for a period of time while they get it valued.
So the company would have to get valued at that point.
And then whoever we did leave it to would have to come up with the cash that they would
need to pay the tax on that value of inheritance.
And the problem with how companies are valued is that Linus media, like they can have these
just insane, insane multipliers over EBITDA.
I don't know if you're familiar with the concept of EBITDA, but it's earnings before tax.
And uh, tax and uh, tax, and I can't remember what the last one is, blah, blah, blah, EBITDA.
Here we go.
Earnings before interest, taxes and depreciation.
Okay.
So a company like ours, that's in a growth phase in kind of a hot, trendy industry, online
media, uh, could easily have a multiplier of like 10 X, even as high as 11, 12, 13 X.
Now I gotta be honest with you guys.
We've only been running Linus media group for nine years.
Could I possibly have that kind of cash on hand if I'm anywhere near a sort of responsible
business operator?
He's trying to like reinvest in the company and because that inheritance tax is deep into
double digits.
Like you could end up paying like probably 30, 40% plus tax on this inheritance.
So if we, if we take that, that value, let's say, let's say for the sake of argument that
Linus media group makes a million dollars a year, okay.
If we had a 10 X, so let's go conservative.
If we had a 10 X multiplier in our valuation, that would be $10 million on which they could
owe like $3 million, three or $4 million or something ridiculous like that.
These are intentionally not exact numbers because this is Yvonne's department, not mine.
She deals with this stuff.
The point is just that it's really complicated and we wouldn't have, we wouldn't have 30%
of 10 years of earnings sitting in the bank because that would be stupid.
So what would happen is the company would have to be sold to some soulless aggregator
of media companies and then my kids would obviously be fine because they'd get a big
pile of cash, but everything like everything about Linus media group, everything about
the way we want to do things would immediately be dead because it would all be about getting
back a return on this gigantic cash investment in acquiring this company.
And so I forget why I started this conversation, but there's basically no way to, there's no
way to leave the company to, right.
If valve, if valve is primarily owned still by Gabe Newell and family or co-founders and
they get old and or die or are not interested anymore or whatever the case may be, hopefully
they have billions.
Yeah.
Well, I think they probably do, which is, I mean, in the bank, I think they do though.
Yeah.
So there's that.
That's fair.
So Newell owns more than 50%.
The rest of it was buried in a Forbes article that honestly I literally could not navigate
through the ads because there's too many on the page and it was bouncing the text around.
So I installed an ad blocker live to try to go to your screen.
But then, but no, no, no, no.
But then you know that those are actually like not allowed on company computers, right?
Just remove it when you're done.
I will do that.
Okay.
But even with the ad blocker, I couldn't, so I couldn't read it because the ads kept
reloading and moving the text around, which is the only reason why I installed it.
And then I couldn't read it with the ad blocker either because they detect that and then block
you from seeing the page.
So I actually don't know because it was literally unreadable.
But he owns at least 50% and after that, I'm not sure.
True Scott says, you still never told us what actually happens to LMG if something happens
to you.
I don't know.
What happens is it gets parted out and my kids get the proceeds essentially.
I would like for there to be a better plan.
We talked about, we talked about this, I think on last week's swan show where I was discussing
the possibility of taking on investment.
That would actually be one of the main reasons that I could think of for us to change our
ownership structure because one of, one of the goals, and I've said this since day one
is I want to be a real company, right?
And real companies don't just die when their founder dies.
So figuring out some way that we can create an ownership structure that can last longer
than my beating heart would be a goal that I, that I would have while I'm, while I'm
still here and while I'm still alive.
But I don't, I don't know a way to do that without losing what's special about what we're
doing here.
There was an LMG clips video going through where I talked through that and I read through
all the comments on it.
There were some really good comments.
A lot of it was stuff I was already aware of, but there was some stuff in there that
I just, you know, honestly hadn't really thought of it that way.
The people with more of a financial background than I have and you know, basically the thing
that are the key piece that I didn't know, like I said, my, my, my business knowledge
is all school of hard knocks.
I've learned everything that I've learned because I've had to learn it.
And one of the things I didn't know was that not only does a publicly held company become
soulless because it serves its shareholders, but it's actually legally obligated to be
soulless and put its shareholders first before anything else.
And what's really complicated about that is that from my point of view, we could make
some really short term fiscally irresponsible decisions that I see in my vision having enormous,
an enormous payoff in the longterm.
But if the shareholders disagree, then they can make an argument that I was not acting
in their best interest.
They can push me out and then they can sit and wallow in their own filth with no vision
now.
And, you know, that's, that's what happens to a lot of companies.
It has happened.
It's happened to a lot of companies.
Founders get pushed out.
There's no vision left.
They chase short term rewards.
They do whatever wall street tells them to do, and then they just have no soul.
So I just don't know what to do.
Yeah, I, I don't think this is actually the same and I'm not exactly saying he was like
a good person or anything.
But Steve jobs was forced out of Apple.
I don't, I don't know if it was through the same means, but I know he was forced out of
Apple at one point and that's like, that's pretty crazy to think about, right?
Lots of really good questions here.
You are assuming YouTube and float plane will be relevant in 20, 30, 40 years.
I assume nothing.
That's why we're so diversified.
That's why the labs coming.
That's why LTT store is such a huge statement to put in your mouth that I assume nothing
no to that.
You assume that float plane and YouTube are going to be around in 30, 40 years.
You said nothing even remotely like that.
I sure don't.
I have no idea where that came from.
Linus media group is a media company right now.
YouTube is a very favorable platform for us to publish on.
But if that changed in the future, we'd be on it.
Don't worry.
We got this.
You guys are on the regular says, is there a way to do some kind of employee ownership
plan in that case?
Believe it or not, that is something that we have looked into very extensively and unfortunately
the exact same problems exist.
So even if, so if I wanted to get paid, the employees literally have to pay a fair market
value.
We have to make some kind of argument.
So if I wanted to give them a deal, I basically have to put together a legal document that
says, this is why the deal is justified.
I think we're only worth five X EBITDA because I'm walking away immediately and I'm the fricking
man and they're going to have trouble, but I would actually have to do that.
Legally speaking, I would have to do that because any additional value that the asset
was found to have, I think there are potential fraud liabilities.
There are potential taxation liabilities.
There's all these problems if we don't sell it at a fair market value.
So that's problem number one.
So they have to actually have enough money to buy the stupid thing, which we're again,
because we've been growing for so long and growing at such a great rate, like look at
the size of this company.
There's like 60 people here now it's ridiculous.
That multiplier ends up being pretty high and it ends up being a lot like an unreasonable
amount of money.
So that's issue number one.
And issue number two is if we wanted to gift it to them, it's still the tax problem.
They still have to pay taxes.
It's the exact same problem as my kids.
So it's really like, it's really stupid honestly speaking.
Another thing, what would happen to LTT if only Linus died, nothing against Yvonne, but
there are a lot of responsibilities that would be extremely hard to take on all at once.
I think you guys overestimate how important I am.
I'm a pretty face.
And I do like to think that Yvonne and I are the yin to each other's yang.
She is very detail oriented.
She's very organized.
I am very creative.
I tend to have sort of like a big picture vision, but I absolutely lack the focus to
actually put all the pieces in place to get there.
That's what she has.
We absolutely compliment each other nearly perfectly.
I told her if I believed in that, I would say that she was my soulmate.
Obviously that's stupid.
That's not how the world works.
But if I believed in that, I'd say she was because it's like we were made for each other.
That's how perfectly the puzzle pieces fit together.
And anyway, the point is that you guys, I think, underestimate what she does.
I think you overestimate what I do and what you also, I think, underestimate is the talents
and the experience of the people who work here.
Look at a James or an Anthony or a Colton or a Nick or a Luke, those five names that
I just named.
Okay.
Let's go through them.
Five years, six or seven.
I think Colton's up to, I think Colton's up to seven.
You're at 10, at least 10 or 11.
So hold on.
Can you add these up for me?
We're at the 23 so far.
I think I'm slightly over 12.
Nick's at eight years.
So that's 31.
And who, what was the last name?
I think I said Anthony, Anthony is at five.
So that is 36 years of experience in online media.
And I picked just five people under this roof.
This is an incredible team.
I mean, they will survive without me whatsoever.
If you were randomly deleted, success would go down a lot, but we could keep the ship
floating.
You'd survive.
If Yvonne randomly disappeared, I highly questioned the ship floating for very long.
I think the ship could float long-term.
I think the short-term turbulence might sink it before it gets a chance.
That's the challenge is that what she does is so much more important day to day than
what I do, if that kind of makes sense to you guys.
So that's, that's, that's, what's tough about it.
There's, there's just so many things to consider.
I wish it was as simple as writing in my will.
If I die, I would like it to be divided up into sixtieths and be queefed to the employees.
But what would actually happen is it would be divided up into sixtieths and sold to the
highest bidder and there would be nothing left of its soul.
So we need to figure that out.
But fortunately we hopefully have some time.
That's that's where I'm at on that.
We should talk about sponsors because if we don't talk about sponsors, then the ship will
definitely not float.
The show is brought to you today by Corsair.
I love it.
Thanks to Corsair, their 5000T RGB case features distinctive contours and 208 individually
addressable RGB LEDs.
My friends, over 200 RGB LEDs.
It comes pre-installed with three Corsair light loop RGB fans.
It includes a smart controller for fan speeds on up to six fans with dual lighting channels
for multiple RGB components, removable front and roof mesh airflow panels for easy maintenance
and two tool-free hinged side panels.
It's backed by Corsair's two year warranty for extended peace of mind and it's available
now so you can check it out at the link down below.
It's amazing how far Corsair has come, is it not?
Yeah.
From releasing that one case that was thoughtful but flawed to just being the case manufacturer,
like the default.
It's pretty nuts.
It's just crazy.
They make so many things.
Their culture is bananas.
At risk of saying too much, one of Corsair's criteria for entering any category is that
they need to be able to see a path to being number one or number two worldwide.
And I'm like, well, you got to set the bar high.
I mean, they do it consistently.
The show is also brought to you by Squarespace.
Do you need a website?
If you answered yes, check out Squarespace.
If you answered no, there's a good chance you're wrong.
Check out Squarespace.
They've got tons of templates that'll cover a large, large variety of categories of websites.
If you need something for your blog or your wedding or your business, Squarespace has
got you covered.
You can get a domain quickly through Squarespace if you need one or port over an existing domain
that you already own.
And one of these days, my business team, a representative of which is sitting over there,
is going to give me some more cool talking points for Squarespace because they actually
have so many cool features that we never talk about.
