What is up y'all?
Welcome to the WAN Show.
We've got a fantastic show lined up for you this week.
Our main topics of discussion are going to be,
what is USB 4 2.0?
I don't even want to know.
That is not how versioning.
That's illegal.
Version numbering works.
And also LTT has actually completed.
Okay, it is shot now.
We have completed our first major,
like big sponsorship of like an S tier YouTuber.
Yeah, yeah, we do.
We do sponsorships for other YouTubers now.
So I'm going to be talking about that.
What else we got today?
That's wacky.
What isn't wacky is Ryzen 7,000
and Intel trying to say that, you know,
Arc is better than Nvidia ray tracing.
They have never claimed anything in the past
that ended up being skewed.
So I'm sure this is purely accurate.
So brought to you by Squarespace Vulture and Secret Lab.
So brought to you by Squarespace Vulture and Secret Lab.
All right.
I think the first thing we're going to have to dig
into this week is,
oh, the slightly different format for the show.
I'm really hungry and Bell's hungry
and Luke was indifferent.
So we ordered food.
So we're going to get through our tech topics
a little bit faster,
and we're going to save our merch messages
for a little bit later in the show.
So if you guys haven't picked up a screwdriver
or a backpack or an RGB hoodie or short circuit hoodie,
like the one I'm wearing
or anything else that's on the store
and you wanted to order one now
and send in a merch message,
Bell's going to be curating everything throughout the show,
but we're going to get to them later.
We're going to push them a little bit further out,
which means we are going to jump right into USB 4 2.0.
That's right, ladies and gentlemen,
the USB, what is it?
USB forum, USB promoter group.
Can you, they have, they are on a mission.
They are on a mission to make me angry
because there is no other possible reason
that I can imagine for this naming scheme to exist.
This is not how versioning works.
If you- I like to think,
I like to think that someone there knows that
and is driving for change,
but this one time was like,
actually we need this sequence of numbers
and they made it happen.
What? They wanted 420.
What do you even, oh my God.
Well then they could have just made it version 4.20.
And even that would have been stupid
because it appears to be a pretty significant upgrade
from 40 gigabit per second to 80 gigabit per second.
To be clear, I am not upset about the technology.
It sounds actually like really solid.
You do need an active cable
for that 80 gigabit per second.
It's max on passive is 40 gigabit,
but that's still pretty crazy.
It's only USB type C, which is what's going to happen.
A matter of time, yeah, matter of time.
I'm so angry.
It includes new features
such as a bandwidth boost beyond 20 gigabit per second
for USB 3.2 data tunneling when using alt mode
such as display port mode
and has been updated to feature the latest versions
of the display port standard and PCIe spec,
which remember is important
because USB 4 is now essentially Thunderbolt
which was able to carry PCIe connections.
That's how you can hook up an external GPU
and stuff like that.
It is backwards compatible with previous revisions
including the original USB 4 standard
which has barely even made it to life at this point.
USB 3.2, USB 2.0 and Thunderbolt 3.
And our discussion question is faster is always better.
But why do they keep using these confusing naming schemes?
I might have an answer for that.
I'm going to have to try to dig it up.
Capes in floatplane chat says that the USB spec naming
is meant for developers and not consumers
and that we should refer to Benson Leung's,
hopefully I said that right,
response in the USB-C hardware, USB-C hardware subreddit.
I legitimately almost said Chardware.
Names, sorry, what?
Hold on a second.
Hold on a second.
All right, Benson.
I don't like that personally.
I don't see why developers need a worse naming scheme.
I would like to try to find this thread.
Can someone post?
I think I've probably got it.
USB promoter group announces USB 4, this is great.
It has 163 comments and 48 upvotes.
That's usually a good sign.
The top up, oh, this is great.
No, I don't want to log in.
I don't care.
I found the post.
USB does have branding professionals.
Hint, this announcement is about a spec version bump,
which is a technical document, not a branding document.
Here's what my guess is on the branding will be for gear
with the new speed USB 4, 80 gigabit per second.
Why USB 4 2.0?
Why not USB 5?
Why not USB 4.1?
Why not literally anything else?
Like there is no continuity whatsoever.
We had USB 1, then we got 1.1.
If I recall, there was a 1.1 A.
Hold on, all the versions of USB.
Here we go.
Okay, 1.1.
Okay, 1.0 apparently was like never really a thing.
This is from Triplight though.
So I have no idea how accurate this is.
Oh my God, just show me the table.
Okay, so we got, here we go, here we go.
Triplight provides this chart, 1.1.
This was full speed USB introduced in 1998.
All right, you had your USB A, you had your USB B.
That was for your scanner, all right?
We had scanners back then.
Okay, that was a peripheral.
We had our printers, we had our scanners.
Combine them, black magic, not till later.
Okay, then we had USB 2, high speed.
Who would think, what would you think is faster?
High speed or full speed?
Help me out here, Luke.
Full speed?
Yeah, I would think so too.
Maximum, right?
Unfortunately full speed is like 1 40th the speed
of high speed.
Yeah, okay, whatever.
Came a mere two years later.
So yeah, it went a lot faster and that merited,
a spec bump.
Okay, then we went from 480 megabit per second, okay?
So we 6X, excuse me, 10X the speed again to five gigabit.
And that was in 2008, whopping eight years later.
This was USB 3.0, which I think has since been renamed
to 3.1 Gen 1 Super Speed.
Okay, then things get really messy.
USB 3.1 doubled the speed over USB 3.0
and was originally called USB 3.1.
Then it was changed to USB 3.1 Gen 2 Super Speed Plus.
Holy, okay, then we got USB 3.2 Super Speed,
which I think is, yes, now called USB 3.2 Gen 2 by 2.
Oh no, right, no, no, no.
These were former names, right?
Gen 1, now it's USB 3.2 Gen 1.
Okay, 3.2 Gen 2 by 2, and that's 20 gigabit per second.
I really enjoyed that one, I remember that launch.
Oh my God.
Oh, it was fantastic.
Then we got USB 4, which was also known
as USB 4 Gen 2 by 2 or USB 4 20 gigabit.
Wait, what 20 gigabit?
I thought, oh my God.
Okay, so USB 4, this is where things get really complicated
because USB 4 has optional components to the spec.
You don't have to, you can be USB 4
without being 40 gigabit per second.
So here we've got USB 4 20 gigabit.
Okay, so that came in 2019, does up to 20 gigabit.
Then we got USB 4, which is Gen 3 by 2,
which does 40 gigabit and might also do like PCIE and stuff,
assuming you have a compliant cable.
All of this was preventable.
So there's some posts actually in response to TechLinked.
So Laughing Man or Benson Leung,
the person that we're finding comments from and stuff,
responded to a TechLinked Twitter post, a tweet,
some would say, and there are more comments
from him on the Reddit thread.
There's a few different comments on Reddit.
They're all saying roughly the same thing.
Where's the other one?
The main thing is what I kind of already said though.
On Twitter, someone responded to TechLinked by saying,
Ben Mitchell responded to TechLinked by saying,
oh my God, can they just stick to the naming scheme please
and stop renaming old standards?
Benson Leung, also known as Laughing Man said,
no, because people, and then in brackets,
developers, spec writers, and others,
work on these spec documents.
These are living standards
and having a sensible version numbering scheme is required.
Someone responded to that by saying,
this is not a sensible version numbering scheme,
which got 23 likes.
He responded.
Luke with the play-by-play here.
All right.
The likes are interesting.
The TechLinked post got a bunch of likes.
The first response gets 68.
Benson responds gets three.
Someone go up, by the way,
can one person go like that 68 one?
Thanks, nice.
Perfect.
Bryce responds, gets 23.
Benson responds again, gets two.
So that doesn't mean he's right or anything.
It's just people aren't happy about it.
He says it absolutely is in reference
to not a sensible version numbering scheme.
He says the USB developers announced the version 1.0 release
of the USB for spec in 2019.
Sorry, I missed that part.
Three years have passed and a new version
is about to be released
based on the same USB for technologies.
It makes sense to go from version 1.0 to 2.0.
But if it's the same USB for technologies,
then why the actual living is it not just USB 4.1?
Yep.
Yep.
You know, like how you did it before.
Yep.
Remember that USB promoter group?
Remember when you did that?
Remember when USB 3.0 became USB 3.1
because it was based on the same underlying technology
but made it go more faster and had some new features?
Do you remember that?
I also don't even mind multiple decimal points.
Have you seen that in some versioning?
Yeah.
They'll do like major, minor, micro or whatever.
I'd rather have a letter at that point personally,
display port style.
Okay, display port has made some mistakes though,
if I recall correctly.
No, no, HDMI has done it.
HDMI 1. something B was like a huge upgrade from,
cause really, okay.
If it's going to end up facing the consumer,
you can't just wash your hands of it and go,
well, this is intended for developers.
It's not my fault that consumers are confused.
He's saying it won't.
What? Of course it will.
He said, I agree.
So I'm just making sure that I say his arguments.
He's saying that it won't and shouldn't
because there will be official branding
and that official branding is USB 4, 80 gigabit per second
or 80 gigabit.
The problem is that that's not what's going to end up
being presented.
For sure, yep.
And like, meanwhile, you've got the HDMI group
actively making it harder to tell
what is implemented on a product.
You've got the USB group adding ambiguity layers
on top of ambiguity layers, okay.
With optional parts of the specification
and no clear actual like line in the sand
for what qualifies as USB number point number.
So someone just said what I was trying to say better.
It's called semantic versioning
and it goes major, minor patch.
I actually, I've never minded that personally.
Sure.
Because you could have like, okay,
so let's use Windows who have not done a good job of this,
but let's use Windows.
Let's say we're on Windows 15.
So you have Windows 15, that's your first number, 15.
Sure.
Dot, and then you have major version releases.
Well, why don't we just use a Windows that used this?
Windows 3.1.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
So major update is the 0.1.
And then any little tiny fixes,
whatever they can get slammed under
at the very bottom decimal point,
no one really cares, but they're there.
Because they matter.
Right.
But like the average users aren't going to care.
And that's completely fine.
That works for, I've never really seen anyone complain
about that naming scheme.
I'm not saying it's the best.
I'm not saying it's the most marketable, whatever,
but it works.
It's very functional.
What's marketable is what can be understood
from my point of view.
It should describe at least like, okay,
you can criticize Intel all day
for their opaque processor numbering schemes,
especially once you make your way out of the,
like the mainline enthusiast skews
into some of the weird low power stuff
or some of the embedded stuff that they do.
But at least every digit has, mostly,
some kind of meaning to it.
Like you could, if you had a legend,
you could interpret it, right?
Whereas USB just has no clear,
it just has no clear, like, well,
going from three to four didn't have a speed increase.
Okay.
It didn't even have an interface change.
They're both USB-C.
So what was the difference?
I mean, I know the difference.
There were a lot of technological innovations
between USB three and USB four.
But then why did you allow this half-ass implementation
that wasn't 40 gigabit per second for USB four?
Like I just, I'm struggling here.
I'm struggling.
As long as it's consistent, I can kind of get behind it.
But any other time, it really does feel like you are,
you are confusing consumers for a reason.
Like, you know, when, oh man, like you'll see,
you'll see like a GPU maker go from three digit numbers
to four digit numbers when,
and you particularly see these things happen
when they don't have anything
particularly innovative to show.
Yeah.
There is some people,
I want to make sure I'm defending Benson and Leung right now
because there are some people saying like,
oh, they like, they promised or they said
that it would be USB four, eight gigabit per second.
They're still saying that, and he's still saying that,
that's going to be the marketing or branding version.
This weird one that I already forgot,
USB four version 2.0 is theoretically
a developer only branding thing.
The problem with this is it's not only has it already hit
a lot of consumers, but it's going to hit many more
and will very likely be a part of the branding
of certain products.
So, cause companies are going to start designing,
developing, planning these products like now,
and they're just not going to get updated.
We've seen it happen a ton of times, so.
Yeah, I'm really frustrated.
Let's move on though, that's just enough being angry.
Do you want to talk about Japan declaring war
on floppy disks or?
This is actually pretty interesting.
Japan declares war on floppy disks.
Japan's digital minister Taro Kono
has declared war on floppy disks
and other retro tech used by the country's bureaucrats.
Japan still has roughly 1900 government procedures
that require the use of disks,
including floppy disks, CDs, and mini disks.
Mini disk, what?
I was very surprised to see mini disks on here.
I know, right?
Kind of awesome.
The US government had been using floppy disks
as recently as 2019 to receive nuclear launch orders
from the president.
That is awesome.
To be clear, I'm not suggesting, you know,
that it's on the internet.
Like, I'm just saying we could do something
a little more robust than floppy disk gets.
That's okay, I just want to make that very clear.
Yeah.
More than 20,000 typical disks would be needed
to replicate an average memory stick
storing 32 gigabytes of information.
This is pretty epic.
You guys did a video fairly recently,
building like a Windows 98 machine.
We bought it.
Oh, you bought one of those?
Yeah, there's a vendor online
that sells Windows 98 computers for like a grand.
Yeah. Yeah.
And they have like new manufactured hardware and stuff.
