Welcome to the WAN Show, losers!
Well, at least, statistically speaking, at least a couple of them are.
Most of you are cool, though.
We've got a great show for you today.
Lots of great topics.
The TikTok ban.
The TikTok ban is not a TikTok ban.
It's something much more insidious.
Masquerading is a TikTok ban.
We're going to be getting into that.
Oh, no.
The Internet Archive loses a major lawsuit.
We're big fans of the Internet Archive, and this is not cool.
What else we got today?
AI experts advocate for a pause.
He scrolled all the way down the dock.
You can't even say that.
Rapid fire is all the way down the dock.
Rapid fire is on page four, and you took all of the non-rapid fire topics, okay?
It was a requirement that I scrolled down the dock.
I just shouldn't even pick topics anymore.
I enjoyed the time when I just yeeted us into the stream.
That was fun.
Anyways, AI experts advocate pause on high-level AI development.
I really wanted to say something spicy about that right then, but I will wait until later
in the show.
Also, Dolphin Emulator comes to Steam.
Really, you're picking that over the changes to Twitter Blue and Legacy Verification?
I just don't care.
And Australia debating a mature rating for loot boxes?
That's actually kind of sick.
That's the only good news, right?
We didn't address the title of the video today.
It's all bad news.
Yeah.
Yep.
The show is brought to you today by Zoho One, Grammarly, and JumpCloud.
Why don't we jump right into our first topic, the worst news?
To be clear, we're not American, so theoretically, this sort of doesn't affect us or something.
But we're Canadian, so it also definitely does.
Yeah, and America with its outsized reach in the world.
It kind of affects everybody.
The US government is continuing to debate the RESTRICT Act, which has been broadly
characterized as an attempt to ban TikTok, which, you know, has some merit, I guess,
if you were to look at it from a certain point of view.
Data collection and stuff like that.
It's, you know, turning the minds of the youth into sponges or whatever I think of the children
argument you might form around that general idea.
However, the language of the act never mentions TikTok directly and is in fact far, far broader.
The RESTRICT Act proposes to grant the Commerce Department additional investigative and punitive
powers regarding all information and telecom companies connected to a foreign adversary
if they pose undue and unacceptable risk to US national security or US citizens.
Whatever that means.
That is very, truly broad, isn't it?
Oh yeah, that's vague as you could possibly have it.
Wow, that's broader than...
Barn.
I mean, yeah, I was...
The broad side of it.
Yeah, very broad.
Okay.
The foreign adversaries included in the act are China, Cuba...
Okay, Cuba?
Are we still against Cuba?
Buried this hatchet?
I actually thought they had until you said Cuba and I read it at the same time.
Iran, Russia and Venezuela, but that list could be expanded in the future.
Corporate entities focused on tech that are based out of these countries will face additional
scrutiny including potential fines and total bans.
Language targeting third parties that aid in the subversion of these penalties has raised
concerns that the act may be used to ban VPNs and to fine or even imprison those who use them.
Okay, so here's the thing.
The problem with legislation, right, is not what they do.
It's what they write down that they could do and then slowly frog boil over time.
That's why there's so much concern over this.
A spokesperson for the primary sponsor of the bill has stated, this legislation is aimed
squarely at companies like Kaspersky, Huawei and TikTok that create systemic risks to the
United States national security, not at individual users.
The threshold for criminal penalty in this bill is incredibly high, too high to ever
be concerned with the actions of an individual user of TikTok or a VPN.
Now here's the problem with that, and I'm deviating from the script a little bit here,
but we had a lot of the same conversations around Bill C-10, which became Bill C-11,
which I don't even know what it's called anymore, here in Canada, where they kind of went,
oh, well, no, no, no, we're never going to like do anything like that.
It'll never restrict an individual user's ability to upload.
If that's the case, that needs to be written into the law.
That's right.
Yeah.
So fine, put your money where your mouth is, and if it isn't a concern, then write that s*** down.
Yeah.
The federal governments of the US and Canada, as well as NATO and the EU, have all banned TikTok
from official devices on the basis of cybersecurity concerns.
More likely they're just wasting time on it.
Staff are likewise being advised to remove the app from private devices.
France, on the other hand, has simply banned all recreational apps from official devices
rather than TikTok specifically, because I guess the French are just more direct.
Anywho, one concern raised, to be clear, I'm not saying that the way that TikTok, well,
the way that TikTok's parent company is collecting information is not mass surveillance of foreign nationals.
I am not saying that that's not a thing.
I'm just saying that I'm not convinced that TikTok was suddenly what made it a concern.
Yeah, it might be both.
But the concern raised by US officials is, this is back on script,
is that the Chinese government could press ByteDance into revealing information for use in state intelligence operations.
And while there's no indication that the Chinese government was involved,
four employees from ByteDance were fired after using TikTok data to track the location of journalists
and cross-reference their location with that of employees suspected of leaking information to the press.
Cute.
Several commentators have criticized singling out TikTok when the majority of American corporations
collect massive amounts of data from American consumers,
and the American government has repeatedly been caught buying that information from them.
Likewise, TikTok is far from unique in its impact on the mental health of teenagers,
another focus of the debate in Congress.
All of that seems extremely fair.
So, discussion question.
Is this a threat to personal liberties or a necessary restriction on foreign intelligence operations?
I guess if it was...
If it was a more trustworthy entity that was saying,
hey, we really need to stop these foreign governments from spying on our citizens,
I'd be like, all right.
I 100% believe that foreign governments,
and I say that for everyone anywhere, if that makes sense.
So if you are China in this situation, I would say the exact same words.
I 100% believe foreign governments,
just place yourself anywhere, the statement's still true,
are going to use this type of stuff to gain information on what is going on in your country.
We're talking about spy balloons in the U.S.