Jake, I want more Squarespace talking points.
It's a great platform.
We use it for ltxexpo.com as well as linusmediagroup.com.
And it's so easy to maintain.
It's like just painless, so painless.
So get started with a free 14 day trial and head to squarespace.com forward slash when
to get 10% off your first purchase.
Did you want to say something?
I...
Okay.
So someone...
Did I go off the sponsor thing?
Are you going to say something controversial?
No, you can.
So I uninstalled Adblock.
You can share my screen if you want.
Oh, okay.
It's all ads.
The whole page.
There's one tiny little bar at the top and then it's ads.
Okay.
You can close it now.
There's nothing there.
Flowplane chat asked me if we're going to talk about the New York Times article and
I was like, what one?
And they linked it to me and I was like, oh yeah, that merch one.
So I clicked on it and was, I think you know what's there.
Would you like to hear something really funny?
Sure.
The link that I tweeted sharing that article was a privateered link.
I didn't know.
So the, the, the author of the article did send me a copy of the article, but they actually
didn't do it as quickly as one of my, one of my bros in a, did they post it in the YouTuber
lounge or in worth reading slash watching slash listening to?
I'm actually not sure.
This is like my favorite discord ever.
Oh yeah.
Yeah, here it is.
Here it is.
This is a username TA.
You know who you are.
I didn't recognize this domain messaging-custom-newsletters.nytimes.com.
I assumed that that was like the official source.
So before the author sent it to me, I copy pasted this one onto Twitter.
I didn't notice that it was formatted super weird.
It says subscriber only newsletter, which I didn't really look at.
And clearly I'm not a subscriber and clearly this newsletter is totally working just fine.
I'm wondering if they just don't bother to have any of that stuff.
If like, I wonder if that guy's a pain or whoever that is, is a paying subscriber and
they just send them links that just don't deliver any of that stuff or something.
I don't know.
Cause that looks like an official link.
It does.
So anyway, so people were replying to my tweet being like, actually you just shared like
a paywall stripped version of the thing.
I was like, well, I'm not going to undo it at this point.
So yeah, we can talk about, we can talk about the article.
They got a lot of things right from our chat.
There's a couple of little details that are probably not quite how I would describe things,
but overall I think what was really the coolest thing about that article was being featured
in a positive context.
It feels like a lot of traditional media is anytime they talk about YouTubers, it's just
doom and gloom, just looking for an excuse to crap on my colleagues and my entire industry.
Like, and I get it a lot of the time that the negative things they're writing about
are super negative and they deserve negative publicity.
But where's the article about Tom Scott, just like being awesome because he's Tom Scott
or just like massive charity drives that modern influencers do.
Where is it?
Yeah.
And it's, it's frustrating for me, honestly, I don't expect a ton of the attention for
myself.
I have grown accustomed to being just quietly doing my thing over here.
The tech niche is like the least, it's the, I think it has the highest size to sex appeal
ratio on the entire platform because it's actually a gigantic vertical, but no one talks
about it.
No one cares.
And that's changed a little bit over the years.
When I went to the last creator summit that I attended, Marquez, for example, was, was
actually like featured in the thing and I was like, Holy crap, someone from our space
actually got noticed.
YouTube did a thing with us actually, where they did a billboard campaign and they just
like plastered me on billboards, which I was like, I was pretty tickled about something
that isn't just like a late night TV show host.
Yeah, exactly.
I was like, Oh, that's pretty cool.
So they've actually done a better job recently.
You've got to give credit where credit's due.
But the point is, I don't expect it to be me.
I just expect them to like, try a little, right?
Yeah.
Like it doesn't have to be whatever PewDiePie's latest controversy is or whatever, you know,
toxic prank channel or like whatever, you know, minor got exploited by someone and like,
to be clear, absolutely all horrible things.
All horrible.
And you should say it's horrible.
Sure.
Okay, I think there's room for a little more nuance with the PewDiePie stuff.
Some of the stuff has been, I'll say more nuanced.
If there's horrible things, you can call them, you got to call them horrible, but you should
probably show the other side of the coin.
Yeah, there.
That's all I'm asking for.
And so that was honestly the best thing about it was someone reaching out just to have a
positive conversation and be like, Hey, look, isn't this cool?
Cause it is cool.
It's totally cool.
I think it's cool.
We have one more sponsor and it's brought to you by Zoho.
Thanks to Zoho CRM.
Zoho CRM is a 360 degree solution for managing your business's sales, marketing, and customer
service.
With their intuitive UI and simple navigation, you can implement their service quickly and
efficiently with minimal disruption to your current processes.
They offer AI predictions to help you understand your customer's needs so you can see trends
and purchase patterns with a variety of indicators.
Plus their built-in design studio helps you customize your CRM experience to help you
spot critical customer or account information at a glance, helping you get your work done
faster.
They offer flexible contracts, transparent pricing, and an ever evolving product that
grows to meet your needs without snowballing costs.
They've got over 15 years of experience in the industry and over a quarter million clients,
making Zoho CRM a great solution to support you in your customer relationship management
needs.
You can get 50% off your annual subscription.
That is a deep discount when you use code ZCRM50 at the link down below.
All right, what's our next topic here?
Should we do a couple of merch messages?
It kind of feels like we should do that.
We've got some curated ones here.
We should at least do a few.
Yeah, yeah.
Because there have been a spicy few today.
Great job on that product photography.
I never, okay, I know that you prefer Alex P in person, but I know you still go by A
Prime Online.
What am I supposed to use for you in front of the audience?
He doesn't know.
So how am I supposed to know?
Gosh darn it, you're killing me here.
Well, whatever.
You guys know him as A Prime.
He did all the photography for the privateer shirt as we're calling it.
And you did, you did a bang up job.
That one with the gun.
I love it.
The smoke, the like the fog, it's, it's sick.
It's sick.
I love it.
Thank you.
What can I do for you though?
Oh, you're just here to say hi.
Okay, cool.
Let's get some messages then Thomas B says, great.
Real talk Linus.
How's the lab building going and would making your own crypto coin help fund your lab?
Okay, Thomas, let's have a chat would see, I don't want to use the word stealing because
if people give it to you, it's not technically stealing.
And the last thing I want is to use the wrong word to describe what is functionally the
same would private yet again, just use that as a catch all term for like every would relieving
people of their heavy purses make my purse heavier.
Why yes, yes it would.
Factually speaking, would I be able to sleep at night knowing that I had executed a perfect
rug pull?
I was going to say you can reword this.
Would rug pulling your own crypto coin help fund your lab?
Rug pulling my own crypto coin would probably help fund my own small island.
I mean seriously with our tech savvy audience and like that's something a lot of people
don't realize.
We have a new section on the forum where the business team is posting potential sponsors
and current sponsors talking about controversies trying to make sure that we're doing everything
in our power to improve our due diligence on sponsorships is essentially what we're
doing is we want to make sure that our sponsors reflect as well on us as we reflect on them.
And as part of that process, they've posted one particular sponsor to which someone replied,
well, I really don't think this makes sense because LTT's audience is predominantly 14
year olds.
And I went, well, that's wrong.
Oh man, where does the idea come from that as soon as people turn 15, they no longer
have a sense of humor or like fun.
Can we just be fun for an adults can enjoy it too?
What's wrong with that?
And the funniest thing about it is a lot of the people who seem to have that perception
are not 14 years old.
I know that it's like, why are you making this assumption that nobody else out there
could be just like you and it professional that does enterprise stuff or software by
day or just enjoys video games and wants a fun way to stay up to date on technology and
enjoys our wacky projects and, and just likes being along for the ride and thinks that we're
kind of a cool bunch of people like, is that so impossible to think that to imagine, right?
I've actually been told on many occasions, like I'm super into tech, frankly, I know
more about high hardcore IT tech than you do Linus and man, the book of things I don't
know about IT would be a long one indeed.
I don't know if it, I don't know if it could fit on our petabyte project server.
So I'll, I'll get messages from people being like, but that's not why I watch you.
That stuff's boring.
I do that stuff every day at work.
Yeah.
Why would you?
I just want to hear about like the cool consumer gadgets that like, I don't have, I don't want
to read a dry boring article about, I want the fun version of it.
And that's what we do.
It's amazing to me how many people watch our content and don't know what we do.
I just, I love it.
I love it.
You guys it's, it's great.
I guess that means we're doing it really well.
Lem dog on full plain chat said bleep.
I'm a 30 year old director at my company and converted my, the entire company to framework
laptops because Linus I'm a, I'm pretty far from being 14 years old a little bit.
And to be clear, you know, that's why it's so important for us to disclose things like
that.
I am an investor in framework and that framework is not perfect.
You know, for me, and I love that Lem dog, that is absolutely fantastic because what
you did is knowing that there are going to be some pitfalls along the way you put your
money where your mouth is and you supported a company that has a vision that you stand
for.
That's freaking awesome.
That's exactly what we do.
That's exactly what we do.
That's cool.
Um, what am I supposed to be talking about right now?
I don't even, I don't even remember.
We got here from talking about right.
So could we rug pull and would it be a rug pull of Epic proportions?
Yes, I do believe it would be in the same way that years ago we could have partnered
with a local developer to make a mobile game and we could have just microtransactioned
the crap out of it.
And I could probably own a yacht by this point, but not as cool as Bezos is.
No, that one is, but a yacht, but a small don't have to deconstruct a historical Ridge,
a small yet.
Do you, if you don't have to deconstruct a historical bridge, is it really a cool yacht?
No.
Okay.
That's cool.
But it would have been okay.
Can I just call it a boat?
Nice boat.
I'd have, I could have a boat.
So the point is that we've had opportunities where we could have cashed in on the trendy,
cool way to make money.
And we decided not to, we decided that we really like it better.
Slow and steady wins the race.
And we made the ultimate decision because we weren't going to do a coin at one point.
We were like, yes, we are going to do it.
And we learned more and reflected more and we decided not to do it.
So we're not going to do that.
It is possible that some kind of blockchain, something could make sense.
That was something that actually got brought up in the, in the comments under that video
about potential funding sources is, Hey, don't go public because the reporting requirements
are going to bury you under, under accounting costs.
And just, just administrative overhead.
But what if you guys did some kind of like blockchain based smart contract thing for
some kind of like commitment to like, if you, if you buy it for this value, then it will
get paid out at X value as the company, something, dividends, something.
I don't know that they explained it better.
The point is a super interesting technology.