No.
Oh, I thought they did.
No, they just, well, they might have some,
but a lot of it is refurbished.
That makes sense.
Yeah, because there's a lot of it out there
and it costs nothing,
but what costs is spending the time to validate it
and make sure that it's all working and ready for deployment
because there, as Anthony explained in the video,
there are many industries that still rely
on extremely old software.
Tons of manufacturing and stuff,
where like it does, as much as this might annoy some people
in like software development and stuff,
what they have does enough in a lot of these situations.
300 megahertz, a lot of, that's millions of cycles a second.
Like it's actually fine for just-
In a lot of very specific situations.
Running a conveyor belt.
Yeah.
Who cares?
Yeah.
It's fine.
Yep.
And the cost of updating that hardware
that it's running is monumental.
It could be, could potentially be catastrophic
depending on the size of the business.
Like, so compared to updating this giant,
this giant kind of machine or whatever it is,
just going out and buying another Windows 98 computer,
even if you are being charged an obscene amount
of money for it.
Sure.
Makes business sense.
It's an obscene amount of money for what you're getting,
but it's still a grand,
which to individuals is gonna seem like a lot.
To a company that's churning out millions of dollars
worth of product every day,
and they need that freaking machine running,
isn't gonna be a huge expense.
It is amazing how different the calculations
for the worthwhileness of a purchase are
for a business compared to a consumer.
See, I was even talking about,
okay, what if you're a smaller business
and you just can't afford to update the machinery?
That's one way of thinking about it,
but then Luke's like, well, what if they're churning out
millions of dollars worth of equipment?
Well, then they're clearly not starving for money,
but let's talk about opportunity cost.
What if they had to turn off that machinery
for some period of time in order to perform this maintenance
to upgrade it so that it can run Windows Vista
or so it can run Windows 10 or whatever the case may be?
What is it costing them to have that not running?
So it could be literally,
it could be hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars
to turn it off and upgrade it versus what?
I just spend a grand
and I can go get a new Windows 98 computer.
It's wild, right?
And so as much as it feels counterintuitive for,
you know, as an 80s, 90s kid, right?
I feel like Japan is like the land of technology.
That's the kind of the brand that Japan has to me, right?
You know, the first time that I ever saw a USB thumb drive,
it was a friend bringing it back,
I believe from a trip to Japan.
Yeah, or the first time I saw a mini disk,
oh, it's Sony, you know,
Sony was like the premium, the premium, right?
Samsung and LG were still like lucky gold star,
like cheap crap, right?
Nobody respected those brands back then,
like Japan, the land of video games and technology.
And like, so for me to read that the Japanese government
is still using, I mean, CDs, okay, fair enough, I guess,
but mini disk, mini disk was never even,
like I wasn't even aware of it as a medium
for anything other than, you know, listening to MP3s
off Napster, right?
Like that was the only thing I ever knew it to exist for.
And it was also common back then for certain,
I mean, it's still is common,
but not on the same scale, I would argue,
because the internet has connected people very closely,
but it was very common back then for certain technologies
to actually take off in certain areas.
So maybe mini disk was just used for other stuff in Japan.
I mean, it was sick.
It was cool.
Like compared to the other things we had at the time,
you gotta understand USB thumb drives, not a thing yet.
Okay, and even though, and even when they were a thing,
they weren't necessarily convenient.
Like if you went to a library or something like that,
it's not like it would support plugging in your USB drive.
And I'm talking like the library at school.
Like you would have to carry sometimes a floppy diskette
with USB drivers on it.
And then the USB drive that had your,
like your PowerPoint presentation or, you know,
something, some kind of multimedia thing
that wouldn't fit on a floppy disk.
Even once I had a USB drive,
I would often still use floppy disks.
Not in small part because my first USB thumb drive
was either eight megabytes or 16 megabytes.
Like it actually didn't have that much more capacity.
People thought it was weird too.
Jax in FlowPlane chat said mini disk
was much more popular in Japan.
I mean, yeah, I guess I get it.
Cause the capacity compared to the things we had at the time
was massive.
Apparently you can copy rented music in Japan.
And that was a big push for mini disks.
Oh, interesting.
Okay.
I mean, Japan has all kinds of stuff that I just like
never even saw or never heard of before.
Like the kinds of stuff you can get in vending machines
over there and stuff.
Unfortunately, the one time we went to Japan,
we didn't really get a chance to stay.
Very short period of time.
And it was awesome for that really short period of time,
but it was awesome.
Anyway, so that's hilarious.
I guess it's finally time for floppy disks
to head out, ride out into the sunset.
I shouldn't be that surprised.
I mean, I remember feeling this exact same emotion.
Like you ever get that where it's like a deja vu
kind of feeling, but you don't actually feel like
this thing happened before, but you feel like
you've had this, you've experienced this feeling before.
The day I found out that one of our major competitors
at NCIX still submitted their POs via fax.
I'm sitting here going, well, you can't,
you can't walk into the warehouse and grab a computer.
You can't send a email.
Like, what do you mean?
Why would you submit them via fax?
That one I genuinely don't understand.
You would actually send your rep an email to say,
hey, check your fax machine.
That's like leaving you voicemail to ask
if you've checked your text messages.
Like what are you, what are you doing?
I can't fathom it.
It's very weird.
It's very, very weird.
It does make me a little bit sad.
And I know this probably just like makes me old,
but I always really liked the physical nature of things.
Sure.
Like there's an Animorphs book.
That might be dating me as well.
But there's an Animorphs book
where they have these like data cubes.
Like even Star Wars has the, whatever they're called,
the pyramid things that have knowledge of them.
Yeah, for sure.
Holocrons.
Holocrons, yeah.
These like physical mediums of information.
Just cause I know that doesn't mean
Star Wars isn't dead to me, carry on.
We're always, I always thought they were really cool.
I thought it was cool.
That's one of the reasons why I like physical games as well.
I've always really enjoyed physical media and it is like
better sure that things are becoming more digital
and whatnot, but I do find it more boring.
So I think it's like kind of cool in a not good way,
I guess maybe that some of these things
still run on this old hardware
and run on these old systems and stuff like that.
I think, yeah, I think it's kind of neat.
Chats super into Animorphs.
Okay, which Animorph for you?
Which Animorph was I?
Yeah.
I only remember one of them,
so I guess I'll just go with that.
Sure.
I only remember Tobias's name.
I read it, I probably read like 40, 50 of them.
Like I was super into Animorphs.
Marco and Tobias.
Tobias was like the bird, right?
Yeah, Marco's the one whose mom is the,
I never knew how to pronounce it.
Yerks?
I don't know how to pronounce the aliens.
Yeah, the slugs.
Yeah, yeah, she was controlled.
And wasn't his like brother or is that Tobias's brother?
I don't know.
Maybe I didn't make it that far.
I know Marco's mom is like Visser one
or something like that.
And I don't remember any of the other characters.
And I only know Marco because you mentioned it.
Yeah, it's been a long time.
I don't remember Hawk.
Yeah, I think Tobias turns into a Hawk.
Yeah, Tobias is the Hawk and he's stuck as a Hawk.
And then I think he gets unstuck later or something.
He wanted to be though, I think.
I don't remember.
I remember something about him having an option
to become unstuck and he was like.
Forget it, I'm a Hawk now or something like that.
Yeah, that rings a bell.
I think I did make it that far.
People are like spoilers, spoilers.
Okay, okay, these books came out like 20 years ago.
I think we're clean and clear on spoiler warnings.
Yeah, yeah.
Can't remember the Andalite's name, man.
Hold on, hold on.
Okay, Andalite's name.
No, I got nothing.
Cause like one joins them later or something.
And it's like when that TV show adds
that like dumb extra character.
Like I don't remember him really serving any purpose
other than just be like, oh, cool.
We have an alien sidekick now.
Axe, that's the one.
Nighttime, that was the name.
And he was like the son of the one
that gave them the powers in the first place or something.
I don't know.
Man, Animorphs, man.
I bet my daughters would love Animorphs.
I don't know if my son would be into it.
I think I still have a bunch of the books.
I tend to keep my books, but yeah,
I think I still have those.
Axemily, Ezgru, oh my goodness.
What a name.
Yeah, I think we'll just call you Axe.
Yeah, that's probably a good idea.
A hundred percent.
All right, what were we talking about again?
Japan, Declaring War on Floppy Discs.
Yeah, physical media, man.
Books are- And how I like physical media.
Books are a tough one for me
because on the one hand I-
They're very unreasonable in the modern day.
Yeah, they don't make any sense.
But the flip side of it is I've been on vacation this week.
I've been on vacation this week and I was like,
man, I haven't read a book in forever
because it's tough for me.
I get sucked in and then I'm not functional, right?
Like I love to read.
It's not that I don't love it.
I just, I can, I don't have the discipline for it.
It's like, it's like Anno for me.
It's like, I could be sitting there
for literally eight consecutive hours
doing nothing but like not even stopping to eat,
just like reading, right?
And so I was like, oh, I'm on vacation.
I'm gonna read a book.
And I just, I have Kindle Unlimited,
but I just did not gravitate toward the Kindle at all.
Not even a tiny bit.
I was like, I will go look at my library of dead trees.
And I don't know why.
It doesn't make any sense.
I don't want to fill my house with books.
They're stupid, they're heavy.
They take up space.
They're hard to find.
Obviously just having one, one slate
where all the words can just appear
is it's objectively better.
Yep.
But it's subjectively better.
Man, the book I settled on, it's called
Mr. Norrell and Jonathan Strange.
It was actually given to me by Tyler before he passed.
Well, not given, borrowed lent to me, but I wouldn't.
Obviously.
Two of my favorite books of all time
are recommended from him.
Yeah, so that was why I wanted to read it
because it was the last book recommendation he gave me
and I haven't been able to yet.
But anyway, I'm about a quarter of the way through
and it's thick.
It's this thick, right?
That's really inconvenient to hold.
It sucks, it's heavy, it's stupid.
But.
But the experience is good.
Okay, we need to do a float plane poll.
Okay, physical books versus digital books.
I'm on it.
Honestly, I think it could be settled for me
if digital books were way cheaper.
But the fact that physical books, even with shipping,
are often cheaper than a digital copy
is just outrageous to me
because I don't believe for a second
that the author is getting way more royalties.
Yeah, I doubt it.
I do not believe that.
I like, I enjoy audio books
because we've talked about for a long time,
I have like issues reading scripts and stuff.
I'm mildly dyslexic.
So I read really slowly and I have a hard time reading.
So I enjoy audio books and I listen to audio books
for things that I feel like I need to get through.
Like, oh, this book is on a topic.
I feel like I should have this information
for whatever reason.
I want to learn something.
I want to grow in some way, whatever.
So I'll listen to an audio book
to make sure that I get all of that.
But I enjoy reading physical books.
So especially if it's like some like fantasy novel
or something like that,
I'll usually read it physically.
It takes me forever, but it doesn't matter.
So who cares?
See, even with a tech audience,
overwhelmingly like 67%,
two thirds of floating chat.
There's something about tactile.
It feels good.
And that's like, like putting in a floppy.
When's the last time you did it?
The noises.
Remember the noises?
It's great.
Yeah, I know.
It is like, I just, I don't know.
It's time to play a game.
You hear it spinning up.
You strap the headphones on.
Like you feel it's much more of like a full experience.
So are you going to get into vinyl?
Because that's what like everyone in the office,
you're getting into vinyl.
I'm the first person in the office that got into vinyl.
They don't know that,
but I wasn't invited to the cool kids club.
What the heck?
Okay, that's one that I can't, I can't.
The second I learned about the existence of Napster,
like the piles of CDs that I owned were okay.
I shouldn't say the second I learned about Napster
because it took a little while.
Like you would have to,
the only way that I could listen to any,
to MP3s I downloaded was sitting at the computer,
like on our computer speakers.
Cause we didn't even have headphones at our computer.
That like wasn't a thing yet.
So I did continue to use CDs and my Discman
for a couple more years,
but by the time you could burn a CD of MP3s,
I did that a handful of times,
but you had to have a compatible CD player.
It had to be able to read data discs.
And then shortly after that, I got an RCA Lyra,
which was a 64 megabyte MP3 player.
And that was it.
That was the last time I gave two about any kind of
physical media songs.
And then I did pirate music for a long time.
And then along came music subscription services.
I now happily pay for,
actually I think I have two subscription services.
I should unsubscribe from Apple music.
But anyway, I happily pay my subscription.
I don't pirate any music anymore.
Yeah, I have YouTube music and YouTube music's cool
because if you buy a song on iTunes,
you can just take that file
and you can just upload it to it.
Our Google play music had that.
I don't know if YouTube music has it anymore.
Does it still do it anyway?
So all my songs are totally legit now,
but I just, man,
I cannot even begin to imagine having like.
I think they're cool.
I really enjoy the look of it.
I never had them when I was younger.
Like my dad had some,
but I don't think we actually like
had a record player set up.
He actually has some really wicked ones,
but I don't think we had a record player set up.
I have some really cool ones.
Like I have the vinyls for Divinity Original Sin 2.
Gotta have them signed by like the development team
who I met in person and like all this kind of stuff.
So it's like really cool.
The actual record isn't signed.
The sleeve is signed to be clear.
And I used to use them for like timers basically.
Cause that was the thing that annoyed me the most
is they're kind of short.
Like they end really quickly
and then you have to go to the thing
and flip it or change which one you have or whatever
to be able to keep listening to stuff.
That's my biggest gripe.
But in order to solve that,
yeah, I would use it as a timer.
So I'll be like, oh, I'll clean this area for this long
or I'll walk out for this amount of time
or I'll do whatever.
Yeah.
Gremlin Injector asks why I prefer those over Spotify.
I subscribed to Google Play Music
because it comes with YouTube Premium
and YouTube Premium matters a lot to me.
As for why I prefer it, I hate YouTube Music.
It's terrible.
Google Play Music was so much better.
They dragged me kicking and screaming
away from the Google Play Music app
because the integration with Sonos was flawless.
It was so much better than Spotify's integration with Sonos
than anything's integration with DTS Play.
It was as seamless as just pressing cast.
I never, for years, I couldn't figure out
why anybody ever even opened the Sonos app
other than just adding their speakers to their system.
I didn't even need the Sonos app anymore.
I would just open up the Google Play Music app
and I'd go zone, zone, zone, volume sliders, cast.
One button to cast it.
It's so stupid.
The way it works in the Spotify app,
you have to like create different groups in the,
this is what DTS Play actually,
I don't know if I've tried the Sonos one.
Anyway, it's not as seamless.
I need Google and Sonos to bury the hatchet,
which I've given up ever happening,
but I need them to bury the hatchet
and just bring back the Google Play Music
Sonos casting experience because it was the best.
I liked Google Play Music a lot.
I hate YouTube.
I'm not trying to like bandwagon, but yeah, it's worse.
YouTube Music is way worse,
but yeah, it's not worth another entire subscription to me
to get Spotify and there's no way
I'm not gonna have YouTube Premium
because I watch a pretty considerable amount of YouTube
and I don't wanna watch ads.
So yeah, YouTube pre-made is for me.
Yeah, also the family plan for Google Play Music.
For YouTube Music, which is stupid branding, stupid.
What does music have to do with YouTube?
Nothing.
Yeah, there are music videos on YouTube.
I get it, but.
Conrad just said, YouTube Music sucks
because if you shuffle a playlist,
it shuffles the exact same way every time.
It's true.
I know.
Why?
Who wants that?
No one wants that.
I know.
I can't imagine a single person is like,
I'm going to enable this thing
that should make things random,
but if it changes, I'm upset.
There's no way that person exists.
Like.
Well.
Come on.
I mean.
Nope.
Okay.
I mean, yeah, they probably do.
But there's no way they're not outnumbered
by everyone else who would want it to actually be random.
That's fair.
Oh, it's so annoying.
I have that problem literally right now.
And I actually like tested it a bunch of times.
So I was like, there's no way that's how it actually works.
So I made a really, really short playlist of,
I think it was like four songs or something
just to like check.
And yeah, just the same order.
Like, come on.
Yeah.
I just want Google Play Music Pack.
That's all I want.
Yeah.
You know what else I want?
To talk about our sponsors.
The show is brought to you by Squarespace.
If you're looking at creating
and sharing your own content online,
give Squarespace a try.
It's the all in one platform
for building a top tier website
and growing your brand online.
You can upload or embed your video library
and organize it in one of Squarespace's
best in class templates to explore the new ways
that you can monetize your content.
You can both display your social media content
and push website content out to your channels.
Plus with member of areas,
you can unlock a whole new revenue stream for your videos
by allowing you to post exclusive content
behind either a subscription or a one-time fee.
And Squarespace's analytics and insights
ensure that you are optimizing your website
every step of the way.
So go to squarespace.com forward slash when
to get 10% off today.
Luke, what can I do for you?
Someone said, there's heaps of people like that.
They work on USB specs and naming.
Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha.
No, because it's not exactly the same.
Those guys do shuffle it every time.
Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha.
Oh, that's funny.
Like, I don't know.
At this point, I think Microsoft is just
taking this with Xbox naming.
Like, that's pretty clear to me.
They're absolutely memeing on us.
But I do actually believe that the USB promoter group
just unironically has no idea why it's so bad.
There's no other explanation at this point.
The show is also brought to you by Vulture.
Vulture provides high-performance cloud servers,
bare metal storage, and managed Kubernetes
at a fraction of the cost of big tech.
You can deploy instances with your preferred OS
through 12 pre-selected operating systems,
and there's the ability to bring your own ISO.
Their networking features are optimized
for multi-cloud deployments,
thanks to VPC peering and Direct Connect.
And with 25 server locations worldwide,
you can spin up low-latency infrastructure
for your users wherever they are.
With Vulture Talon Cloud GPU,
you can deploy fractions of NVIDIA A100s,
because they're expensive to buy a whole one,
to affordably handle even the most advanced workloads.
So right now, you can get an exclusive 30-day,
$150 code for new signups.
Just go to getvulture.com slash WAN,
that's get V-U-L-T-R dot com slash WAN.
Also, the show is brought to you by Secret Lab.
Secret Lab chairs are designed to keep you comfortable
for those long nights of work and play.
Or if you're on the WAN show,
it's kind of a little bit of both, that's right.
There they are.
Hey, the Titan Evo 2022 series
offers four-way lumbar support, thanks Vanna.
Comes with a magnetic memory foam head pillow,
and is offered in different upholstries,
like hybrid lead threat, soft-weave fabric,
and NAPA leather.
Best of all, a five-year extended warranty is included,
along with a 49-day return policy,
so you're covered if anything goes wrong.
Save up to $250 on select Secret Lab chairs
during their Black Friday pricing sale
at the link down below.
Oh, cool, yeah, you guys are gonna wanna check that out.
Big savings.
Sick.
Sick!
In other sponsorship news,
we sponsored.
Okay, okay, to be clear,
it's not actually unheard of
for us to sponsor other YouTubers.
We've sponsored UFD Tech.
UFD Tech, I know about that, yep.
Yeah, he did that like cannonball run thing.
I think he's done a few things
that we've sponsored. We've sponsored that.
Yeah, yeah, we've done.
I mean, it's usually when he's doing something
that's like, you know, helping raise funds or like.
Yeah.
Yeah, so we like to chip into that kind of thing.
Brett's been an amazing supporter for us over the years,
so we're happy to give something back.
Of course.
We've also worked with Quinn from Snazzy Labs.
Yep.
But no offense to Brett or Quinn,
this will be by far the biggest sponsorship
that we have ever done.
Okay.
So I won't give too many details,
not gonna give too many details.
I will say that we wrote a fairly substantial check,
more than we've ever written for our sponsorship before.
I will say that it is for the screwdriver.
It's Logan Paul.
It's a.
You're gonna make a blonde cap.
I guess I'm wrong.
I tried, I shot my shot.
Okay.
Keep going.
Anyway, so it's for the screwdriver,
which as you guys probably know,
we just launched in four variants,
all black, including a black shaft,
all black with a silver shaft,
black and orange with a black shaft
and black and orange with a silver shaft.
All four variants are still available.
And that is pretty much all I'm gonna say about it.
Other than that,
we sponsored this person to build a PC
with our screwdriver, obviously.
And I wanna let people guess.
Is that all?
If I told you the theme, you'd know who it was.
Here, I'll tell you the theme.
I'll tell you the theme.
Actually, here's what we're gonna do.
Let's play a little game.
Luke is going to guess five YouTubers.
Like verbally?
Yeah.
After each one that Luke guesses,
I will give some kind of hint.
Might be helpful, might be not that helpful,
but I will respond in some way.
To help guide Luke's guesses.
Then we're gonna put all five of Luke's guesses in a poll
so that you guys can say who you think it is.
And this is a tech YouTuber.
Ah, well, I don't know.
You could guess someone
and then maybe that would be something
that I would tell you as a hint.
Okay, Marques.
Marques.
Or MKBHD more specifically,
he's hiring more people, I should refer to the brand.
That's actually, yeah,
that's a good way of thinking about it.
Okay, let me come up with something
that I could help to guide you,
some way that I could guide you.
This person doesn't normally build computers.
Marques doesn't normally build computers.
Okay, that does help though.
Yeah, exactly.
Jerry rig everything.
Okay, I'll give you some collaboration there before.
I'll give you something else.
This person is male.
Okay, so you're giving me something about that person
that is accurate.
So I might be able to get a country confirmation.
So I'm gonna say Tom Scott.
This was suggested by FlowPlane chat,
but I think it's good.
Tom Scott.
Yeah.
Okay, this person has been making videos
for over five years.
Okay, okay, okay.
Darn it, I wanted the country.
Good one though, I respect it.
Darn.
For those guessing Mark Rober,
no, but we are working with Mark Rober.
So that's gonna be a fun one.
Cool, that's cool, interesting it could be.
I'm kind of like, I'm like already out,
but there's some good suggestions.
There's lots of different suggestions.
So I think I'm gonna go with one of them.
Where did it go?
Adam Savage.
Adam Savage.
He's been making YouTube.
Okay, so based on his face, that was wrong.
No, no, no, no, no.
I have already read it in the chat.
I'm just interacting, I'm being an active listener.
Yeah, yeah.
What I'm really trying to think of is like,
what I can say.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
This person, I would say is pretty physically adept.
Let me send you back to Marquez, no, it's not Dennis.
I would never sponsor Dennis, I'm too angry with Dennis.
I need help.
I will be fighting Dennis, literally.
When is that happening by the way?
I don't know.
Oh, I'm not sure.
I'll be ready no matter what, but I'm not sure.
I'm not sure.
I'm not sure.
I'm not sure.
I'm not sure.
I'm not sure.
I'm not sure.
I'm not sure.
I'm not sure.
I'm not sure.
I'll be ready no matter what though.
I want to like showcast it or something.
I'm not even worried.
Oh, guys.
I think earlier he let it slip that it was a tech,
it was someone in tech.
Oh, that could be it, that's interesting.
Is he though?
I don't know, I don't watch a lot of, oh.
Come on, Luke.
Hacksmith?
All right, that's your five?
Yeah.
So let's go ahead.
I put those in the doc.
I don't know how a polling system works.
Do you mind throwing that one in?
Oh, you want those in a poll?
Yeah, so we're going to let you guys guess.
It's really easy, but it's like.
Okay, do we want to add any more?
Because there are some that people suggested a lot.
Sure.
Okay, I saw Unbox Therapy in there a lot of times.
Yep.
I saw Electro-
Mr. Who's the Boss.
Mr. Who's the Boss.
Okay, so we'll add a few more for you guys.
We'll add a few more for you guys
that actually do meet the criteria.
Like obviously Gamers Nexus, like not going to be it.
Like they do build computers.
Yeah.
Sort of actually do build computers.
Not really, they build test benches.
Anyway.
That's a computer.
Yeah, sure, sure, that's a computer.
All right, yeah, sure.
Let's go with that.
Okay.
No, DIY Perks builds computers all the time.
Come on guys.
Come on guys, that's like DIY Perks' thing
is it builds weird computers.
Every single time I watch a video by him,
I'm like, this has got to be the end.
There's no way he thinks of something more crazy than this.
And then every single time he releases another video.
And I'm like, how do you do this?
He released one on a lens recently that is just amazing.
Yeah.
Like he made his own, oh man, just what a wild.
Guy's wild.
What a wild guy.
Okay, so let's go with that list.
Here's what I'll say.
The correct answer.
Is it in the list or not in the list?
Can you do that?
Should I, should I not?
Let's see.
Don't like.
Let's have, let's have, let's have some fun with you guys.
Don't like, you know.
Oh, here's actually, oh, here's a good one.
Okay.
Now that I have this particular list,
I think I'm comfortable saying,
actually I'm going to add this.
Okay, there, you got all of those?
Are we able to do a poll with that many options?
Okay.
I mean, it's currently letting me, so.
Okay, hold on one more.
We'll see.
Okay.
I don't know if I want to suggest it to you yet.
Yep.
Okay.
We've got, we've got, I think the main ones
that people were suggesting.
Yeah.
And I think I, oh wait, no, no, one more.
Let's put this in there.
Oh, very cool.
Okay.
The correct answer is in the list.
Okay.
I will say, I will say that.
Yeah.
So guys, the poll's going up.
Are you ready to post the poll?
Yep.
So I want to know who you guys think we sponsored
to do a build with the LTT screwdriver.
Just wanted to make sure we got the spelling
or something right, what we did, posting, no.
Okay, here it comes.
The options are in no particular order.
Let's go with the order that, no particular order.
Jerry Rig Everything, Adam Savage, iJustine,
Slow Mo Guys, Smarter Every Day, Henry Cavill,
MKBHD, Tom Scott, Hacksmith, Unbox Therapy.
So, do, do, do, do, do, do.
I'm going to let you guys vote for a little bit.
Why don't we talk through Ryzen 7,000?
The big news this week, obviously,
in the tech space is Ryzen 7,000.