There could be, there could be ways for us to, to raise funds, but it would have to be
in a way where we feel like people are getting something for their money.
And that's a big part of why we have merge messages now, instead of just doing, I don't
even remember what they're called anymore.
Super chats, because a super chat, if I don't read it or cause I miss it because their feature
is broken, or if I forget or whatever the case may be, all you got was a colored bit
of text with a merge message, you're going to get a product in the mail.
So even if we don't get to it or our answer isn't thorough enough for your liking or whatever
the case may be, you haven't just thrown away your money, which I personally think is really,
really important.
So the only way that we would do any kind of fundraising activity would be if I can
figure out what's in it for you.
And some people might say, you know what, in fact, I've seen a lot of people say this.
All I need to be in it for me is to like, own a chunk of LMG and like, where it's like,
and I think I just like the stock.
I've seen people compare it to owning, owning real estate on the moon.
You know, like it doesn't even need to be legally binding, just a certificate of I own
one chair of LMG.
And it's like, yeah, fine, fine, fair enough.
But instead of NFTs, you should do like a tile wall in one of the buildings and people
can like buy a tile and put whatever they want on there as long as it's appropriate.
That's pretty cool.
We had an idea like that.
There was supposed to be a name wall when we moved.
Do we have that list of names?
Because we really do need to put it up at some point.
I was like seven years ago.
Okay.
We should, can, can you, can, can you make a note to get that list of names and fun fact,
we actually have something kind of similar to that coming.
Well, it's the feature you're working on.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Oh, it's done.
It's done.
I mean, well, why don't you tell them what the feature is?
It's super cool.
Conrad pushed it like a bit ago.
Anyways, it's the free upsell shelf.
Conrad has been done this for a bit.
That is such a terrible internal name.
We need a cooler name for that.
My headphones are really having a lot of trouble.
Mine were too.
I think what happened was someone was fidgeting with them and they unscrew.
So make sure they are actually screwed together as well as plugged together.
Oh, so I, I fixed that.
Didn't know that was a thing.
Yeah.
All right.
Yeah.
But yeah, the, the, the thing that probably needs a more marketable name than free upsell
shelf.
Free upsell shelf.
What does that even mean?
The fuss man.
The fuss.
The fuss.
But basically when you're checking out, you have things in your cart.
I don't know if it's populated right now, so I don't know if it's doing it right now.
But there's certain free items and there will be new ones and I'm sure the ones that are
in there right now will be circulated out eventually, but there's certain free items that you can
choose from to have one of that can go into your cart as well.
Like maybe a sticker or something else like that.
Sticker pack.
We do packs of stickers.
Yeah.
Sticker pack.
The thing you're going to talk about.
Do you know how much I spent on stickers this year?
Probably a lot.
Over a hundred thousand dollars.
Yeah.
I'm not even joking.
I'm not even surprised because when, when, when honestly, when we were tasked with this
free upsell shelf thing, I was like reading the details on it and I was like, this is
going to be expensive because some of the ideas that you guys have to give away for
free people sell for like very notable amounts of money.
I'm like, what the heck?
I'm talking like $15, $20.
Nick sent me the approval request for our sticker PO.
And I was like, why do you need a CEO signature to buy stickers?
Oh.
Oh.
I was going to say, I got sticker shock, it was like 140 grand or something stupid like
that.
I'm like, how long is this going to last?
He's like, Oh, the year wasn't, wasn't one of the thoughts to, to give away a pin.
Yeah.
Pins are like metal weight.
This is great.
And they're expensive.
Lee Sun Cray says, I don't like the stickers.
They're just junk to me.
That's the point is the point of this feature.
Yeah.
So we want you to be able to pick your own free item.
Yeah.
So you'll be able to choose between stickers.
We want to do pins and the first option other than stickers is going to be a postcard.
So if you remember the GPU wasteland mouse pad that Sarah designed, she adapted it to
a little coloring sheet.
So it's black and white and you can color it.
And then on the back is a postcard.
And the idea is that we're going to encourage people to color it in and then mail it back
to us.
And then for like a wall of inspiration in the creator warehouse space that they're going
to be moving into, hopefully in about a month, they're going to have this whole wall of postcards
from all over the world from our customers.
And the idea behind it for me was just like making it a little bit more real.
Cause right now it seems really cool.
I think for a lot of them, it feels like they're, they just like there's these designs and there's
like a photo shoot and we, we, we like show it off and we talk about it on WAN show and
then it's just like, it's like, it's a one way relationship.
You're just firing stuff out into the ether and it's gone and people leave reviews on
the site.
And I love that.
I will just sit and idly read reviews on lttstore.com cause I love it.
It's a very encouraging most of the time and be very helpful whenever it's not encouraging
cause we're always trying to do better.
And so I thought it would be really cool to see every one of those cards and know that
someone somewhere is wearing a shirt or drinking from a water bottle and they like colored
that for us.
And so I'm expecting to see some really cool stuff.
Yeah.
Sweet.
Conrad also did a cool implementation for it on mobile so you can like swipe through
them and stuff because obviously the wide shelf isn't super compatible with a tall phone.
But yeah, yeah, yeah, it's good stuff.
Free screwdriver bit.
That is going to be tough because an individual bit coming back to our conversation about
like measuring out spools of tubing and you know, managing, managing that we're not going
to have individual bits for sale.
I don't think it's, it's just, it's, it's not worth touching, I guess would be the best
way that I can describe it because you got to understand that every, every item has a
cost, right?
Because somebody has to touch it to put it there, touch it to pick it up, touch it to
put it somewhere else, and every time you touch something that has a cost because someone
has to do it.
And so something that has such a low cost, it's just not worth even touching.
So that's why we're going to have bit clips rather than sell individual bits.
There's an interesting idea mentioned by angry panda PC.
He said, can I pick nothing?
Yes, by the way.
And then it says, or like to plant trees or something.
Oh, interesting.
Well, that's, that would be cool.
I think that's really cool.
I'd be super down for something like that.
Sure.
Why not?
You could maybe go with the Mr. B special and just do like remove garbage from ocean
or plant tree.
I love it.
I think that's sweet.
Yeah.
We're going to have to figure out sort of a way to manage that, but absolutely figure
out like how much contribution can actually go because it should be fairly comparable
to the cost of the other.
Yeah.
I think we could probably make it as simple as it's just like, like a dollar or something
like that.
I mean, might be high compared to the cost of a sticker pack compared to the cost of
an enamel pin and it won't be so as long as we can figure out, maybe what we'll do is
we'll run it without that option for a while, figure out what the average cost of what people
select is, and then we'll just do some equivalent to that and then we'll just make that part
of just cost of doing business and we'll assume that fixed overhead on every order and we'll
just go from there.
I think that'd be really cool.
Yeah.
That'd be super cool.
People are talking like third world computing projects.
Yeah.
That's, that's amazing.
I love it.
And just, just like all the other things on the free upsell shelf, it could cycle out.
Cause someone mentioned the third world computer projects thing.
Yeah.
Well we could do trees for sure.
We could do ocean for a bit.
We could do a different project for a bit.
I liked that.
Man, merch messages are one of my favorite things because when someone has to like go
on your website, shop, place an order to send something, it ends up being a lot more thoughtful
than a lot of the other interaction that we get.
So it acts as kind of a, a really, um, it acts as a really great filter because you
end up with a lot less garbage.
And you may be part of it is that we have, uh, Jake sorting through all the garbage now,
Jake Bell events.
I should just call him bell because otherwise he's going to get confused with the one true
Jake.
We have too many Jake's now.
We've got Jacob at creator warehouse.
We've got Jake Bell in the business team.
We've got Jake Tyvee in the writing team.
I'm probably missing a Jake.
There's just a handful of names that we have like a freaking ton of, uh, what's, uh, what's
one of the other ones that's ridiculous.
Yeah.
We have like so many Alex's.
Yeah.
We have way too many Alex's.
Yeah.
It's, it's terrible.
We need to get rid of some of them.
The field train goes a lot more thoughtful and the message on the screen is like, Hey,
oh, I mean, okay.
Sometimes it's also fun just to like see your message on the show because if you send us
one we actually have to reply to a lot of the time you don't get to see it on the screen.
So there's, there's benefits to both.
There's benefits to both.
Uh, did I eventually answer that question?
I, I can't remember anymore.
Is this still the crypto lab question?
Yeah.
Maybe we should like talk about a tech topic.
Wow.
That was, that was a really long time on one more specific boy.
It sure was.
We tangented so many times along the way.
Sorry.
I try.
I do.
I do try.
Microsoft will soon require a Microsoft account and internet connection to set up windows
11 pro.
This was already a thing for home, but now you will officially be, wait, hold on a second.
Yeah.
Oh my goodness.
Yeah.
You will officially not be able to use windows 11, even the pro version without a Microsoft
account.
It was a matter of time.
You either buy the product or you are the product ladies and gentlemen.
Yeah.
Brutal.
I, I, I, part of me wants to go down the path just to rip them a little bit of like, would
you have done this sooner if your driver compatibility was better?
So it was actually possible roasted, but I don't know.
I don't think that's actually the case.
I just wanted to roast them.
Yeah.
The fact that it like today, still you can buy a com buy a computer component and install
windows on it.
And like the ethernet driver doesn't work out of the box is just saying how many actual
like network chip sets are there?
Probably hundreds, not probably hundreds, definitely hundreds.
But when we're talking the scale of Microsoft as a company, could they have hundreds of
network drivers?
Yes.
Yes.
They could.
And how like, at least in, in my experience, Linux has had that just so on lock for so
long.
I've never had a problem with a network driver on Linux.
Not once.
And I know some people have Wi-Fi back in the day.
I never did for Wi-Fi back in the day either.
Okay.
And I know, okay.
I know especially for Wi-Fi other people did.
I'm not saying this was not a case for everyone.
Okay.
It was always easier for me.
And at least one was always what you really needed, right?
Getting at least one way to access the internet was always the big problem.
Because once you get the one, you can update things, you can fix everything easily.
Yeah.
So, yeah.
Um, so privateer shirt is pretty popular.
Uh, hold on, I'm gonna, I'm gonna refresh this like constantly here to see if I can
catch it.
Uh, nope, crap.
Come on, come on.
Just need one more, one more to come through.
I think it's a cool shirt even if you don't have the context, which might help.
Yeah.
Okay.
Okay.
Did we get one more?
No, it was something else.
Okay.
Cred.
Well, whatever.
We sold 419.
Wow.
420.
I got it.
I got it.
There's my dashboard.
You guys can't read that from there, but it doesn't matter.