AMD dropped absolute knowledge bomb after knowledge bomb
about their upcoming plans.
The Ryzen 9 7950X is actually getting a price drop,
or rather you could consider it a price correction
compared to 5,000 series.
It's still 16 cores, 32 threads,
but can hit a whopping 230 watts when needed
and can turbo up to 5.7 gigahertz,
5.7, 80 megs of cache on board,
and is rated to run with DDR5 5200 memory.
However, AMD has already come out and said
that their new expo, extended profiles for overclocking,
DDR5 memory kits will be available,
and the sweet spot for Ryzen 7,000
is going to be 6,000 mega transfers per second.
Ooh, there's some discussion questions in here
from whoever prepared this topic for us.
The 7950X being a hundred dollars cheaper than last gen,
could that mean that they're reserving the $800 slot
for an X3D part?
That is possible,
although I wouldn't expect it to come anytime soon.
The 7700X is a hundred dollars more than last gen,
but that part came out over a year into the rollout,
so that kind of makes sense.
So it could be that the 7700X
is actually the 5800X replacement.
It's eight core, 16 threads,
maximum boost of 5.4 gigahertz.
I love these boost clocks.
Holy crap, are we ever getting close?
I mean, AMD, Ryzen, it's not a bad thing,
but Ryzen generation after generation
has been kind of an overclocking dud
as far as like overclocking on an air cooler
or an ambient water cooler.
Obviously the liquid nitrogen folks
are doing what they do with it, right?
But for the mere mortals among us,
it doesn't really overclock much,
which is another way of saying
that AMD has really optimized it
to run at the maximum attainable speed
for consumers out of the box.
Yeah.
But they are getting like shockingly close
to that six gigahertz barrier.
That's just like other topics we've had today
is boring, but good.
AMD claims that the 7950X,
their top tier chip is 11% faster overall in gaming
compared to the 12900K.
And that even the Ryzen 5 7600X,
which is $300 beats the 12900K in gaming
while also costing a lot less.
How competitive will Ryzen 7000 be with Raptor Lake
asks our discussion question,
especially because Raptor Lake is rumored
to be more expensive than Alder Lake 12th Gen.
Ooh, wow.
Canadian retailers listing 13th Gen Intel Core processors
with prices 15 to 19% higher than Alder Lake counterparts.
With that said, I know from my experience in retail
that sometimes what we would do
is we would put in placeholder prices
before we actually got formal pricing
that was just definitely higher than what it would be.
So that way we could have the listings up,
we could prepare our pages and everything.
No, almost nobody would actually order at those prices
because, and the product's not even out yet,
it's not shipping or anything.
But what it would mean
is that you could get everything prepared
and you definitely wouldn't lose money
if people ordered it early.
So it could be that this is not actually that meaningful.
Either way, it could be,
it could mean that the competition between Raptor Lake
and Ryzen 7000 is gonna be a little tighter
than the initial rumors might've indicated.
I'm excited.
Oh no, we forgot to type in Mr. Who's the Boss.
Oh well. Yeah, that's my bad.
Well, I guess we've ruled out Mr. Who's the Boss, sorry.
What do you think the sweet spot is?
What do you think the mover's gonna be?
Oh, I think it's absolutely going to be a 7700X.
At 400 bucks for eight core 16 thread, 5.4 gigahertz boost,
especially because like precision boost,
whatever AMD calls it, their boost technology,
is so good that I would actually expect this.
If you provide ample cooling to exceed that in some cases,
like with just a tiny little bit of adjustment,
I just don't see how you're gonna get
any kind of meaningful performance uplift in games
going to a 7900X or 7950X.
Of course, I am totally excited to be proven wrong.
I'd love to see massively multi-threaded games come
and I'd love to see just like absolutely
like runaway frame rates.
But I don't foresee it happening at a time
when the current generation consoles
all have eight core CPUs.
I just don't think it's realistic.
Speaking of which.
Well, the real ones, sorry Nintendo.
Guess what I played a little bit recently
and actually had some fun with?
Guitar.
Star Citizen.
No way.
I would have actually thought guitar
was more likely than that.
Yeah, it only had one extremely major bug
that ruined everything, only one.
That's genuinely statistically not bad
as far as Star Citizen has gone.
Hey, what happened to the poll?
Can I find expired polls?
Oh, did someone like close it?
I don't see it anymore.
You, we can find expired polls.
There is a feature for that.
Okay, can you do it?
If I just share your screen,
cause I want to see the-
It's gonna take me a second.
Oh, okay.
Huh?
I'm just telling mine it's not going to switch it.
Yeah, don't, don't do that.
Yeah, for sure, won't do that.
All right, cool.
So we'll have a look at the poll results.
AM5 motherboards, the high-end X670 and X670E
will be available at launch
while B650E and B650 will arrive in October.
Hmm, this is a good question.
It's not gonna come down to just performance.
If Ryzen 7000 and Raptor Lake trade blows,
but AMD has committed to support AM5
through at least 2025,
which is better than Intel typically does,
why would anyone choose Intel?
It's a good question.
I would really like to see Intel stick to their sockets
for a little bit longer.
To be clear, AMD's track record here, not perfect.
I personally, personally invested much money
into their STRX40 platform,
which they said was going to get
future Threadripper processors,
which as of yet have not materialized.
Zen 4 is launching on AM5
and I don't even have a Zen 3 option
for my editing stations yet.
Paid for many of those.
So let's be clear, AMD's track record, not perfect.
We got one generation of chips.
That was it.
But they are saying that they're going to go till 2025
and Intel typically does only two cycles.
So 13th gen is going to be the end of LGA 1700 theoretically
which will support 12th and 13th gen,
which has been a strong argument
against Ryzen 5000 right now
because the 12th gen platform has had some room to grow
while to my knowledge,
they still haven't confirmed any kind of Zen 4
anything for socket AM4.
Although I think they acknowledged
that it could be a possibility.
AMP 323, yes, 5000 Threadripper Pro is out now.
It doesn't fit in an STRX 40 socket.
Fat lot of good that does me.
I didn't want Threadripper Pro.
I wanted Threadripper for my STRX 40 socket.
Right, so in the current battle,
12th gen versus Ryzen 5000.
12th gen is the smart play.
All other things being equal,
wouldn't you rather have an upgrade path
if AM4 is dead end.
So the same thing's going to happen again
where Raptor Lake is going to be the end of LGA 1700
probably if Intel's pattern is anything to go on
while AM5 could have one, two,
maybe three upgrades still.
Now that's not to say that you'll get the absolute most
out of those future chips
on this older platform motherboard,
but that's another thing AMD has done
a pretty darn good job of is maintaining that performance
across multiple platforms.
Okay, you got it?
Yep.
Let's have a look at the results.
I can't see them.
Oh.
All right.
Leading the pack.
It's actually surprisingly flat.
No one has more than 15% and it's Henry Cavill.
Cavill?
Cavill.
Cavill.
14%.
Okay, Henry Cavill at 14%.
But like Adam Savage is 1% behind.
J-Rig everything is 1% behind him.
Tied with Smarter Every Day.
Like it's very close.
I guess what you guys are trying to say
is that there's a lot of potential collabs out there
that you think make a lot of sense.
There's a collab that is trying to happen right now.
Oh?
That I've tabled it to James.
You don't mean Project Farm, right?
Nope.
Okay.
Someone reached out to me.
I've tabled it to James.
Project Farm's review of the screwdriver by the way,
going up Sunday apparently.
I'm stressed, but I'm excited.
Okay, what's this other collab?
Hit me.
Do you want to know who it is?
Sure, yeah.
What if you decide not to do it?
Would that be weird?
I don't know.
There's a thousand reasons
that a collab might not work out.
So given that I'm not committed to it in any way at all,
then I guess you can go ahead and tell me.
Okay.
Despite me reaching out before and getting ghosted,
I have now been reached out by Glarses,
who is as much as I'm salty about that,
a fantastic YouTuber who makes fantastic content
about keyboards.
And he wants to make, with you, he wants to come out here,
a socks and sandals keyboard.
What the heck is a socks and sandals keyboard?
I don't know, but the ingenuity of this man is high
and I expect great things.
He's made a triple keyboard before,
which is literally just three keyboards beside each other.
He made a custom 400% keyboard,
which is not actually like additional keys,
which you might think it's just extremely, extremely large.
He's done many, many amazing things.
And I think it could be really funny.
All right, you know what?
I'm down.
But yeah, that's a potential collab.
I'm down, yep.
Cool.
All right, all right, I'm into it.
I don't know what form it'll take or when it'll happen,
but I'm interested in it.
I kind of want to troll him.
I mean, I still own Skiffing Brit, a T-powered computer.
So clearly I'm a little behind on collabs right now,
but yes.
Yeah.
All right, chat's pretty into it.
I will say as much as you do need to do
that T-powered computer,
I think this one's a little easier.
I think he's going to fly here with the things that you need
and then you just like build it with him.
Oh, wow.
That's really easy, hashtag lie.
I think that's what's going on.
I'll have to follow up again to figure out more details,
but yeah.
Okay, there was one last thing for Ryzen 7000, by the way,
PCIE Gen 5 and PCIE 5.0 SSDs
will come to market in October.
I think that we've kind of reached the practical limit
of PCIE SSD speeds mattering for consumers
for the next few years.
Yeah.
But that's good.
Especially because there are other bottlenecks
that are going to be concerns long before that kind of
massive sequential throughput is going to be a problem.
Still good though.
Oh, is my bleep not working?
You want that level of component to be ahead.
That's fair.
That's fair because new hardware will come
and you want your old platform to be ready for it.
I mean, there's nothing more frustrating
than going back to an old system,
you know, like, I don't know,
let's say Intel 2000 and 3000 series and going,
yeah, this is still totally fast enough for what I need to,
oh my God, it has like two USB three ports.
Yep, a hundred percent.
Yeah.
Oh, good gigabit ethernet is what we're going to think
about anything older than like a couple of years ago.
Yep.
Really gigabit?
I'm trying to transfer a fricking file here.
Yeah.
Come on.
For real though.
For real?
Yeah.
Oh man.
Do we want to talk about this Intel Arc thing?
Oh wait.
Luke, do you want to guess which one you think it is?
I'm not going to say it publicly.
I'm going to wait for you guys to find out.
It was on the list, but do you want to guess?
Um.
You can just point your mouse pointer at it
and I'll say yes or no.
Originally, it was this.
Yeah, okay.
That was my first one.
By the end of it, I was thinking this.
Before chat voted.
It's neither.
Before chat voted, okay.
It's neither.
Yeah, I won't react, yeah.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
So that'll be, that'll be interesting.
Yeah, that, uh.
Yeah, I have things to say about that regarding my guess,
but I will say nothing for now.
I'll wait till after the show.
Yeah, yeah.
There are definitely things that you might say.
Yeah.
Okay.
Intel says Arc is as good or better than Nvidia
at ray tracing.
Okay, so here's the thing about ray tracing
is that it only really matters
if your rasterization performance is also good.
We've seen GPUs that just, you know,
had ray tracing hardware on them,
but simply weren't powerful enough for that to matter
because you weren't gonna be gaming
at a reasonable level of visual fidelity anyway.
So Tom Peterson told PC Gamer,
the RTU or ray tracing unit that we have
is particularly well suited
for delivering real ray tracing performance.
And you'll see that when you do ray tracing on comparisons
with an RTX 3060 versus an A750 or A7700.
We should fare very, very well.
The Intel graphics YouTube channel
released a ray tracing technology deep dive yesterday
where they showed some actual software,
everything from benchmarks to real games
running on their Arc hardware.
So let's go ahead and skip
to some of the timestamps that matter.
Actually, Luke, do you wanna give me some timestamps here?
At 18 seconds, there's a ghost wire Tokyo
running on an A770 with ray tracing.
Here we go.
Wow, thank you, YouTube compression.
This looks like absolute horse.
So that's cool.
One of the problems is any visual stuff on YouTube.
Yeah, what am I even running at here?
Oh, cool.
Auto360p, cause I'm not on a 10 gigabit internet connection.
I had a Twitch clip.
I don't really watch Twitch, but it was a clip.
I had a Twitch clip that was shared to me the other day
and I was like, wow, this looks horrible.
I figured out it had auto to 144.
And I was like, that's, I'm amazed.
Tell me you don't care about VOD
and the VOD experience without telling me
you don't care about the VOD experience.
Yeah.
At 1046, it shows 3DMark Direct X ray tracing
featured a test on the A770 versus a 3060.
At 1445, it shows an Intel spheres demo.
There's some cool stuff.
Yeah, so you can check that out,
but here's our discussion question.
And this is sort of a big one.
If this card were released today, okay,
amidst the pricing pocalypse in the GPU market, right?
So let's head over to Newegg.
If these cards were released today
with all the warts that they have,
like, I mean, even aside from the issues
that Intel has acknowledged
with things like Direct X nine performance, right?
We've encountered other problems like emulators,
just these are small community projects.
They don't have giant teams of developers.
They don't have billion dollar companies behind them, right?
My experience running emulators
on Intel graphics hardware has been awful.
And emulation is a huge part of why PC gaming,
why a device like the Steam Deck is so great
because you can play literally every game ever.
Not literally, but you guys understand what I mean, right?
So knowing that there are going to be caveats in a world
where an RTX 3060 is slashed
all the way down to 380 bucks brand new, okay?
That was the lowest one that I saw.
We're gonna head over to eBay, okay?
These are, remember, these are current gen cards.
We're not even talking last gen cards
that can achieve equivalentish performance.
So let's have a look at our sold, no, not condition.
Come on, come on, sold items, yeah, here we go.
Where are people paying like new pricing for,
oh, that's a TI, okay.
Here's a 3060 for $308.
Here's a 3060 for $250, 300 bucks, 300 bucks, 290.
So these are going for as little as 250
to just around $300 at this point.
So what price would Intel need to come in at
for you to consider an ARK Alchemist GPU?
What would it take?
Like, unless it's, okay, no, I'm gonna let you go first.
Actually, oh, we should pull again.
Let's pull.
So I wanna see like 200 to 250, 250 to 300, 300 to 350.
Because I don't think anything above that is reasonable.
I mean, you can put in 350 to 400.
I guess we might as well just have it there, right?
Okay, I'm working on the poll.
Okay, Luke's working on the poll.
Well, maybe I should, I wish I, okay,
am I just an idiot and I can't find the poll tool?
Like, I don't see how to do it.
I think so.
Okay, where's the button?
It's really straight.
Oh, it's not in the chat window.
That's why you can't find it.
Ah, yeah.
It's just barely to the bottom right of the player.
Well, there it is.
Look at that.
And you just make a poll like that.
And now that you know that,
when the player, when the new player launches,
it's probably gonna move.
Cool.
And the new player is launching like imminently.
Pretty darn soon.
Okay, perfect.
Thanks, Luke.
That's really helpful.
Yeah, no worries.
Okay, I wanna hear what you say.
What's your reasonable price range?
What's the ARK Alchemist price range for the,
cause remember this is, so we're talking to A770, okay?
A770, that's the one that they're positioning
against the 3060.
What's the price range that would get you to buy?
Yeah.
What's the maximum price range that you would buy at?
I think you're overthinking it.
There was too many characters in the title I had to redo.
I see.
What's your price?
Choose your price to me.
For me- Thoughtless victory.
It's like, it's tough because at different times,
I would have said different things
because right now I use my computer for work a lot.
So there isn't one.
Sure.
You know what I mean?
I'm not willing.
I need something very stable.
Got it, okay.
Because if I can't get my computer working-
No, I'm gonna flip this around on you.
I'm not gonna let you hide behind the,
it's for work so I'll cop out answer.
I'm not done, I'm not done.
At other times in my life-
Cause I thought he was gonna cop out.
That looked like a cop out.
I can understand.
It looked and it smelled like a cop out.
For sure.
I would also say though, at other times in my life,
I really liked this type of stuff.
Oh, so you would just get the newcomer just to like-
Very likely.
I would wanna see what's going on.
I would wanna try the different emulators,
see which ones broke, figure out why,
see what those emulators were doing about it,
figure out what the problems were, try different games.
That would be very exciting and enticing for me.
So I'd probably say the 300 to 350 range.
Cause I wouldn't want it to be more expensive.
Sure.
But I would be willing to take the risk,
if that makes sense.
All right, here is,
I'm gonna throw one more scenario at you though.
What if it was today and you were you now,
but it wasn't for work.
This is purely for our gaming rig
because, and before you answer,
I want you to consider the challenge that we had,
that we undertook recently,
where we switched to daily driving Linux.
I wanted to do this with these cards.
So the social aspect of gaming is like a huge part of it.
And that was a big part of what I felt like you and I
both missed out on during the Linux challenge.
That was a struggle.
Is that even though we were able to get
a lot of games running, sometimes with a fair bit of work,
if you can't play what everyone else is playing,
it doesn't matter how well it performs.
It just doesn't matter because you are not able
to have that social experience.
Conrad said, if it's cheaper than $600, I'm not buying it.
I don't buy anything that's not expensive
because it makes me feel,
cause it makes me feel.
Oh, shut up Conrad, you're just trolling.
You're trolling.
Here's Yeezys.
I don't know if that's serious or not.
Well, at any rate.
He's kind of a baller.
Here's the poll results.
Sorry, here's the poll results.
Okay, I think he's drunk.
The winning result is 200 to 250 bucks over on FlowPlane.
Yeah, cause everyone wants it to be as cheap as possible.
Getting 46% of the vote.
Although a massive 36% of you are saying 250 to 300
is also fine with 13% of you saying 300 to 350.
So actually you're in the 13% Luke,
who are saying like, yeah, it just needs to be competitive.
It doesn't actually need to be cheaper.
I find it very interesting.
I think it would also change depending
on what card I currently have.
If I had a card that was,
it could still do it with modern games,
then I just wouldn't get rid of my current card right away.
Right, cause then you could always bail.
Yeah, but if I had a card that was like,
it died or something, I might be less willing.
Yeah, like you, it would depend on my life stage
because there were definitely times in my life
that I didn't have enough capital to like have a spare GPU.
Like I would immediately be flipping that.
You'd have to be able to afford the next one a hundred percent.
Yeah, so it like, it depends on a lot of things,
but there's definitely price ranges and scenarios here
where I'm down a hundred percent.
I'm very intrigued by these GPUs.
I think I even mentioned like us doing a challenge
where we have to run it when it was announced or something.
That was a long time ago.
I don't remember if I did or not,
but it's very interesting to me.
I've always really wanted Intel to succeed with this
because I want another player in the space.
Luke can confirm that I didn't change the formatting
of the person that I pointed to
who was the person that was sponsored.
All I did was move the cursor next to it.
The formatting is different for different people
because just the documents is,
and I just didn't bother changing them.
I mean, it's just different for the top one
because it was the first one that was typed in
so it still had the like header.
Yeah, so don't read too much into it, guys.
He didn't change it.
All right, let's go ahead and,
where's our food at?
And he didn't point at it by like changing the font.
That's extremely unnecessary.
If you've ever used Google Docs before,
he just put his cursor there.
For the food, I think he went home for a bit.
I looked on the map, he was in the, he's almost here.
After I messaged him saying, hello, are you coming?
I saw his car turn around and start going back towards us.
So, you know, it might be cold nanos at the lads,
but we'll find out.
Cold chicken and warm cold slaw.
How long has it been?
Cause like cooked chicken.
Yeah, it's been long enough that UberEats is like,
we're so sorry.
So yeah, right.
But like, is it, is it like, okay.
Cause it's cooked chicken.
Yeah, it has not been that long.
Okay, it's only like two hours.
Do I get like a partial like refund or like,
how does this work?
I do believe so.
It's been a very, very long time.
Okay, cool.
Like an hour and a half or something.
For those of you who haven't got any merch messages in yet,
we are going to be responding to the,
the curated ones from Bell in a little bit.
We're just, we're waiting for our food.
So we wanted to get through all our topics.
I just thought the food was going to be here a little sooner.
We're getting some chicken.
Cool pandas with the lads.
I like it a lot.
Hey, you know what's cool?
I get to cover a controversy
that's not my own for a change.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Let's go.
Yeah.
We did it.
Dbrand is facing backlash after posting a production update
for their Steam Deck accessory kit project kill switch.
The notes were prepared by Riley.
So if there's anything wrong in here,
then I blame Riley.
On Thursday, Dbrand posted an update source two,
original update from Dbrand.
Here we go.
And this is in our slash Steam Deck.
It'll load eventually.
I promise we actually do have fast internet here
because we care about people's productivity
and mental wellbeing.
Man, loading just bothers me so much more now
than it used to.
The social team posted an amazing meme that was like,
ah, my game is taking an hour to download.
And then like the like, ah, yes,
I will listen to this MP3 after a night of restful slumber.
Like I just, my mentality has totally changed about it.
I thought that was hilarious.
It still doesn't bug me that much.
I like having fast internet, but like, I'm not,
I'm not willing to fork out the funds
for Gigabit right now.
So they posted this update talking about the release date,
talking about some different stoves,
how the reservation was gonna work,
some different scenarios, kind of some stuff like that.
Price elasticity of demand,
percentage of customers willing to pay at,
I don't even know what any of that is.
So cool, anyway, they posted an update.
They said that they would launch September 28th
in the form of an essential kit at 59.95
and a travel kit at 74.95.
Well, the update number four says December,
or September 25th.
Well, sure.
Users immediately noticed the absence of any mention
of the tempered glass screen protector,
which many thought would be bundled
with every other component in one kit.
Since it was listed along with the other components
on dbrand's website source three,
which I won't bother clicking right now.
This led to anger that dbrand was ripping people off
by removing an item from the bundle
after promising it would be included.
Some users criticized dbrand for charging extra
for basic components.
In an official response posted under an hour ago,
dbrand explains that they initially announced project
kill switch as an umbrella term to encompass
their suite of Steam Deck accessories.
In fairness, I did not know that,
I thought it was just the case.
So I apparently was not even among their audience,
one of the two camps in terms of how they interpreted that.
Camp A assumed all six items would be included
as a single product purchased at one MSRP.
So case, kickstand, travel, cover, skin for the case,
screen protector, and stick grips.
While camp B assumed-
Do you wanna see it?
All six items were standalone products.
Here's the source.
Okay, got it.
Complicating things is the fact that the screen protector
launched six months ago and was purchased by dbrand says
the majority of kill switch reservation holders
who paid a $3 reservation fee,
which was subtracted from the price of purchase.
The way dbrand sees it, including everything in one bundle,
what camp A wants, would saddle 68% of reservation holders
with a duplicate product.
So they split it into two kits and keep the screen protector
as a standalone purchase.
However, there's also the fact that prior to update
number four, dbrand reservation holders received an email
with a survey asking what price they'd be willing to pay
for a kit.
dbrand included this data at the bottom of the Reddit post.
Okay, that's what we were looking at.
So users are accusing dbrand of making this decision
after finding out that they could make more money
by splitting the products up in this way.
Huh, okay.
Is there like a pre-order, an image of the pre-order page?
Well, it wasn't really a pre-order.
So people couldn't have purchased it.
They hadn't announced pricing.
So no one put their money down.
Yeah.
I mean.
So does it matter?
I don't know.
I don't really get it.
Okay, so the original picture, the, let's see.
Not the update number four, not that, but the picture.
Screenshot of kill switch listing, tempered glass
is a component.
This I could definitely see being interpreted
in different ways.
Because this says, can I zoom in?
Yeah, so there's a project components thing at the bottom.
I'll make this really big and then share my screen
so that people can see what I'm talking about.
So this is at the bottom.
Project components, impact resistant grip case,
magnetic kickstand, skins, tempered glass,
travel cover, stick grips.
But it doesn't say, I don't know.
It could be a line of products.
It could be one package of products.
It doesn't say any of that.
I don't know.
Yeah.
Also there's no pricing.
So what does it even matter if it's included or not?
If they made the tempered glass thing,
you can just buy it, right?
You can buy it now.
Yeah, so I don't get it.
If they never announced the pricing,
what does it actually change?
So just add one of the bundles to your cart
and then also add the tempered glass to your cart.
Okay.
People including I put $3 down for project kill switch.
What does that even mean?
Well, that's to like reserve,
like basically it's to indicate interest
in a way that dbrand can actually kind of count on.
Like I wish that when we had taken screwdriver
or backpack interest levels,
that we had taken like some token amount of money
because it's a much larger commitment.
Do you make that refundable?
So the way it works is when you place your order,
it's included or something like that.
And it's a fairly negligible amount, like it's three bucks.
So I think for them, they saw that as justifiable.
Now that we've done things the way that we've done them,
I don't know that we'll change it
just cause it's kind of working for us
and everyone has their own way of doing things,
but it's definitely something
that I'd want to reevaluate next time
we have like a signup for notification.
You know, do we want to take some kind of deposit?
Do we not want to take a deposit?
We had a lot of people say we should have taken a deposit
kind of like valves done with the steam jack.
Yeah, so I don't know.
We'll think about it.
I don't know.
For me, the most interesting part of all of this
is the way that dbrand can pivot
between being antagonistic towards their customers
and the absolute royal crown king and queen
of trolling the entire world
and being like meticulous and professional
in their communication,
but all without not being them.
This is probably the funniest line in this whole response.
Replying to this Reddit post,
can you attach the travel cover
when the deck doesn't have the kill switch case on?
Does the deck fit in the valve supplied case
with the travel cover on?
By their understanding,
the travel cover is a truly standalone component
usable without a case.
At least 12 other users seem to agree
with their understanding.
At no point did we suggest this was a possibility.
This user is simply mistaken.
While it is fair to hold us to a higher standard
of consumer education on interoperability,
the reality is that we have almost 11 years of data
to support the notion that this type of misunderstanding
is unavoidable at scale.
They just basically called people idiots,
but in the most professional way
that I think I have ever seen.
I mean, this is the first time I've seen any of this stuff,
but yeah, there's no reason to me why, I don't know.
Yeah, I don't know.