The point is 420 of them.
So really excited to get these shirts in your guys's hands, uh, see reviews, see what you
guys think of how close we got to the feel of the existing ones.
Um, what am I supposed to be talking about right now?
Right.
So this whole Microsoft account thing was announced as part of Windows 11 insider preview
build 2255 seven, which is an extensive rework addressing most of the main issues.
That's that's optimistic.
Drag and drop to taskbar now works.
Unbelievable.
Uh, color profile settings, uh, task manager, redesign more dark mode themed apps, uh, Mika
UI design and more windows, better snap layout, picker, uh, new swipe gestures for notifications,
quick settings, and start.
Have they fixed the issue where when you have a bunch of notifications queued up, you like
cannot get at your taskbar at your, uh, system tray rather.
That is so annoying.
And you have like, when you're trying to, when you're trying to like sneak in there
between notifications to get something, um, start menu folders, folder content previews.
Couldn't you do start menu folders and like windows 95, a lot of this stuff.
Honestly, I'm like, when did that originally come in Vista?
Like wow.
Expanded dynamic refresh rate support.
The release notes clarify that an internet connection is only required for the UBI or
first time setup.
But if the PC is for personal use, you will need a Microsoft account to continue setup.
Basically, most people will probably want to use a Microsoft account, Xbox services.
Um, uh, I mean, find my finding your device, uh, there, there are lots of like legitimately
good reasons.
I don't think you were able to use BitLocker without a Microsoft account.
Is that correct?
I just got a suggestion for the free upsell shelf.
Yeah.
The bonus bin.
The bonus bin.
Oh, Oh, like for a name for it.
Yeah.
Who sent you that?
Uh, I chop off my friend.
Oh really?
I don't know if I, if he wants me to say his real name on it.
Yeah, sure.
That's fine.
Bonus bin.
That's not bad.
It's pretty good.
The bonus bin kind of, I'm thinking of like bargain bin, but it's not bargained.
It's not bonus.
It's like, yeah.
Yeah.
Okay.
Pretty good.
I'm not paying you for it.
I'm privateering it right now.
He's trying to pay us.
I like it.
Perfect.
I think he's trying to play us right now.
Yeah.
It's in their best interest for us to like sell more stuff through their platform, I
suppose.
So we're both kind of winning here.
Yeah.
Um, uh, what else?
So I don't know, I, do you, do you use a non Microsoft account with your computer?
No.
Yeah.
I use a Microsoft account.
You know, what's funny is I want to, but my Microsoft account like randomly is broken
on both my work computer and I think my laptop right now.
So if I go into my Microsoft account, it'll be like manage your Microsoft account.
I click it and like takes me, opens a web browser and like takes me to my profile.
But my computer just goes straight from booting up to the desktop and I can't, uh, what was
I trying to enable?
I was trying to, oh, I was trying to enable windows hello or something.
It was like, you need to link an account in order to something, something.
And I was like, but, but it is.
So what I'm kind of thinking is stop.
What I'm kind of thinking is I'll upgrade to windows 11 and maybe that'll fix my problems.
Okay.
All righty then, um, so we're both in la la land.
Yeah.
Um, uh, Jay from nucleon who posted this news on the forum, uh, sums it up thusly the, the,
the controversial or the, uh, the mixed reaction to this news.
I hope whoever thought of this idea and everyone who approved this steps on a Lego barefoot.
What a polite, what a polite way of, uh, of saying a pox on you, a pox on you and your
acquaintances all Anthony's take, uh, windows is clearly making money via ad and tracking
revenue these days.
So it makes sense if Microsoft is hoping to transition to a free to use model still even
apple doesn't force you to send into an apple ID on Mac.
Windows is becoming more of a walled garden by the day.
Yeah, for sure.
I think I would be less annoyed by it.
Um, if, if Microsoft services weren't such trash, um, like you're saying with the, the
bug that you've had trying to use any like Xbox gaming related software on a PC is just
the worst experience.
Try to game with a minor, with a minor, like a young person.
Better than like we did last night.
Right.
But I set it up.
Okay.
Find a young person in your life, a cousin or something like that.
Try to play a video game with them.
Is the difficulty in like, they find it very obtuse to be able to.
It's how difficult it is to even be aware that there is anything blocking certain services
from working like Minecraft dungeons would not work online for a minor.
And it's like, there needs to be a wizard Microsoft, you didn't just like lie about
their age.
No.
Okay.
They have actual minor accounts and there's no like, Hey, we couldn't help noticing that
your Microsoft account is a minor one.
Is your mom or dad around to sign in and go through this wizard to tick, tick, tick, tick
because that would make sense.
Yeah.
It's awful.
And like the wizard, you have to put in a password to be able to access a wizard, whatever.
It doesn't matter, but there should be some type of prompt to let you know what the heck
is even going on.
It's freaking awful.
It's so, it's so frustrating because you know that it's, it's, you know how like there's
the 80 20 rule.
I feel like they've done like 30% of the job.
Like they, they need a significant amount more effort to get to that 80% where it's
like, okay, this is acceptable now.
And they're not there.
And it's really, really frustrating.
And the more that they set it up as a requirement for things, but you have to use this thing.
The more it needs to be better.
Yes.
If it just sits there and it's terrible and I don't have to use it, then I don't care.
Yeah.
Go be terrible in a corner, Microsoft online, do whatever, whatever.
But if I have to use it, it needs to be significantly better.
There's a reason why we didn't talk about this pretty much at all for years, because
we didn't have to interact with it.
And now that the amount that we have to interact with it is increasing, we're going to talk
about how terrible it is because it's terrible.
That's it.
Really, really frustrating.
Digital Matrix IO says under 13 is really hard because of COPPA.
Fair enough.
But I think what I suggested is better than just having a hidden control panel for the
parent account that has no like obvious way to create a family group in it and no obvious
description of all the different boxes that you need to tick in order to actually just
play games with your kids.
And here's another thing that's just common sense to me.
If I am set up as the parent guardian of my family group, I should automatically be set
up as someone who is allowed to interact with my...
Yeah, you should be able to invite them to things.
Immediately.
Yeah.
I shouldn't even have to activate their access to online gaming in order for me to play with
them and for them to play with each other.
Because what if I didn't want to?
What if I didn't want them to be...
How is this a useful protection if there's no allow list and no common sense applied
to it?
There's lots of scenarios where I could see a parent...
Let's take Halo, for instance.
For instance?
I want to be able to play Halo with my son.
I don't necessarily want my son to be able to play Halo on his own.
That seems like a very reasonable use case.
I don't know.
There's a funny comment from a Philippine chat, MajorMayhem said, Microsoft is the MVP
of MVP.
It's the most valuable player of minimum viable product.
Very funny.
I liked that.
That was good.
Okay.
That's pretty funny.
My problem is I almost think it's below.
I don't think it's at MVP yet, but that is what it is.
Disney wants to be your government now.
This one's just kind of weird.
What is this?
Live in a corporate suburban hellscape with Disney story living.
Oh my God.
This is Disney hotels, but you actually live there?
You live there.
Yeah.
There's some really amazing stuff like members of the public will be able to buy day passes
to visit the suburban community.
And it's like uncertain if people that live there will have visitor passes that they can
give to their non Disney visiting friends.
There's like some amazing sounding thing in the middle.
The center of the community is a 24 acre grand oasis.
I'm sorry.
I got to stop you here for a second.
No joke.
This is not like theatrics.
I'm not acting for the camera.
I felt physically ill hearing you say that.
Yep.
I read it before the show, which is the only reason why I didn't have a strongest reaction.
Go on though.
Yeah, it's rough.
So yeah.
100 housing units named Cotino will be built in the city of Rancho Mirage.
They're hoping to offer some of the same types of experiences that you would find at Disney
resorts, including this 24 acre grand oasis that will have clear water using the crystal
lagoons technology used at their resorts.
There will be shopping and entertainment centers as well as a hotel and a clubhouse for residents.
It sounds extremely similar to a retirement village if you've ever been to one of those.
Like I said, members of the public need to buy day passes to get there.
This is not the first time Disney has tried to create this community.
There's interesting YouTube videos on this actually Epcot or E-P-C-O-T in Disney world
famously began as experimental prototype community of tomorrow that was supposed to revolutionize
the concept of the American city.
Walt's vision was never seen to completion.
And now Epcot is based on whoever wrote this, I've never seen it.
The worst park at Walt Disney world.
Fair enough.
Yeah.
Wow.
While Disney is designing the neighborhoods, they won't be building anything.
They are handing off that to other developer companies like DMB development, a builder
of luxury communities around the US.
Disney has not announced prices or financing options or anything like that.
Huh.
I'm extremely uncomfortable right now.
Yeah.
How are you going to make the Linus Media Group tech community?
You know, what's really funny, 24 acre land center in the middle is that actually is something
that Luke and I have talked about.
Like there are, there are literal ghost towns like in our province that we could probably
swoop in and just be like, yup, this used to be like a mining or logging or whatever
community and now it isn't.
And so nobody's like here anymore.
We're just going to come in and we're going to like buy it.
We're going to pay for a big fat fiber pipe into the town because realistically that's
all most of us need.
And this is our HQ now.
It's internet town, British Columbia.
Yeah.
Honestly, I think it's a matter of time until a YouTuber does it.
There's been, I mean, there's a, there's a town in, I think it was Sweden.
I don't remember.
It's one of those three countries up there that did like, they took over, it was an old
military community based on a base, military base.
The base was no longer used anymore.
The community was thus abandoned because of that.
So they revamped the entire thing and they turned it into like tech startup town.
There's like incredible internet connections to everywhere.
And they're throwing money into startups to give them grants and stuff to start pushing
there so they can like set up this new town.
It's very interesting.
I don't know.
That was like four or five years ago that I heard about that.
I don't know if it ever actually like worked out or not, but it's an interesting idea because
what you're, what we're seeing a lot of right now is the same cities that have always exist
just getting bigger, not a ton of like new cities cropping up.
Yeah.
Jason K 003 on Floatplane says, how far away is that from a cult?
Well-
Well, if you don't put on your Linus socks and Linus sandals and Linus underwear and
Linus pants and Linus shirt and Linus two can line a sweater to go outside, then you
just get kicked out.
Yeah.
So I'd say it's pretty close to a cult.
Yeah.
Internet town BC.
Let's go, man.
I mean, Floatplane chat, obviously, you know, not representative of the general population,
but like I'm freaking in, I'm coming boys.
There's a Floatplane theater on prem.
What else is there?