Doesn't it even say it's a magnetic kickstand?
I don't know, I don't get it.
I don't know, I'm over it.
I'm over it.
If you can't refund, it's a pre-order,
don't go back on your word.
Yeah, that makes sense to me.
All right.
Yeah, I mean, I guess if people didn't know
what they were buying,
then dbrand's biggest sin here
is just not figuring out the plan.
It is very unclear, I will say that much.
When you go to the project page,
it says project could like, we're doing this project,
we're looking for interest,
whatever, reserve yours for $3.
The project includes all of these things.
My base assumption would be that it,
I'm buying this thing that costs this much.
Or not that costs as much,
I actually have no idea how much it costs,
so there's no way in hell I would ever do this.
Because why would I reserve something
that I have no idea what the price for it is?
But I mean, that's other people's thing,
you can do whatever you want.
But I would assume that it's one package
that has all of this.
But again, if it's all possible for sale,
and they didn't say how much it costs,
yeah, then who cares?
I don't know, I don't really get it.
I don't think this matters.
But I also just learned about it now
and don't really understand everything that's going on.
So sounds good.
Trostaft asks, I wish floatplane took up more of the screen
when not full screen.
Thankfully, picture in picture is there.
The new player, is it gonna have
like a theater mode style thing?
The new player has a theater mode.
Cool, coming very soon, coming soon.
The mythical new player.
All right, oh, the chicken's here?
The chicken's here, we've got some chicken.
That means I think it's time to do some merch messages
and go off the rails a little bit here.
So here, we're trying something new this week.
We've had some people saying they don't like merch messages
like clogging up the tech discussion.
So we're doing all the tech discussion front loaded.
So if you don't like the Q&A stuff
and all that good goodness, then see you later.
And we're hungry, so we're gonna have some dinner.
Hey, thanks, Bell, you rock, man.
You didn't by any chance happen to get your hands
on like a thingamahickey for putting in the thing, did you?
A thingamahickey.
What a guy, what a guy.
He's got the forks, he's got the sauce.
What's the sauce for?
You don't like shake it,
you just mix it with the fork?
Well, I don't know.
I told you, I've never had Nando's before.
I don't know what the sauce is for.
That is some lukewarm chicken.
Oh boy.
That is lukewarm AF.
We both get one of these?
I thought we got different things.
I don't know, no, we both ordered the same thing.
That's why I was telling you.
No, but like the, what do you call it?
The base, the base?
Oh, the, yeah, the basting.
Okay, so that's just for the chicken.
I got medium.
This is whatever goes on the salad.
Yeah, I don't, on the salad.
I think.
There's a salad?
I don't know what this is.
I don't even know what's happening.
I don't even know what's happening.
Wait, did this order literally take an hour and a half
to arrive and didn't come with forks?
Wow, this is amazing.
All right, bon appetit everyone.
Do you have to like say that you need forks?
Bell, while you get settled in,
I'm just gonna get a couple of merch messages going here.
Okay.
Oh man, there's a lot of curated ones tonight.
All right, cool.
Caleb asks, what's the longest road trip you've ever taken?
Currently on a 10 hour drive.
Thanks for the infotainment.
I don't actually know which one is technically longer.
That's what she said.
But I've, but I road tripped to Winnipeg
and I road tripped to Arizona.
I feel like Arizona is longer.
I think Arizona is quite a bit farther.
Pretty sure.
I've never mapped it.
Oh crap.
And Canada is big.
Oh crap, I just threw rice all over myself.
This is not good.
Is it, you mix it like that?
That's what I've done before.
Well, I don't, I don't like, no,
I don't have, I haven't had this container.
Hey, there's rice everywhere.
If I get a bowl, I usually like shake it up.
Thanks for nothing, Luke.
I'm sorry.
The longest road trip I've ever been on.
Should I try it now?
I almost don't want to if it just sprayed everywhere.
Was to Halifax.
I was gonna do it at the forge.
So I drove across the country.
Oh, that's long.
When I learned to drive.
So the day I got my learner's permit, right?
So I was 16 years old.
Exactly.
The day I got my learner's permit,
I took my knowledge test.
That's it.
It's purely a knowledge test.
And I walked out to the parking lot, all excited.
And my mom was like, what the are you doing?
That's the passenger seat you drive now.
And I was like, okay, this is a manual car.
I.
You had no training on manual yet?
No.
So she's like, well, no time like the present.
So I drove out of like the,
I wouldn't call it a city like it's maple Ridge.
Like it's not,
but I drove out of the ICBC licensing office
in maple Ridge home stick, which was interesting.
Then we packed and we left
because my birthday is in the late summer
and we needed to be back for school to start.
So this was our trip.
We were back for school and we left on either
my birthday or the day after or something like that.
That was a long way.
There's a lot of being in a car with two people.
It was good though.
It was very memorable.
It was one of the most memorable things
I've done in my life.
Definitely worth it.
Cool.
Next question here is from NCC 1702, Linus,
your existential dread about LMG and your legacy
has inspired me to change how I train people.
That is irrelevant, but wouldn't you,
would you ever have LTT themed framework accessories,
whether it's the shell or other parts of, or components?
The training thing is kind of ominous.
I wonder if that's a good thing or not.
Well, I think it is a good thing.
I think that we should always try to,
it depends what the goal is, right?
So if my goal is to build something that provides
information to consumers long after I'm dead,
then I should be preparing for me to be dead
as soon as possible, right?
But if my goal is to run a company, well,
then obviously I don't really give two hoots
about what happens to it when I'm dead,
because my goal is just to run a company, right?
So yeah, it's, I don't know,
there's a lot of people here that are younger than me.
They will, they will outlive me, you know,
I don't know that the younger people than me,
like the Jake Bellavance's of the world,
the Luke Lefren years of the world,
I don't know that they'll still be here.
I don't think I'm going to outlive you.
For that long, that's fair.
That's an inside joke.
That is, yeah, I'm not explaining that.
The point is, I do think it matters.
So my, for my goal, it matters a lot.
As for your question re framework,
LTT branded framework accessories,
any business decision has to be like,
it starts with a Venn diagram.
Like it's so, it's so simple.
We learned it in grade two, grade three or whatever it is,
but it's such an important life skill.
Anytime I do anything, I basically start drawing a circle
and I try to find, you know, what the necessary circles are
that will land on the person who is interested in that,
in that service or that product or that piece of content.
And I talk, honestly, even not this week,
cause I was on vacation,
but last week I probably had a Venn diagram conversation
with two separate writers,
whether it's pitching a video concept
or whether it's, you know, during the script,
a paragraph that they've written where I've gone,
okay, this paragraph is relevant to people
who are super into Linux.
People who get this joke you've made
and people who, you know,
have been keeping up with the current events
that this like news thing that you alluded to.
So you've got these circles
and you've got this tiny little intersection.
You've got small circles with the tiny intersection
and basically it doesn't land
unless all of these stars align.
You wrote this joke for yourself, take it out.
You know, like those kinds of conversations,
they're tough conversations,
but it's a really important training exercise
so that you don't just spin your wheels,
producing products or creating content
that nobody actually wants to consume, right?
And so I feel like the LTT themed framework accessories
fall there, no offense to framework, love framework,
love their mission, invested in the company, right?
But their market share in the laptop space is,
it's not a circle, it's a dot, you know?
And so we need that dot to overlap with LTT viewers, right?
We need that, we need the subset of LTT viewers
that will actually buy anything LTT branded,
that want to rep the brand.
They have to actually have bought a framework laptop, right?
So you've got people interested in framework,
people interested in LTT,
people who actually bought a framework
and people who are willing to buy something from LTT
you're asking for so many stars to align.
I just don't think it's feasible.
There's minimum order quantities, right?
Like if it was some 3D printed thing
that we could throw up on Thingiverse or something,
or I think Thingiverse ran afoul of like
the creator community or something.
Oh, did they? I don't know.
Don't quote me on that, but whatever the trendy place
to throw up 3D printing files, right?
Sure, sure, yeah, that's fine.
But if we're talking a mass production product
where you have to make a thousand or 5,000, 10,000 of them,
I just don't think it's feasible.
There's also, I think,
I think within the kind of whole idea of framework
and things that we have promoted in the past,
try to go to like a hobby space
and laser cut your own vinyl.
Yeah, sweet.
I did it.
My laptop has a purple dbrand skin on it.
And then someone, I was talking about wanting to do it
and then someone sent them to me
better than I would have made, which was fantastic.
Nice.
And it's a, it's a Haunter.
There's eyes in the mouth and it goes on the purple
and it looks like Haunter and it's amazing.
Looks super cool, still there,
still holding up really well.
Yeah, it's great.
Question for both of you.
This is good, but it's a really wimpy amount of chicken.
Yeah, you were talking about
how there's going to be way too much chicken,
but those are all fake photos.
Yeah, like this is like nothing.
There's like no chicken in here.
There's actually very little chicken, yeah.
If anything, I'm disappointed in the amount of chicken.
I need more dead bird.
Nandos, reach out.
We want the sponsorship.
Change our minds.
Yeah, we'll make a whole segment or something.
Question from Jay for the both of you.
Do you have any games on your phone?
Yes.
What?
I do, Orna.
I've talked about it on the show before.
It's a, I don't know what to call the category.
Map game, GPS game, whatever,
but it's like a Pokemon go.
What I really like about it.
Pokemon go alike.
Yeah, sure.
What I really like about it is I think,
you know, the story of Pokemon,
my thing with Pokemon go.
It launched, I didn't look into it.
I went on a hike because I wanted to get a Geodude.
For sure.
And there's no Pokemon on the mountain
because they want you to funnel into these PokeStops.
Orna's not like that at all.
Orna will actually detect like,
Hey, there's a forest here.
We're going to make it a forest biome.
There will be more forest things,
same thing for water, stuff like that.
So it has significantly more stuff built into it
that encourages you to get out there and move around
and go on hikes and go off road
and do those types of things,
which I think is very cool.
So I've been enjoying it.
It is a mobile game.
There are some pay to make your gameplay more successful.
I wouldn't necessarily say win.
Is there a win?
You'll get more, yeah, exactly.
That's the problem.
You get more loot and stuff though.
So you could perform better
with the amount of gameplay time that you invest,
which I kind of do see as a form of pay to win.
But yeah, Orna's sweet.
I enjoy it.
It encourages me to go outside.
I have some games.
I get quests all the time, like go walk 2000 meters.
And I'm like, cool.
I have checkers free, chess.
Oh, I also have chess.
Nice little time killer with the kids.
I have dress coloring.
Sometimes the girls like to sit and play with my phone.
Sure.
I have Minecraft on here.
Apparently I've never opened it.
I don't know why that's on here.
Yeah, I have leechess and chess.com.
I don't know why I didn't think of those.
I use those all the time.
Text twist two.
That's just like a, like a comfort food game.
Yvonne and I like to play together.
I have retro arch on here.
Unicorn color book glitter.
That's also for the girls.
And that's it.
That's it for the games on my phone.
I'm not really a big mobile gamer anymore.
I used to play more mobile games
back when they were just actually like simpler in a way.
They've kind of gotten too complicated for me.
Like I'm not going to sit down with the intention
of playing a game for an hour on my phone.
Like, but it was like happy jump.
Like, yeah, I'm on the can.
Stuff like flappy bird.
That era of games was like those.
That's all I wanted for sure.
Yeah. Agreed.
Here's some bell lore to give them some more time to eat.
I love mobile games.
I play a lot,
but I prefer the ones that you can just buy and be done.
So without explaining, here's a bunch of ones.
Just check out, hold down, down well, slay the spire.
Wait, so the spire's on your phone now?
Oh, I play it so much on the phone.
It's perfect for the phone.
Cause you can just like click it and it saves your spot
and you can move on with your life
and go back and keep playing.
So I have many hours in that.
Loop hero also on the phone.
Also plays great on the phone.
A dark room.
The one I'm going to explain so they have more time,
play down well.
It's a just go down the hole and try not to die.
It'll cost you like five bucks, but it's great.
Cool.
Next question here from Bearded in the Cave.
Yep.
How did your mini split system
keep your previous house in the northern climate
to keep up with the cold?
Yeah, it was fine.
Yeah, it's been great.
It's perfect.
Next one here.
You guys tweeted out a while ago.
This question's from Brandon, by the way,
that you're looking for the next big thing.
I shouldn't be.
Oh, Chad's saying you were.
That's probably old, so you probably used to be.
Classic Chad, always such pranksters.
We tweeted out, what should we make next
now that we have the backpack and screwdriver out?
Was there anything that you read that you were like,
actually this is a good idea
or something we should consider?
There's definitely some good ideas that I saw.
I saw someone posted that we should do
a glow in the dark screwdriver.
I messaged that to Nick who said,
apparently it was already on the list.
And then Yvonne said
that she had suggested it at some point.
So apparently it was already like
on the random future ideas list.
I'd say some of the most obvious ones
are a smaller version of the backpack.
Got a lot of people asking for that.
Yeah, RGB screwdriver.
That I don't think we have planned anytime soon.
Smaller version of the backpack though,
maybe costed down as well.