Apple SSDs are ridiculously slow actually.
And also don't buy a Mac mini or an iMac if you like your data.
This is from Anthony.
So definitely not biased at all.
Hold on a second.
Let me have a look here.
While developing Linux for M1, it has been discovered that Apple's SSDs are running much
slower than expected.
It turns out the fsync command, which is supposed to tell the drive to flush everything out
from caches to the main storage, doesn't do that on Mac OS.
Oh, instead it only flushes current rights to the drive, leaving cached data in volatile
memory.
The command to actually do fsync called f underscore full sync has some unflattering
benchmark results.
So if you're not flushing, you get 40,000 IOPS.
And if you are, you get 46 IOPS, not 46,000, 46.
And this is on the MacBook Air M1 running Mac OS.
On an x86 iMac with a WD one terabyte NVMe SSD on Linux, not flushing gets you 20,000
and flushing gets you 2,000.
That's still an order of magnitude less, but that's a lot better.
And on an x86 laptop plus a Samsung 860 Evo 500 gig SATA SSD, not flushing is 5,000, flushing
is 143.
The end result is that Apple storage appears to be much faster than the others up until
the point where you care about data integrity, where it becomes comparable to a spinning
hard drive.
Mac OS doesn't even seem to try to proactively issue syncs.
You can write a file on Mac OS, F sync it, wait five seconds, issue a hard reboot, e.g.
via USB power delivery command and the data is gone.
That's pretty bad is a quote from Hector Martin on Twitter.
That's rough.
I love this Twitter thread.
The start is amazing.
Well this is unfortunate.
Oh no.
Apple's one of those companies where I get really frustrated because they spend more
on R&D than almost any other company on earth and they make like nine products.
It's not like that.
I'm obviously being facetious.
They design and through partners build some of the most amazing silicon in the world.
Obviously that takes a freaking lot of work.
And they make more than nine products.
And they make more than nine products.
But for the breadth and depth of their product portfolio, it does seem like they spend a
lot of money.
And I just wish that some of it was on stuff that I cared about.
I just feel like they could do more better.
To be clear, this is basically never an issue on laptops because the battery should keep
the machine from losing power before the OS has finished a disk flush command.
But for desktops like the M1 Mac mini or 24 inch iMac, this could be a huge problem.
Either writing your files is excruciatingly slow or you could lose even a file you saved
five minutes ago to a power outage or a, thankfully rare, system crash.
Hope you've got an uninterruptible power supply, says Anthony.
And his discussion question is, why?
I guess I already kind of covered that.
When you have the R&D budget of a small country, why don't you get the basics right?
Just hold your phone differently, dude.
But hey, at least they've got it nailed down, how to lock screen replacements.
Yeah.
That's good.
That was worth it.
Yeah, that was totally worth the time they spent on that.
They shouldn't have spent that time making sure that you don't lose your data.
I mean, you should have just had iCloud anyway, realistically.
And I want to clarify, I know that they backtracked the whole locking out screen replacements
thing, but that doesn't change that they did the R&D for it.
I think they backtracked it because of the pushback, not because they didn't want it.
Jayden says, if you don't have a UPS, you are wrong.
I knew for years that I'm supposed to have a UPS before I was willing to spend UPS money
on having a UPS.
I was going to say, you can't necessarily afford it.
If you can definitely afford a UPS and you do important things on your computer and you
don't have one, I think you're wrong.
That's fair.
That is fair.
And in our final big news topic of the day, Dr. Ian Cutrus has left a non-tech.
Oh no.
For 11 years, Dr. Cutrus, AKA Tech Tech Potato, the tech journalist known for eating giant
wafers.
Yes, my friends, that is an actual file photo of Dr. Cutrus that we have here.
Actually, that's his photo.
He has announced his departure from a non-tech as senior editor.
He joined as a freelancer while Anand, the Anand of a non-tech, was still editor in chief
and has been responsible for some of the non-tech's most technical articles in recent years, particularly
with respect to CPU architecture, excuse me, and lithography.
His crowning achievement, in his humble opinion, I added the humble part, was talking AMD into
the $3,990 price tag for the Threadripper 3990X.
This is one of those things, kind of like how my crowning achievement is like more packaging
on tubing.
This is a, yeah, it's a pretty small win, but a notable one nonetheless.
I love it, Dr. Cutrus.
As for where he's going, he says it will be a mixture of behind the scenes and public
facing opportunities, as well as consulting within the tech industry.
He says he will announce future roles on Twitter or LinkedIn, probably both.
He seems to know where he's going and is amused by the speculation online.
His farewell article will not be the last article on a non-tech.
Some have been pre-written and are waiting to go up, including an AMD Rembrandt review
and an interview with Raja Keduri, Intel's senior VP of architecture in the graphics
and software division.
And a Google search for Raja Keduri will actually reveal Dr. Cutrus's previous interview.
So there are some discussion questions around this.
Are we hiring Dr. Cutrus is literally in there from Anthony?
Yes.
Well, there are other discussion questions like, what does this mean for tech journalism?
What would it mean if he went to work for an Intel like, okay, hold on, let's see.
So if he went to work for an Intel like Ryan Shrout, or went to work for Apple like Anand
did, or went to work for, who are some of my other favorites, Gary Key, went to work
for Asus or went to work for AMD like Scott Wasson from the tech report now at Intel.
Is it the fate of tech journalists to work for the companies they cover given enough
time?
So what I will say about that is that our goal is to do our part to reverse that trend
with the lab.
We are putting serious budgets behind recruitment for serious people who seriously know serious
things about serious tech.
And we're still going to have a fun way of presenting that data and that analysis.
But we want to get real serious business about the analysis.
And we recognize that I'm not going to learn everything there is to know about chip architecture.
In fact, I might not learn a small fraction of what there is to learn about chip architecture.
But what I can do is I can bring in experts, make sure that they have a bag of money to
tell me all about it.
And we can continue making super fun videos for you guys, because that's what I'm really
good at.
If I had a superpower, it would be taking something that there's almost no one on earth
who understands least of all me and turning it into something that's really fun and engaging
that still manages to teach people something.
That's I think what I do.
So I want the lab to make me way better at that.
And then actually there's like so many, oh man, there's like the vision for the lab is
like broad.
It's very expensive.
Yeah.
It's going to be really expensive.
Yeah.
So rug pull?
I said expansive.
It's both.
Yeah.
That's also true.
Rug pull?
Rug pull the lab.
We got to rug pull the lab.
It's really the only choice.
I think we don't.
It's the only option.
I think we have a moral obligation to rug pull to fund the lab.
Yeah.
Would you guys support a rug pull?
You know what?
We don't do too many straw polls these days, but I think we have to know the answer to
this.
I think chat is actually going to explode if you don't say it.
If I don't say what?
Whether or not we're hiring Dr. Cutress.
If I don't say whether or not we're hiring Dr. Cutress?
Yeah.
Oh.
So how's the poll going?
Yeah.
Let me just go ahead and post that.
I'm going to start in the float plane chat.
Good.
Yeah.
Okay.
Okay.
Oh, you propagate it from there.
Oh, you're going to throw it in the other ones?
Well, here, why don't you do Twitch and I'll do YouTube.
Okay.
Okay.
We're going to put it in there.
Boom, boom, boom, boom, boom.
Guys, check out that chat.
Oh, I'm not logged in on Twitch.
Okay.
Well, why don't I just do all of them then?
Nice.
Nice.
I voted.
Nice.
That was my contribution.
Thanks, Luke.
Really appreciate you, fam.
Yep.
Okay.
Oh my God.
That was for my own chat.
I voted for the correct answer.
Wow.
Why does Twitch do that?
It's like not being able to play video games with my own children.
Why?
There just needs to be a common sense filter on this stuff.
All right.
Here we go.
You guys ready for the results?
I'm ready for the results.
Results.
Actually, I meant to vote.
Hold on.
I wanted to vote.
Wow.
It has just been swinging.
Rug pull the chip.
Rug pull to fund the lab, 86% yes.
You guys are such trolls.
That's why I like you.
What if we just told everyone it was a rug pull?
Ethical rug pull?
Like 100% transparency from the start.
Well, we talked about that with LTT coin.
What if we called it LTT labs rug pull coin?
Like no question.
RP coin.
Oh my goodness.
Oh my goodness.
That would actually be really funny.
Megan says first merch order since LTX 19.
Can't wait for LTX 2023.
Oh man.
Thanks Megan.
Really appreciate you picked up the women's sweat something.
I missed it.
Jeff Bellavance over there moved it on me.
For those of you not in on the joke, I'm calling him Jeff because I accidentally called him
Jeff because I had a total brain fart a couple of weeks ago.
It's Jake.
Let's go with Bell.
Let's go with Bell.
Let's do some curated merch messages.
Shall we?
Bigz asks, if you want to do a fundraising event, just add a wallet on the store so people
can give you money and get merchant return later.
That's called a gift card.
Thank you though.
Thank you.
I do appreciate the idea.
We do have gift cards.
If you'd like to go pick up some gift cards on LTT store.com diff Randall picked up a
couch ripper pillow.
Will the screwdriver have a way to adapt for square drive sockets?
So because it uses a standard hex, a standard hex socket, you can just get any adapter you
want and plug it into it and it will work fine.
Just fine.
A question while you're picking that up.
Do you see your children having a part in the business when they are older?
I would love for them to, but I'm not going to be one of those parents who plans out my
children's future before they even like, you know, have their first sip of alcohol.
Like yeah, that's why my parents never planned the future for me and why I ended up being
such a loser.
Nice.
I still haven't done it.
Actually.
No, that's not true.
I had a sip of beer when I was like seven or eight.
Have I ever said on the show what my parents did with my brother and I in regards to alcohol?
I think it might be Luke story time.
Have I told you?
I know the story.
Yeah.
So my, my parents both said, um, that we could, we could have alcohol, we could drink.
This was like before we were of age or whatever.
But the first time that we would have to do it, we were going to, we were, we could have
as much as we wanted.
We would go buy however much they wanted us to buy.
Um, but we'd have to be locked in the backyard with them the whole time.
And it was like, that's the coolest thing ever.
And then neither of us took him up on it and I'm pretty sure my brother waited till he
was like actually, uh, not entirely, but mostly until he's reasonably of age and then he's
not even anywhere.
I think he drinks like once a year and I don't drink at all.
So it clearly worked.
Yeah, I guess so.
Um, for, for me it was, uh, it was, it was the classic, you know, give it to them while
their taste buds are still extremely sensitive.
Um, and it's really good.
So it's a combination of things.
Like I have a lot of really negative associations with the smell of beer and wine.
Um, me too.
I will, I will leave it at that.
Um, and uh, one of, one of them is that I tried it when I was very young and it was
just, you know, obviously it's, it's a God awful taste when that's mostly it for me.
I don't have negative associations from like people necessarily.
I just remember like one time I was at a friend's house and the adults were drinking wine and
one of the adults offered me wine and I took a sip and I was like, that's genuinely disgusting.
Literally fermented.
That's really gross.
Yeah.
And then a buddy in high school was like, Oh, I got some beers.
Do you want one?
And I was like, no.
And he was like, we'll try a sip.
And I was like, okay.
And I tried to sip and I was like, that's disgusting.
You can, you can have the rest if you want.
This is gross.
I don't know.
I'm just not into it.
I know a lot of people are going to disagree with me.
Yeah.
I mean, and people are welcome.
Welcome to disagree.
I mean, there's strong arguments to be made for like the, the fermentation of, of hops
and as like one of the reasons that humanity like, yeah, like modern civilization as we
know it, like modern farming and like, like centralized cities rather than just roaming,
you know, tribes of people wandering around.
Wasn't it also like a really big part of like being able to, uh, make water consumable in
an easier way than constantly boiling everything.
Yeah.
I don't remember.
There's something to do with that.
I don't know.
But like, yeah.
Yeah.
I don't know either.
I'm not down on it.
I have absolutely no moral objection whatsoever to consumption of alcohol.
I don't care.
As long as you're not a danger to yourself or others.
I'm not, I, I, I feel my, my need to be involved is exactly zero.
Yep.
I just, it's just not for me.
Yeah.
Not for me either.
Uh, flash seven 28 says the disgusting taste makes your food taste better.
Is that the whole pairings thing?
I don't know.
I don't, I don't get it.
I don't know, man.
Uh, love it.
Anyway, I, what I wanted to show you was this is a near final screwdriver.
This is from the, Oh, there's ball sweat on it.
Let me get that for you.
I just, I had it, well, it's not really like sweat.
It's more like, um, humidity.
Sure.
Yeah.
Uh, anyway, let's see.
He'll touch it.
Yeah.
I don't care.
That ratchet is from the Chinese supplier that did not get acquired by a competitor
and therefore is actually willing to produce product for us.
Uh, the plastics are all shot in the same material, unlike the one that I've been using
for six months.
The ratchet is not quite there.
We're doing some work on the tolerances to make it a little bit quieter.
The top will still swivel.
And the reason for that is a, that's how the bit retention mechanism works so that you
can turn it to see all the different bits that are in it.
And B, it allows you to use it a number of different ways.
Yeah.
I like, so you can power drive like that.
You can use it kind of like the, you know, the, I fix it one, like if you're, if you're
down on something like this and you're turning it like that, or you can turn the ratchet
with your fingers with the knurling, the knurling, I think we're also going to go a little bit
deeper.
The Taiwanese supplier had the knurling just right on, on theirs.
Um, but the Chinese supplier is still getting things figured out.
One of the coolest things about the, the switch to the new supplier is a, the quality is way
better, which is great, I guess, because, um, Chinese tool manufacturers are not able
to ship into the U S without tariffs right now.
So they need work.
And because our screwdriver is going to have all the plastics shot and final assembly done
in Canada, even though the ratchet and shaft are going to be manufactured and assembled
in China and then sent over here, enough of the manufacturing and assembly is done in
Canada that is now a Canadian made screwdriver.
So we are not subject to tariffs.
So we can use the high quality Chinese supplier that needs work and we can avoid the tariffs
and be price competitive.
And it's just going to be a really, really great tool.
I'm extremely excited.
But can it play crisis?
Unfortunately, not so much.
It'll make a lot of things that can play crisis though.
Uh, Nathan H asks, how dirty do you let your laptop screen get before you have to clean
it?
So when I have milk splatter from like eating cereal in front of it that no longer wipes
off, I have to go get water and I have to, I have to clean it.
That's my threshold.
I mean, here you tell me how bad is this?
It's pretty bad.
It's greasy.
I've yeah, I know it's, it's, it's really bad.
I've pointed this out before though.
And you pointed out in a counterpoint that that gets particularly bad cause it's always
closed.
Yeah.
I open it only when I'm using it.
It doesn't even get wiped by like sliding in and out of my pocket.
Not even a little.
So it does tend to get a little grody cause I remember seeing quite a while ago your phone
screen and I was like, wow, that's really grody.
I'm not used to Linus's phone screen being really grody.
Um, but yeah, it's cause it doesn't get wiped constantly in and out of your pocket.
How about you?
Are you, are you, uh, here, give me your razor.
Okay.
We're going to shame him.
We're going to publicly shame him.
I'm expecting his keyboard to be disgusting and his screen to actually be relatively clean.
Nailed it.
There's like actual crud in between the keys on a laptop keyboard.
Look at this under the backspace.
It's gross.
And I've actually like cleaned it for people that don't know my hands just like leak.
They like shoe onto things.
It's actually insane.
It's very, it's always annoying for, for, uh, my current girlfriend and any other girlfriend
that I've ever had.
Cause I hate holding hands because my own hand will just any amount of added heat and
then also not being exposed to the air is just going to make it just soak.
And even if they don't care, I just hate it.
When we went work from home, Luke just like left all his stuff here and nobody wanted
to touch his keyboard to clean it up.
And like the weird part is that keyboard on my laptop.
I have actually cleaned like a lot of times and it just doesn't matter cause it's going
to immediately come back because I like, yeah, I don't know.
Every once in a while when I'm sick, I'll have actually dry hands because it will stop
and I'm every single time it happens, I'm like, Whoa, this is what it's like to be normal.
This is crazy.
I don't know.
It's annoying.
Johnny asks, uh, games keep getting bigger.
Some are massive and that to storage keeps getting cheaper.
Do you think we'll go back to a cartridge system with games pre-installed on them dot
twos that we insert nest style?
No, I really don't think so because the other factors that the internet keeps getting faster
and that's, that's just going to be the way to deliver games.
I'm afraid.
Brian says, finally buying a shirt, thought the mouse pad, as soon as it dropped, what
are your cat's names and are they as tech literate as you?
Our cat's name is dash.
We only have one cat now.
Pretty much every story about why we only have one cat is sad and I've definitely told
it on the land show before, so I'm not going to revisit it right now, but yeah.
Walter says, have you seen the UFD tech new egg scandal?
They didn't pay for video sponsorships.
I have not watched it yet.
I really need to.
It's brutal.
You're so far away.
It's very brand it Luke.
You got to watch it.
Come on man.
Yeah.
Okay.
You got to watch it though.
Okay.
I'll watch it.
I know they too.
I know you don't like watching full length videos.
He does a too long.
Didn't watch thing at the very beginning of the video.
Oh, maybe I'll just do that then.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I know Nick has watched it and I think we're working on some kind of LTT store sponsorship
for him or something like that.
He actually does a positive call out in the video because the same thing like LTT store
and new egg sponsored the same thing for him.
LTT store sent him twice the amount of merch stuff that they were originally agreed to.
Yeah.
Just for like funsies I guess.
And new egg just like didn't pay him.
Cool.
And then try to pay him hush money to like not talk about it.
What's the difference between repaying someone what you owe them and paying them hush money?
I haven't watched the video, so I'm legit just asking.
It was, if I remember correctly, he was like trying to get it for a long time.
Oh man, I don't want to misquote.
You should all just watch the video.
It's really good.
I think what happened was he started being a little bit more public about it.
And then they were like, Hey, we'll give you like three times the amount if everything's
cool now.
It wasn't like we're actually going to fix it.
It was three times the amount and it was clearly only done because he's a public figure.
Got it.
Which always feels bad because if they're going to take care of you just because you're
a public figure, it's not okay.
Well, it's like the whole someone who is someone who's kind to you and rude to a waiter is
a rude person.
Like it's that simple.
Exactly.
Justin K, with Nintendo's recent disregard for game preservation, will you be throwing
caution to the wind and doing a switch emulation comparison on the various handheld gaming
PCs?
Something's something.
I am a pirate.
Nice, nice privateer shirt, by the way.
I actually included switch emulation in my coverage of the Aya Neo 2021 Pro.
I talked about, I think I was using Yuzu.
That's the, that's the switch emulator I ended up using.
I think that the Steam Deck is going to be an excellent candidate for switch emulation.
I would strongly encourage you guys to do everything in your power to own a legal copy
of games that you are going to play.
However, you know, you want to talk ethical piracy.
I think there's a strong argument to be made for playing Breath of the Wild on your desktop
at 60 FPS with your Breath of the Wild cartridge sitting carefully away in your closet somewhere
and not being played at 30 stupid FPS because Nintendo can't be bothered to release that
software on something powerful enough to actually run it.
Like I, I, I have, I have always said, I think there is a lot of gray in this whole conversation.
We are not the arbiters of what you should and shouldn't do.
I do intend to discuss switch emulation performance on the Valve Steam Deck is the short answer
to that.
Brandon G says, love and appreciate all you guys do.
Have you considered adding an archive page to the store to show all the products and
iterations of them that you've ever released?
It's a cool idea.
No, I haven't thought of that.
I don't know that we would expend dev time on it since it has, I'm going to get into
really boring, really boring, crappy, stupid business talk with you right now, but there's
no ROI on that.
I literally can't sell it to you.
So why am I even doing that?
If we had absolutely nothing else to do, sure.
But even then, probably not.
We'd probably work on like a really funny April Fool's joke or something like that.
It would maybe because we're not like getting rid of all that information.
So it'd be maybe be more interesting, sorry, to have like a blog newsletter thing that
goes out like a bunch of years from now going like a look at 10 years ago versus now I look
at five years ago versus now, whatever.
We've looked into UV reactive ink.
We have not had a ton of success with it.
So we are not going to release anything that we can't stand behind.
Mr. J, how did you like using an LED wall screen during the deal or no deal show thing,
PC or no PC a while back?
Do you plan on any more stage style shows?
We've had so many production challenges with those that we just, I don't think, uh, Belle,
we don't have anything like that in the pipe right now, do we?
I'm getting, I'm getting one of these right now.
So nothing, nothing for the time being.
Any plans for more BTS asks Patrick S.
Like 17 videos in one week and tech link to make a video in one day thing as someone in
that industry.
It's been some of my favorite content also would love more designs in the app.
And it ended there.