Yeah, I think people might end up disappointed
at how little it ends up affecting the cost
because most of the cost is in the construction,
not the raw materials.
And the construction is really complicated.
It's a really complex bag to manufacture.
That's a big part of why it costs so much.
I saw a really interesting post breaking down
how much we've made on backpack and screwdriver on Reddit.
No way that's accurate.
It was not accurate.
Our costs, I just want to make it really clear.
It estimated our costs at 25% of our retail price.
That is not even close on either backpack or a screwdriver.
Our costs are substantially higher than that on both of them
because materials, construction, logistics,
they all cost a lot of money.
More than you obviously, more than you think.
They're profitable, we're making money.
Like it's good, it's good business.
But it's not, yeah, we're not making,
what would that work out to like 400 points on them?
That's not happening.
Other stuff, I mean, yeah,
we'd love to do more variants of the screwdriver.
There's an email from you that I need to respond to.
I've been mulling it over.
I think super no, like aggressively no.
Oh wait, what did I say?
Is this not-
This is about buying up a certain company.
Buying a company?
That is making a thing that I theoretically wanted
at one point.
Oh, we should just talk about it.
No, we should not buy it.
I pitched to Luke.
I was like, hey, we have officially launched more tools
than the coal bar hammer company.
Maybe we should just offer to buy them
and finally push it over the finish line.
No, no, no, no, no.
For a wide variety of reasons, I think no, no, no, no, no.
I'd love to hear more about your reasons.
It has taken this long.
What do you think the state of the project's in?
I don't know.
If you buy the company, do you buy their debt?
I don't know, maybe.
But do you make the coal bar hammer?
And do you make that back?
Do you?
Do you want to make the coal bar hammer?
Would you be better off just siccing Kyle
or whoever else on ice?
It makes no sense.
But let's say you even wanted to make a hammer.
I think you'd be better off just having him design a hammer
instead of just buying out this,
probably at this point in time,
not even good design for a hammer.
And like, it tries to do way too many things.
If all you had to do was be able to break into a crowbar
and also be a hammer, and that was it,
and just limited the other stuff,
he could probably make one that was way better.
I have some bad news, Luke.
What?
Top message.
Or I should call it top keckage.
Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha!
From Nick Light.
Not gonna lie.
I thought about the coal bar idea a month or so ago.
I think it's hilarious and I'm down.
How many people are even going to get the joke?
It doesn't, it doesn't have to be a joke.
Maybe we can actually make it good.
How would you want to make a hammer?
What relevant, okay.
Backpack. You bought it.
I get it.
I didn't buy it for me.
I have a hammer.
It's great.
It's a hunk of metal that goes up
and then goes both directions.
But is it also a pry bar?
And it's, no.
And all the other crap it does?
Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha.
Darn it!
I don't, I don't think most people are going to get the joke.
It doesn't even have to be a joke.
What if it's just good?
I'd buy the coal bar hammer for my dad, says Conrad.
Heck yeah.
We can all buy one for our dads.
I was going to say, if we sell,
if we sell a coal bar hammer indirectly to everyone's dad.
Then it's fine.
We're doing great.
Great business model.
In all seriousness,
I do have one that I'm pretty excited about
that is very early stages.
So who knows if it'll ever even make it
across the finish line,
but I want to do a battery bank
that is kind of steam deck style.
So don't replace the cells,
but also if you're going to do it, here's how to do it.
Yeah. That'd be sweet.
So the idea would be like the last battery bank
you would ever buy.
Yeah.
If it's, if it's possible, you know,
I'd love to figure out if there's a way for us
to make the firmware upgradable so that if, you know,
let's say someone like Nintendo who uses USB PD,
but in kind of a wonky different than everyone else way.
So your switch can die if you use a standard power brick,
like, you know, that sort of thing, right?
So if there's a way for us to firmware update it
so that we can account for things like that,
obviously things, bad things might still happen,
but if we can continue to tweak it over time,
I think that would be a super valuable product.
And I think that's one of the big things
that we're really gonna continue to focus on
as we go forward.
Cause that's what's really differentiated
backpack and screwdriver is we figured out
what we wanted to exist and then made it exist, right?
Like with something like a t-shirt,
I think there's a little less room for innovation,
but for something like that, that battery bank,
I think absolutely we are identifying something
that is a problem and we're fixing it.
I hate to say it.
Yeah.
It's been said a million times.
It's been thought about,
I think it might've even been decided to not do,
but if you do socks and if you do sandals,
you've literally completed the outfit.
You could walk outside respectively,
maybe not respectively.
You could walk outside legally,
wearing entirely LTT clothing.
That would be pretty sick.
I understand it's hard to do, but that would be pretty sick.
And the amount of people that would buy socks and sandals,
LTT edition, I think is pretty solid.
I think there's a business argument there as well.
I need new socks pretty bad.
I've been holding out for like years.
The real motivation.
Yeah.
Oh, I'm being transparent about it.
It's time.
I have to go buy new socks.
So we're not going to hit my time window, unfortunately,
but yeah, I think that'd be sweet.
Darn tough.
If you guys want to work together, hit me up.
Yeah.
Deodorant.
Frankly, we don't make anything.
We couldn't make anything strong enough for our audience.
Love you guys, but.
Bare feet is legal, not everywhere.
There are places that you have to have
coverings on your feet.
I don't know.
I don't know.
Speaking of buying companies,
if you could choose another content creator
to join the LMG staff, who would it be?
I don't know how to answer this question
without it being like awkward.
Yeah, that's tough.
Honestly, I think we skipped that.
Do I abstain?
How about instead of the one,
I could pick like a one that I'd love to work with.
All of them.
We would love to work with everyone.
I mean, it's tough.
Ah, man, it's tough because,
just because I really like someone
and respect them as a content creator
and would love to work with them every day
doesn't mean I think they should be acquired, right?
Like let's take,
okay, let's take someone we talked about last week.
Okay, Sara Dietschy, right?
She has a totally different perspective on tech.
There's no reason to do that.
Yeah, right.
Great on her own.
Exactly.
She's doing great on her own.
She's probably more valuable
to the greater community as an indie.
If all we wanted to do was make sure that she had,
let's say she hadn't just killed it
on her Lab 22 launch or whatever else.
So let's say that she was struggling
in some way or something.
If all we wanted to do was make sure
she had consistent income or something like that.
Well, what are we getting out of it?
So presumably we expect profit at some point.
So if that's our motivation,
well, what are we gonna do
to squeeze her publication for more profit?
Is that even gonna provide any kind of service
to her viewers?
It has to be a win-win-win, right?
It has to be a win for us,
a win for her and a win for the audience.
And if it's not a win-win-win,
then it doesn't make sense.
And I can't think of too many
that would fit in that category.
Yeah, it's tough.
That's really tough.
Cause I mean, you see what, was it MCNs?
You see what MCNs did to people.
Yeah, just extract value.
You don't wanna be an MCN.
That's stupid, blame and annoying.
And no one likes you and you're dumb.
Um, so like Linus said,
there has to be value in both directions.
There has to be something
that's truly beneficial for them.
And we could get them editors
and videographers and stuff like that.
But a lot of these creators
already have solutions for that.
Some creators actually are unwilling
to give up the creative control of editing.
So wanna do it themselves,
which is respectable.
That's an approach, whatever.
I'm not making any judgment on that,
but like some people would even want those benefits
is what I'm saying.
Yeah, I don't know.
It's really tough.
There's a lot of people
that I would love to work with more closely
cause I think it would be freaking awesome.
But I don't think that would necessarily be better
for anyone other than it just being like, cool.
Question here from Jay.
Do you think we'll ever see RAM slots on GPUs
for choosing how much RAM you want?
Nope, never.
Should we explain in more detail or just leave it there?
All right, we'll explain in more detail.
What's the trend you see
in terms of RAM's physical proximity to processing power?
Let's look at Apple's M1 processor
where they've actually got the RAM
right on the package, closer.
GPUs were one of the first consumer devices in your system
that brought the RAM off of an installable module
that's just out of necessity,
quite physically distant from the processor
and from the memory controller
and put it right on the board,
soldered to the board right next to the processor.
Why?
Because GPUs needed mondo memory bandwidth
in order to move texture data
and other game assets back and forth.
So what you're never going to see then,
and look at the highest performance,
I don't know what that was.
Look at the highest performance GPUs today.
They actually bring the memory even closer with HBM.
So those, because the traces are so short,
are much easier to run at much higher frequencies.
And so the last thing you're gonna see the GPU industry do
is trend back the other way to modules.
Like not only are they physically more distant,
but anytime you have an interface like that,
like a slot, like a socket and a pin interface
or anything like that, you're going to have some loss.
And that loss is bad for signal integrity,
which is bad for, you guessed it,
higher switching speeds, which is bad for bandwidth.
So it's just, it's never going to happen.
I'm pretty sure it did happen way in the past as well.
And it's not done anymore, which doesn't always mean a lot.
But in this case, I think it does.
We've got a food question here.
Luke and Linus,
what was the most memorable meal of your life?
Easy.
I have an answer for this that is easy and I'll lock it in.
Do you wanna go first?
No, I'd hit me.
I think it might even be the same cause you were there.
Oh, was it the first dinner?
The first LMG dinner?
Oh.
Oh, different one.
Darn it.
Cause that was pretty memorable.
We had that like truffle and stuff.
Like it was a whole.
And now I'm not really sure.
It was a whole thing.
Yeah, that was kind of a big deal.
The first LMG Christmas party
was not really a Christmas party.
And we could like, okay, to put it in perspective,
our first meal when we landed in Las Vegas,
that first year was chicken nuggets because they were cheap.
Dude, we got a whole table of chicken nuggets.
So we balled out on chicken nuggets.
We had no money.
But to celebrate the success of our CES trip
and the connections we'd made and the sponsorships
that we had started conversations about
and all that good stuff,
we went out for one nice dinner and I was like,
maybe we'll make this a tradition.
That tradition has since become the annual Christmas party.
But when it started, it was just me, Ed,
Luke and Brandon and Luke's friend.
And we kind of, you know, for us went kind of wild
in terms of ordering.
It felt pretty nuts.
I remember like being worried about the company's books
because of that dinner.
We got like a $50 fried rice.
I remember specifically that fried rice.
That was,
as much as I remember that fried rice,
the food itself wasn't, was not great.
Yeah, I didn't care like at all.
That was a big moment in like my life,
but the meal isn't what made that memorable.
So I think-
So that's fair.
Like I wouldn't have picked my wedding
just because it was about the wedding.
It wasn't about the meal.
Yeah.
So, okay.
So that's the reason why I think my brain didn't go there.
My brain went to a different dinner
that you were also at.
Japan.
Yes.
Yeah.
We stayed at this,
it was a hotel in Japan that was like,
what is this like a thousand years old or some crazy,
like I remember hearing that and being like, no way.
And then I looked into it and it's like, yep, that's true.
It was at a hot spring.
We were, it was just amazing.
We had a meal at the hotel in this like big open room.
There was like three waitresses for like the,
what was it like 12 of us that were there or something.
Crazy one chef for just us.
I still have, it's still on my fridge.
It will always be on my fridge.
I still have the like, it's not a menu.
It's like the order that the dishes come in.
I can't read it cause it's in Japanese,
but that was, that was an incredible meal.
I don't know.
And it was, it does have the other components
and it's probably cheating because of that, to be fair.
Cause that was also a pretty big moment for us.
The people that were there were awesome.
There was a lot of other things going on,
but the meal itself, like, oh man, how many,
it was like some insane number of courses,
like over 12, I think.
And chicken sashimi is definitely the most adventurous
thing I've eaten.
You ate it too?
Yeah, I didn't remember if you did.
Yeah, I remember both of us tried it
and then cooked the rest of our chicken in our broth.
They were not a huge fan of, but it is what it is.
But yeah, that was amazing.
Yeah.
That was for the Omron factory.
It was tied to that trip?
Yeah.
It was also a wan show, which is probably
one of the more unique wan shows we ever did.
Ed was passed out drunk behind the camera.
Like, it's a miracle.
He managed to get the camera pointed in the right direction
before he fell asleep on the stairs.
The stuff he has been able to accomplish
when needed to is impressive.
Absolute unit.
Yeah.
Oh man, okay.
Speaking of travel, Tomas asks if there's a country
or place that you've always wanted to visit,
but haven't had the chance to.
I want to go to Australia or New Zealand.
I heard that's the place to be when the apocalypse comes.
What, because they're already trained in dealing with it?
No, it's because there's nothing of real strategic value.
It's far enough away from everything
that is of strategic value
that the fallout won't really get there.
And it's like temperate and like pretty developed world
in terms of infrastructure and like standard of living.
Relatively self-sufficient.
I know New Zealand is checking
a lot of those boxes specifically.
Yep.
Those are definitely up there.
A lot of the places that I really wanted to go,
I have gone to, so that knocks off a bunch of stuff,
to be honest.
I would really like to go back to Japan.
I barely even count our trip there as like actually
being in Japan.
We were there for like less than 24 hours, weren't they?
Weren't we?
And we slept.