Um, any plans for more BTS, honestly, the BTS videos that we've done have mostly been
because we had a sponsor that was really like workflow focused and you know, wanted something
that would go along with their thing and we couldn't really come up with any other idea.
It's not because those are our favorite videos to produce.
It's just something that we know that there are people who enjoy.
And so we wanted to kind of try to find all the synergies and put them together.
Again, it's more like boring business stuff.
Luke, have you tried lost arc yet?
I have the, if I, my like super quick review would be that the story is very skip worthy.
The mechanics and gameplay is very fun and it is extremely pay to win.
And if you think it's not, you're wrong.
Okay, cool.
Roberto asks, do you have any plans on making an LTT lunch bag to go with the backpack and
water bottle?
Are you in my brain?
I've been wondering, you guys should do like more pirate themed stuff.
Cause you have a banana and now you have a pirate shirt.
Like I feel like I don't, I can't think of one.
Do not have a pirate shirt.
They have a privateer shirt.
We do.
And you have a privateering banana.
We have a banana.
I don't know if it's a privateering banana, but we certainly have a banana.
I don't know.
It's honestly not something I want to lean into that heavy.
I don't know if you noticed, but I haven't even addressed any of what happened on the
show today.
I it's just, for me, the whole thing has just been kind of like, okay, pretty much everyone
has moved on.
There's a very, very, very small number of people who are still very, very, very, however
it is that they feel about it.
And okay.
Yeah, I've said everything that I could possibly say about it at this point.
So here's a shirt, LOL.
Um, Tao teas says, ah, you have privateer'd me dollars, you hearties, or me hearties.
I don't know.
Whatever.
I don't have a very good pirate place.
Real question.
Will MG ever consider making a tech tip Wiki?
Kind of like how Lewis is doing with the repair stuff.
Um, would you support a well-made community effort, converting and summarizing videos
to Wiki format?
Uh, that's one of the things I would like the lab to tackle.
Uh, uh, John, our tech Wiki writer actually had the idea of doing like a tech dictionary,
a textionary.
And I was like, wait, like physical.
He's like, yeah, it would be like, it'd be like kind of cool.
We could bind it really nicely.
I was like, John, we're not doing, we're not printing a dictionary.
The year is not 1983.
Uh, the first tip in the dictionary would be that you should look at things online.
Yeah.
Um, trees, man, come on.
Um, love you, John.
Um, but what I w what that actually got my brain thinking about was, Hey, maybe that
should be part of LTT labs.
Is this just quick and dirty?
Hey, what is that?
I need to know.
I don't even have time to watch a video for like three minutes.
Uh, abs, absolutely.
I could see that being something that we would pursue.
Jake says, love the show.
First time catching live.
He plans for pet merch.
Okay.
Why don't you do some stuff?
I'm going to go see if I can find something.
Okay.
Um, water cooling, stream deck, when it's a matter of time, we're so slow down.
If you guys couldn't hear that, you said someone will probably beat us to it though.
We're so slow now.
Um, there's a lot of questions in here that are very specifically for Linus.
Like is there a framework update and stuff?
I'm trying to skip through things and find some, find some me stuff.
Um, there's one that said my name and then it flew away.
Here it is.
James R said, Luke, what is your job title?
COO.
And what would someone have to do in school to get a job like yours?
I have no idea.
Uh, um, I don't know, dude.
I do a lot of weird stuff.
I'm kind of all over the map.
So I don't think there is one thing, um, that you could go to school for that would cover
my, I'm not saying like, I'm so smart that it's impossible.
I just do a weird range of stuff.
And the stuff that I do covers a lot of different sections just because of like what Linus was
talking about earlier.
I've just worked here for a really long time.
So I have experience in a lot of things that we very specifically do, and I can do a lot
of those things.
So there's not like a degree that's like, this is how you work at Linus Media Group
or FlowPlane or Creative Warehouse or whatever.
Um, I don't know, getting into software is a really good idea.
Computer science, software engineering.
I originally took software engineering, um, and then got into this, but now the majority,
almost everything that I do doesn't directly have to do with software engineering.
So I don't know, dude, having done that degree does help me though, because when I'm talking
to the developers and stuff that I oversee, I can actually generally understand what they're
dealing with, what problems they're having, those types of things.
So I don't know, dude, um, yeah, sorry.
I'm a fabricator looking to change careers and your job sounds like the most interesting
slash satisfying.
Thanks.
Um, yeah.
I don't know.
Hopefully that helps.
But yeah, getting into software is a solid idea.
You have to constantly deal with very mentally aggravating problems.
It's a challenging job for a perfectionist because there is always things that are changing,
especially if you do stuff like web development.
There are always things that are changing that are outside of your control that are
going to impact the thing that you made and potentially make it worse or buggy or whatever.
So it is, it is constant and it can be grueling, but it can pay really well.
And there's really good job security because like everyone's hiring.
So that's what I'd say.
I don't remember all it is, so that's probably a problem.
That's unfortunate.
Uh, yeah.
So I think I have a solution to this.
I need a little, I need you to stall for me for a little bit though.
Sure.
Can I ask you questions?
Absolutely.
Okay.
How is everything going with framework?
There hasn't been an update in a while.
Uh, well I'm not at Liberty to share, um, everything that's going down with framework.
So the problem for me is that, okay, I don't know anything that any other investor wouldn't,
but because I've like had conversations with them and I don't know what's confidential
and what's not, I've found that for my part, it feels like the best thing to do is just
kind of keep my mouth shut.
Um, I was considering doing like a longer term review now that I've been daily driving
the framework and basically the title is pretty simple.
Did I make a mistake?
Uh, would be, would be what I would go with for the title and I'll talk about some of
the things that have been really great about my framework laptop and some of the things
that have been honestly not as great about my framework laptop.
I mean, part of the way that I see my role as an investor in framework is, um, as being
able to give me right.
Like, I, I, I feel like I'm, I'm there to add credibility, but I can only add credibility
if I'm still able to criticize it.
So in a way it's kind of like being the coach's son, like it ain't an advantage kids.
Yeah.
So that's kind of how I'm, that's kind of how I'm looking at it right now.
I just don't have too much to say that I hadn't said before.
So that's a little tough.
Nothing right now.
Another question from Jordan S uh, this is high Linus squared.
I'm a mechanic or high L squared I should say.
So I guess he means all of us.
Yeah.
I'm a mechanical design engineer and I love the newsletter.
How did the issue with the magnets in the kids build a PC toy turnout?
Oh, we are working on a different product that is going to require an enormous, absolutely
immense volume of neodymium and, and a magnet purchases.
So we are at a price break now where we can actually get custom shaped magnets made that
we can embed in the wood in a way that is, I, that I would, I would trust my life to,
I would trust my child's life that that magnet is never coming out of that piece.
However, that project that has the much greater potential for volume has sidelined the kids
first PC project for the time being.
It's, it's, if anything, it's more hopeful than ever before.
It's going to be an insanely expensive toy neodymium.
I don't know if you guys have been paying attention to this.
It's like five X in price in, in recent times and that, that kid's first PC toy is going
to have like 50 or 60 freaking magnets in it.
Like it's ridiculous that the cost of neodymium alone in that stupid toy is going to be dozens
of dollars.
So it's going to be really expensive.
But it's also, I think going to be one of those things that even if we just did it as
a, as a limited run item, you know, one time, okay, yeah, we're going to make this thing.
I think it could be the sort of thing that is like actually a collectible.
So there's an argument to be made for, for picking one up when we, when we finally do
it, but it's not going to be soon.
All right.
I'm ready.
Luke.
Hold on.
Don't look.
Don't look.
Okay.
Okay.
I think I've seen this though.
Have you?
I think so.
Okay.
Meet the wag hoodie.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So awesome.
That's so cool.
This is Bridget's dog.
Why is, why is the photo viewer in windows so bad?
It's amazing.
It's actually shocking.
Although in windows seven, it was fine actually.
That's fair.
There it is.
The wag hoodie.
So sweet.
So cute.
Yes.
That's a real zipper.
Yes.
It actually functions.
Yes.
Our supplier told us we were crazy.
I mean, I don't know.
Maybe you like, okay, here, hypothetically dogs are a great way to pick someone up, right?
So you might need somewhere to keep a condom.
You don't want it to just be like in your pocket.
Doggy bags.
Yeah.
Cause that could be awkward.
Right?
Yeah.
Just spare doggy bags.
Just okay guys.
I'm obviously more on the serious side.
I'm obviously reaching here, but yeah, that that's, that's genius.
Yeah.
For sure.
You could put your, your little doggy poo pickup bags in there or whatever.
Yeah.
I'm sure chat is exploding.
Oh yeah.
No, no.
I shall own this.
Uh, yeah, you will.
Yeah.
I have to get one from my parents' dog.
Yeah, you will.
No question.
We will sell it guys.
It's it's going to happen.
Uh, I think it was Bridget who pitched this, I'm not sure, but it was one of those things
where everyone, every once in a while, we'll have a conversation where she like goes into
a thing and she's like, okay, hear me out.
I think we should do, I think we should do this.
And I'm like, yes.
And she's like, here are the reasons I think that between the costs, I'm like, we're doing
it.
And she's like, right.
But don't you want to listen?
No, no disrespect.
I don't mean to be rude, but nothing that you could say could possibly change this outcome.
You want it to happen.
I'm more on board than you.
I think let's go.
Let's fricking go.
Part of the idea of like hiring people that are better than you at the thing that you
want them to do is like, they should be better than you.
So if it's, if they, if they truly believe in the call that they're making, yeah.
And I will ask a lot of questions.
Yeah, for sure.
I will ask them a ton of questions.
Make sure that they've gone through everything, all that kind of stuff.
One of the things we're working on right now is that I don't like wearing sunblock and
I don't like getting burned, but I am white as the driven snow and I spend most of my
time inside.
So whenever I do go outside, I get burned in like, I can literally get a sunburn in
like eight minutes.
If it's, if it's like a really hot, like high UV index day or whatever.
And so one of the things that I want, cause I will often wear a hoodie outside cause I
hate wearing sunblock.
It makes my skin all greasy and I break out.
I just really don't like it.
So one of the things I'll do is I'll just, I'll just sweat buckets.
I'll just, I'll just like carry a water bottle.
I'll chug water and I'll just sweat in a hoodie and stay out of the sun that way.
And so one of the things I wanted to do was a super, super lightweight but full coverage
super breathable, but sun blocking garment.
And it turns out there's a whole industry of like sun blocking fabrics and I'm like,
Oh, okay, cool.
So Bridget and I were going back and forth, back and forth on really these three different
fabrics.
One was more like a, it reminds me of like, I don't want to say it reminds me of burlap
because it's obviously a lot better than that.
We would never release a burlap hoodie unless you wanted.
The new LTT burlap sack.
Burlap sack.
Yeah.
I mean that's, I'm kind of tempted to do that.
Okay.
Hold on.
There's going to be like a few random jokers at LTX 2023 that show up in burlap sacks.
That'd be fantastic.
Okay.
Hold on.
I need a second.
Yeah.
Okay.
Um, anyway, so it, but it reminds me of that in terms of its breathability.
Like it's a really, really loose mesh and it's a little heavier and you actually want
a little bit of weight to it.
Like there's a reason that in the middle East, you know, in central America, they wear heavier,
heavy fabrics to keep, to keep the heat of the sun off of them.
Right.
So, so it had a bit of a bit more of that weight to it while still being kind of a modern
feeling, you know, hoodie garment.
And then she had one that had a much tighter weave, uh, had a higher quantity of bamboo,
which is a really nice cooling material and had more stretch to it.
And she was like, yeah, I really feel this will be like a nicer garment.
And I was like, the problem though is that I almost feel like if we were doing a women's
garment, that one might be more appropriate.
But for me as a sweaty boy, I want whatever has the biggest holes in it.
So every possible breeze that comes by is going to benefit me as much as possible.
And I feel like you and I are having like a Mars and Venus conversation here where we're
just coming at this from totally different perspectives.
And I feel like products basically.
Yeah.
I feel like, I feel like we want very different products.
So we brought in, we brought in Nick to sort of as a, Hey, am I crazy?
Neither of us told him what, what were our preferences.
And he immediately gravitated to mine and was like, I'm going to need the airflow and
this isn't going to cling to me when I sweat like a mother trucker.
Right.
And I'm like, yeah, bingo.
And like you can, you can just tell when someone, when someone considers, you know, how a garment
is going to look on them when they're drenched in sweat versus someone who just doesn't spend
their life or like three months out of the year drenched in sweat.
Right.
So so that was just an example of something where, you know, I ended up asking a lot of
questions.
It's not that necessarily, it's as simple as, you know, you hire people that are better
than you because it's when you put two people in a room, even if one of them is better than
the other, that doesn't necessarily make the better person's idea.
The best one by default, I feel like we end up with our best products when we have a ton
of conversation.
You're going for a different thing and you brought different experience to the table.
Yeah.
Um, I have questions about labs.
We were talking about, uh, the, the wag hoodie, uh, but I have questions about labs.
You do?
Well, no.
Oh.
Adam B and Urban Fervor does.
Okay.
Um, Adam B says, I was wondering if for LTT Labs, you might consider finding a way to
measure slash report the exact output of headphones slash speakers.
That way you can take out the human element, i.e I like bass in my audio, therefore I like
these headphones.
Absolutely.
I believe we have a higher sorted out for that already.
I forget their start date, but we will be ready to announce that as soon as their probation's
up.
Cool.
And Urban Fervor says, how will content for the LTT Lab work?
Will it have its own channel or go up on the main channel?
For starters, I think the lab is going to focus on written for its own content and then
um, supporting our other content.
I expect shorts, every short circuit to have hit the lab first once it's in full swing.
And then in the longer term, I think what we're going to find is that short circuit
is going to run out of stuff that's interesting enough to cover as it continues to grow and
have sort of a higher threshold of viewership that it expects per video.
And either what will happen is we'll fragmented out into other circuits or we will completely
rebrand or we will create a lab channel that we just don't even worry about any kind of
like upload frequency optimization.
And we just have way more basic, less opinionated videos that are just, here is everything you
need to know about it in video form if for whatever reason you prefer to watch a video
compared to reading an article.
Yeah.
Owen A asks, has the knowledge you learned at NCIX carried over to LTT NERGE?
Specifically the distribution knowledge?
I would say I definitely learned a lot theoretically about distribution at NCIX, but again, that's
school of hard knocks, right?
Like I didn't learn anything I didn't need to know in order to do my job better.
So I'm not an expert in what the best brand of conveyor for your warehouse is or anything
like that.
I don't care about that, but I would say that it's carried over in terms of relationships
because the guy that runs our fulfillment warehouse actually was the warehouse manager
for NCIX Richmond.
So that relationship was forged in the fires of NCIX and it continues to benefit both of
us today.
Austin D says, how important do you think upscaling techniques like DLSS, FSR, XESS
will be for the future of graphics rendering as games get increasingly harder to run?
I think it's pretty darn important.
I think it's mostly important for a specific type of customer.
I think it's very important for people that don't want to upgrade their computers as often
because for a long time we went through this path where you'd buy a new system and you
could run things on high or ultra or whatever.
And then as time went on the new games, you'd start bringing it down, bring it down, bring
it down.
And that's all fine and dandy and you can still do that, but now it keeps going because
you can bring it down further with these tools in a way that the fidelity is still there
in a lot of the same ways, which is very cool.
So yeah, I think it's quite important.
Michael W asks, you've talked about your time at NCIX and how LMG began.
Would you mind talking about how you got started at NCIX?
I started out as a customer.
I'm super annoying, man.
Like whenever I had a part that I needed to RMA or whatever, a lot of the time I wouldn't
be sure because you don't have just like a whole set of other hardware to plug it into
and figure out, like start troubleshooting what the problem is.
So I actually managed to sweet talk my way into the RMA room at both the Burnaby and
Vancouver locations on multiple occasions and just ask, Hey, can I have some like space
on the test bench so that I can diagnose this motherboard?
Can I have like your test CPU and your test RAM and then can I put like this different
motherboard in my system?
And then if the other one worked and solved my problem, then I would buy it.
I was a regular enough, I knew everyone.
I was like first name basis with everyone.
And then how I actually got my job there was that I was a very active participant on their
forum.
I had some fire.
I have always had a little bit of fire.
I sent Luke some really funny threads that I have participated in.
I have allowed myself and I, I really, I took a long break from this, but I have allowed
myself as part of this whole privateer thing that has gone over the last little bit to
kind of cut loose a little bit and it's been sort of liberating because I just, I've tried
to be, I've tried to be really professional in my communication about a lot of things
over the years because I just ha I have, it seems like something that I should do.
And this is one of those things where I'm just kind of sitting here going, who cares?
You know, and there's a lot of reasons for me to sit and go, who cares?
One of them is that it just doesn't matter.
It's a semantic argument and it's just really silly that it's managed to drag on for so
long especially after I already said yes, semantically, technically what I said was
incorrect, but also like you, I'm giving an inch.
Where's your inch functionally, they really are very similar and, and there, there's no
inch.
So I'm just like, yeah, well if it's something I can't win anyway, I might as well have some
fun.
And there's also the element of who am I bothering with this whole conversation?
Really the only people I could be upsetting with this whole thing.
It's like being a shoplifter and boycotting the store.
I don't care.
What can you do to me?
Nothing.
I never really thought about that angle, but that's pretty funny.
It's hilarious.
So I've allowed myself to get a little more combative with people about it than I have
in the past.
Cause it's just like, it's just ridiculous.
And so, um, yeah, back in the day I had some, I had some fire.
I got into my fair share of AMD versus Intel arguments cause it's amazing how high tempers
get when the stakes are at their lowest.
Do you know what I mean?
Cause it doesn't matter.
Why am I arguing with someone about how they spend their money?
We've talked about this before.
Who cares?
People, people get really, really amped up by defending their own purchasing decisions
because they feel like their purchasing decisions are their identity.
So that's fair.
That's fair to some people, the stakes will be high because they're, they're personal
attacks.
Now you wait for an Intel.
Well, I signed up with Intel.
That means you're making fun of me like, okay, relax.
So anyway, I was a very active participant on the forum and um, you know, when I did
argue with people, I really, I genuinely came from a good place.
I wanted them to understand a viewpoint that at least to, to the best of my ability was
objective and in their best interest.
And so hiring me was a very controversial decision there.
I know that for a fact because they told me much later after it had like worked out that
there was a lot of internal debate about hiring this like kind of pushy kid on the forum.
But I guess if I had to say how it began, I would say by participating, by being a member
of a community, right?
Um, you know, I, I, I just cared a lot and I don't think that's ever changed.
Last merch message.
Chris says, does the backpack have some structure that keeps it from going flaccid and droopy
when it's mostly empty except for something heavy in the front pocket?
It'd be awesome if it kept a lie profile in that scenario.
Okay.
Uh, now do you, by front pocket, do you mean this one?
Cause I've got, this is the latest revision of the backpack here.
I don't know that I could put anything that heavy in the front pocket.
I mean I could put this here, I guess I could stuff this capture card in there.
Oh, uh, something fell out.
Yeah, I will.
I will get it.
I will get it.
So here I will, I will jam this capture card and like cable and stuff in there.
It's really, it's pockets really not, um, designed.
I think that's a, I think that's a bag of folding main pocket.
Yeah, that definitely is.
Um, okay.
Now I will strip everything else out of the backpack.
So I got my, oh my goodness.
Oh, I've got proto new prototype underwear.
Don't look too closely at that.
Oh man.
Okay.
I'm dropping a lot of stuff here.
Crap.
Sorry.
I've just, I'm, I'm committed to answering, Hey, very nice Matthew R picked up the worst
value item on the store.
The expensive edition, CPU pillow.
Love it.
I mean, if you're going to flex, you might as well flex hard.
Ah, pull up the framework.
Framework charger.
Well, it's an ASUS charger.
I didn't get a charger with my framework cause I didn't need one.
Neat.
Right.
Okay.
Sorry guys.
This is taking a bit.
I like actually store stuff in it cause I'm actually using it.
Okay.
Seems like it.
It's completely empty other than the front pocket there.
Are you handing it to me?
No, you're just demonstrating it.
I'm just, I'm just showing it's like actually a really, really great material.
The team did an amazing job.
So there you go.
Yeah.
I was going to say, we have shown it on the show a lot of times, so you'd be able to see
how it's held that structure that whole time.
And it's always been very, it's always kind of been the same peeps feel like you probably
could have just said yes.
That's fair enough.
But demonstrating it's good though.
I wanted to demo it.
I have 30,000 of these inbound.
I need to sell them if I don't show you guys why I bought 30,000 of them, why will you
buy one?
Right.
All right.
I think that's it for today, guys.
Thank you very much for tuning in.
We will see you again next week.
Same bad time.
Same bad channel.
Bye bye.
Bye.