So like it was a very short period of time.
I think I'm going to cop out and say Japan,
because I don't really count being there
for literally less than 24 hours as really being in Japan.
Even though I literally just mentioned
one of my favorite dinners being there.
I found out why this was 600 calories.
Look at the disgusting amount of sauce in it.
Yeah, like I can only eat half of this.
Because it's not completely saturated in mayonnaise.
It's got quite the aroma.
Yeah.
We've got this like hummus thing, though.
Scrapper Wars with Hardware Unboxed in Australia.
Yeah, I mean, we've said all the unfortunate reasons
why Scrapper Wars like isn't so much of a thing.
Yeah, it's dead.
Sorry, guys.
Yeah.
Question here from Mike.
My kids love my LTC water bottle.
That's not really a question.
Would you consider making a smaller one for kids?
Maybe with artwork from the ABCs of gaming.
Yes.
We're already working on a smaller one.
We hadn't thought of putting ABCs of gaming characters
on it yet, but good idea.
Yeah, I get a lot of comments and a merch message
about people loving the ABCs of gaming.
So that'd be cool.
I think it's because I specifically mentioned
during the Screwdriver stream that I read every review.
Some people have left some really sweet reviews
over the last few days.
Thank you very much.
It was a labor of love.
So yeah, I really appreciate it.
Next one here is from Elliot.
Linus, you've talked about your disdain
of closed ecosystems and smart homes many times on the show,
but you've also said you're super down
for a biometric implant.
Are you less concerned about biotech
when compared to all this closed ecosystem?
Well, I wouldn't go for a closed ecosystem biotech implant.
Yeah, there's a lot of caveats there.
The biometric implants that we're talking about
are quite simple.
Yeah, like an NFC thing that I can just program
to just like spit out, you know,
a bunch of characters when I scan a thing, right?
Like I'm talking really, really, really basic stuff right now.
Yeah, yeah, very user controllable type of stuff.
From Joshua, how did you navigate the transition
from a small to medium sized business?
I'm working for a small company for the first time
and we're rapidly growing.
Any tips would be great.
Hire a PR person.
And then don't agree with me.
And then don't ignore them.
There we go.
In all seriousness though, I mean,
you just got to keep iterating, right?
Just keep learning as you go.
I'm not a business.
I'm not like a business guru type person.
I'm not, I don't read a lot of business books.
When I read them, what I usually discover
is that a lot of what I find in them
is stuff that I did figure out along the way.
Maybe not exactly the same way.
To be clear, I'm not saying I'm some kind of genius.
I figured everything out.
Like it's not like that at all,
but the problems that I've had to solve, I've solved them.
So I guess what I'm saying is take time, identify problems,
solve them in ways that are scalable for the longterm.
Don't just solve problems short term.
I just don't, I mean, even the way we've moved
into our house, like you've seen it,
a room goes from absolute chaos to perfection
because I just do not have the cycles to do something
that I know I'm gonna have to do again.
It's not worth it to me.
And that's one of the things I've learned as we've scaled.
And if it's not gonna save you time in the future,
don't do it.
It's a full plain question.
Any new secret shoppers in the work, hold on.
I genuinely don't know.
I'm not on the team that plans that type of stuff.
I cannot actually answer this question.
What I will say is you shouldn't even ask
due to the nature of secret shopper,
they can't tell you and you don't wanna know
because you don't want anyone else to know.
There you go.
Yeah.
Well, Pickle's Lord of the Jar wants to know,
just a few months back, you were worried about the prospect
of your new products not selling well enough.
With this recent success,
do you feel more confident about launching
future high-end merch deployments?
It always depends, right?
Like nothing, I can't take anything for granted.
I feel like it's one of those things where
if you guys just bought it because it had our label on it,
I'd be like, have I taught you nothing, you know?
So I think that there's a lot of pressure on us
to keep making stuff that stands out and will be successful.
And I don't really feel any less of that.
I don't feel like past success is necessarily an indicator
of future success in that particular regard.
I think that you probably can carry some momentum forward,
but that momentum is short-lived, right?
If you guys buy one thing from us where you're like,
oh yeah, I heard like LTT has really good quality stuff,
but I didn't like this,
you're never gonna buy anything again.
So we kinda have to,
we don't have to hit it out of the box.
We don't have to hit it out of the park every time,
but you can never hit less than like a line drive single
to use a baseball metaphor.
Question here from Lucas.
Linus, you've talked about VR a lot,
but what are your thoughts on AR headsets?
Have you tried them like HoloLens
and do you think we'll ever reach mass adoption?
Not with HoloLens.
Have you tried it?
Yeah.
Yeah, it's kind of bad.
Yeah.
So for me, really,
it's not a question of how cool is this technology?
What can we do with it?
It's a question of what do I wanna do
and can this technology do it?
For me, the killer app for AR is memory augmentation.
I can never remember who people are
or like where I know them from.
Oh yeah, totally.
Or the last thing we talked about
or how many kids they have.
If I had a contact lens that I could wear
that was like, Luke mentioned his bird
last time you guys were hanging out
was having some health related issues.
You should check in with him about that.
I can't even, I don't even think I could put a sticker price
on what I would pay for something like that.
I'd pay a lot for something like that.
And I wouldn't be the only person
like in a professional setting.
People literally will hire assistants
whose entire job it is to follow them around at events
and like cross-reference and like provide them
with information as people approach.
Like that's actually a thing, right?
So in a professional setting,
I could see something like that being invaluable.
But I don't know, man, maybe navigation,
like a really slick AR implementation.
Navigation and a facial recognition thing
that can tell me who people are.
And maybe some basic information.
Basic information would be fantastic.
I will remember so many details about someone
and not their name and not their birthday,
but I'll remember like lots of things about them.
I'll be able to jump back into a conversation.
And as long as they don't expect me to say their name
or remember their birthday, I'll do great.
But yeah.
Nighttime astronaut asks,
given the importance of the WAN show now
in terms of LMG's contact with the community and consumers,
should Bell be given a substantial pay increase
and maybe some kind of crown or cape
to denote his incredible role?
I like the crown and cape.
I like the crown and cape, but see,
the reason I brought up this comment
is because I see comments like this a lot.
You know, Kyle did a great job in this video.
He should get a raise or this person did this.
They should get a raise.
That is not how it works.
At all.
What do you mean?
That's not how it works.
What do you mean?
First of all, you're assuming
that they're not already paid fairly.
Second of all, guys,
the people who are in front of the camera
are a small fraction of the people who work here.
You don't just give the person
who gets the screen time the raise.
We have dozens of other people that supported that,
that made whatever it is that Bell or Kyle
or I am doing possible, who also need to be paid fairly.
If we just gave raises to people every time
they did anything of value that was public facing,
our pay scale would be fucked, like a mess.
No, that's not how it works.
As much as I appreciate the sentiment
when people will say,
man, Anthony did a great job of this video.
He should get a raise.
It's just not how it works, I'm sorry.
No offense, Bell, you know,
you're great, you know, Hart.
They wouldn't even see the cape and the crown.
I could be wearing it, yeah.
Crown and cape, I'm down for.
Okay, you've got a $40 crown and cape budget.
Let's go, boys.
Let logistics know, they can source something for you.
You could just get a BK crown for free
and then get a sweet $40 cape.
That's exactly the plan.
Yeah, nice.
And we'll get you guys a Bell Cam.
So when we're doing merch messages,
we can just put him like in the middle here.
So we'll just get like a face cam for him.
We down, we good?
Yeah, I'll get a really old one.
So it looks like an old nineties MSN.
Let's do it, let's do it.
Let's go.
Question here from Cameron.
Do you have any thoughts on the GPD Win 3?
There's been a lot of comparisons,
but I'd love to know your thoughts.
We checked out the GPD Win Max 2 recently,
but the Win 3, oh, you know what?
No, I haven't really looked into this one yet.
Sorry, nope, not yet.
Someday, soon.
Looks sick though, yeah.
Another AR thing.
Oh no, this is the old one, GPD Win 3.
No, this one's old.
Yeah, it's cool, but it's a little older.
The slide out keyboard doesn't have a ton of value for me.
I'll say that.
Another AR thing is I would love
a really fancy calendar slash alarm app
where I can signify when like something is unmissable.
And by unmissable, I mean like blast my face with it,
like make it so that I,
because it's literally covering my eyes,
it's like impossible to not at least respond
in some way to it.
Like do not let this notification not come in, basically.
That would be great.
Honestly, that could be solved with just.
Oh yeah, it totally could.
Being able to set a persistent ringer on reminders
like an alarm.
Like, hey, anyone from the Android team, if you're watching,
can that just be a feature next time around
so that you can set a different alarm style,
like a looping alarm style on reminders
and on calendar notifications?
That would be just a game changer for me.
That'd be sweet.
Like I actually need to go to this meeting.
Do not stop until I acknowledge that I am at the meeting.
Yeah, it would be cool if you could do a like,
I am there thing,
because there's also times where you're like,
oh, I get a notification.
Okay, cool, I know I have to do this thing.
And then you just get blasted by some like huge,
something's on fire problem
that you need to immediately solve.
And then you need to remember to go back to that meeting.
But once the thing is not on fire anymore,
you forget about the notification.
While we're at it, it would be great
if in the calendar app,
I could set what my default reminder schedule is,
because I always have to go in and manually say,
hey, I need to know the day before,
I need to know the hour before,
and I need to know the amount of time
it takes for me to get there before,
because otherwise I won't go.
Yeah, agreed.
Question we have here from a lot of people.
What are your thoughts about the person
winning an art contest with an AI generated piece of art?
As someone who doesn't really get art,
but who can certainly appreciate seeing something I like,
and values the work that goes into it,
I guess I'm excited for being able to just like,
for the cost of getting a print done,
decorate my house, which I think is super cool.
I see it as a potential danger
to the craft though of art over time.
So while it's pretty easy for me to say,
okay, I saw someone tweet at me,
a portrait of Linus Sebastian in the style of Rembrandt,
and they looked awesome.
If I wanted a portrait of myself in the style of Rembrandt,
I guess I could put that up.
I don't, but what's gonna be the style then?
What will be the future styles
that we can plug into our AI generator?
With that said, maybe it's a totally invalid concern.
People create art just because they wish to create art.
And the value of something created by a person
doesn't seem to be tied to
the number of hours they spent on it,
the ease with which it could be replicated
by something else.
It's about the person.
It's about that aura around them, right?
We don't pay $100,000 for a painting or whatever else
because it looks $90,000 prettier than a $10,000 painting.
That's just like not how it works.
It's about who you know, and it's about connections,
and it's about notoriety.
And so I don't think that an AI artist,
I think that it could absolutely
take out a lot of commodity art,
but I don't think it's gonna take out like high-end art,
like boutique art, if that kind of makes sense.
Yeah, like hide your money from taxes art.
Yeah, well, it's a whole separate conversation.
Yeah.
Oh, for me on the art thing,
I think it's just completely down
to whoever's hosting the contest.
Do you allow it or do you not?
It's like the same thing with speed runs, right?
Tool assisted speed runs, task speed runs.
Those are, they have their own category.
You could have an art contest for AI generated art,
whatever.
I think it's down to the contest.
I don't think, I'm gonna say the same as Linus,
so I'm not in that space.
I'm very far from being an artist.
Yeah, Eshwilu over on Twitch says,
AI art only looks good.
As a professional artist,
you need to be able to thoroughly explain your context
to be taken seriously.
Sure.
But yeah, it's fair enough.
I don't give two about any of that, but.
I suspect AI artists could also start working with GPT-3
and have it write a blurb that goes along with the art
and explain why it's cool.
If you think that's a limitation now,
I'll see you in two years.
But either way, I just,
I think it's always gonna be a different space.
Yeah, I agree.
Like smartphones put cameras and put video recorders
in the pockets of everybody and that doesn't make it
so that you don't still need like filmmakers, right?
Like it's.
Yeah, what we also see is that you can sell prompts
for the AIs to generate stuff,
which I think is so interesting.
It's like this guy who was in the art contest was like,
I will share what my prompt was to get this art later
and like is trying to sell this prompt
to get the art that he had made that one.
So very interesting future.
I mean, it's a kind of IP, I guess.
Yeah, yeah.
It's like, if you're really good at configuring the machine
that has a value, so sure.
Yeah, I'm just very surprised, but it makes sense.
Similar things have been done in the past.
Question from Micah, what's your favorite part
about running a YouTube channel slash YouTube media company?
I don't know what's not to like, it's the coolest job ever.
Thank you.
Best part.
I don't know, it's nice that someone listens,
feeling like part of a community, I mean,
we're social creatures, right?
Like we all are sort of fundamentally drawn
to a lot of the same things.
Turning what you would have done every day anyway
into work is a bit of a double-edged sword.
I'd say it's the best and one of the worst things about it,
but it's definitely one of the best,
even if it might also be one of the worst.
Yeah, there's a lot to love.
That's it for merch messages.
That's it.
Oh, well then I guess that's it for the show.
Pretty good timing.
Yeah, thank you so much for tuning in this week.
We'll see you again next week.
Same bad time, same bad.