Do you think the U.S. isn't spying on other people?
How do you know what a spy balloon looks like?
Mine looks like a whale.
Do you have your own spy balloons?
Like, it's happening in both directions.
And I'm not saying anything about that.
It's basically sieve.
It's like the diplomat gets caught doing espionage.
One of the options is to ask them to not do it anymore,
and that does nothing in the game if you've played sieve before.
The player just gets to decide, like, do I care about this?
Do I kick them out, which by the way, also does nothing.
Yeah.
So like...
Cool.
It is what it is.
So like, is there potential that China would use TikTok data to gain information?
Yeah, sure.
Is there potential that, like, U.S. companies might be used to gain information from somewhere else?
Yeah, sure.
I don't know.
This is a...
If I was a person in power for one of these countries, this would be something I would be concerned about.
I would not write into my bill that I can, like, super destroy any citizen that happens to use a VPN.
Or better yet, you could specifically write into your bill that you can't do that.
Totally.
That might be even better.
Yeah.
So like, there's other ways to go around it.
I don't think the concern is unfounded, though, is what I'm saying.
Absolutely not.
And along these same lines, like, if the entire impetus for this is data collection, data control, right?
Because that's clearly what has actually started this debate.
And we see...
Then VPN usage is absolutely something that is, even if it's not part of the conversation out in the open,
is part of the conversation behind closed doors.
Because while a VPN, and we've made this very clear, is not the be-all and end-all of being secure online.
It is a tool in your toolbox that can increase your anonymity online.
It's one of the layers of Swiss cheese.
Yes, one of the many, many layers that you should be using if you actually want to achieve any kind of anonymity.
Sorry, what were you going to say?
I think I cut you off there.
We saw, like, this is only tangentially related, but something that's been very interesting in the conflict in Ukraine
is seeing the social media usage of both sides and the very direct ramifications of such.
Controlling information is, like, incredibly insanely valuable.
And when people are posting photos or videos or whatever else, it can be super, super bad.
Data is huge.
Even just turning the mic on a device could be a massive advantage.
Someone sent me a link today to a vulnerability.
I don't know if it ended up in the doc or not, but I wanted to kind of mention it.
Because coming off of last week, I just thought this would be kind of interesting to bring up.
But an attack that I heard of a long time ago was the ability to be able to tell what keys were pressed
by listening through a microphone.
So you have nothing connected to the computer.
You just have a microphone in the room.
We discussed that on Wan's show.
Back when the set was way on the other side of the 104 building or something like that.
The problem more recently, I think this was as of, oh, man, I don't know because I didn't look into it a ton.
I think it's one year, four months, somewhere around there, is they just, like, not only is it open source,
but they, like, made a website for it.
So it's, like, really easy to do.
And a pretty big attack vector for that could, like, the first thing I kind of thought of was, like,
oh, streamers, because now you're massively, like, yeah, the vulnerability exists,
but there's a bunch of vulnerabilities exist that, like, no one really uses.
But making a website where people can use it really easily means that the level required to be able to use it just dropped.
Same with, like, cheaters and video games.
This is such an interesting conversation and one that we could probably spend the next three and a half hours on.
I mean, we did a video on the Flipper Zero this week.
I don't know if you know that.
Yeah, so Tanner was working on it.
And it's the kind of device that, honestly, we could do an entire week's worth of videos on.
You could review it as a penetration testing device.
You could review it from just, like, you could put it on channel Super Fun and review it from a, you know, mischief kind of device perspective.
You could review it as a gaming device.
I mean, it's chock full of games.
You could push the boundaries of it.
You could go get, you know, custom add-ons.
I mean, it has GPIO pins, right?
You could review all the different add-ons.
Changed the displayed price of gas using them.
So it doesn't actually change the actual price.
So we had to kind of decide on an angle because we can't cover it from every possible perspective.
And what we ultimately settled on was, is it a tool or is it a weapon?
Was sort of the overarching question that we were asking as we made our way through what it is, what it can do and what our position is on it.
Because there's arguments that you can make either way.
On the one hand, sure, let's talk about the gas station price changing, right?
So it uses whatever it is, like sub gigahertz band communication.
And so it allows you to sniff and then replicate these commands that change the gas station price.
You could kind of look at that and go, well, if your system was so insecure that you're not even using rolling codes, right?
Like it's less secure than a garage door opener, which we all know is dog shit in terms of security, right?
Well, then take it as a wake up call to harden your security and update that module from 1973 that you're using to update the thing.
Sure. So you can come at it from that perspective because, and there's a really good argument to be made here, right?
If someone came along with real skills, not some, you know, whatever the hardware hacking device equivalent of a script kitty is, right?
Let's call them a hack device kitty, right?
So if someone comes along who really wants to hit you, the fact that that hack kitty came along and changed your sign and forced you to harden your security a little bit might actually be a good thing.
Because even if your security is still sort of the best you can do as some boomer gas station owner, it's not about necessarily having a perfect lock.
It's about having a better lock than your neighbor's door in many cases.
No, it's, it's true.
It's not, it's not false.
It's like running away from the bear.
Well, you don't have to be faster than the bear.
I'm going to counter this being true actually really quick.
You just got to be faster than the other guy.
He's going to be mildly upset.
I think pretty soon it's not going to matter.
At all.
Like what?
There will be enough arms that they'll just catch both of you.
There was a demo at Def Con, I don't remember when, where they had a circle of servers and they had AI running on the servers and they had like a capture the flag hack contest between all of them and they fought each other automated using AI.
And that was a bit ago.
The future of cybersecurity using AI is going to be insane and everything's going to be automated, they're going to be hitting everything at the same time.
So if your neighbour and your lock both suck, but yours is better, they're both broken.
That's fair.
OK, that's fair.
Where I was ultimately getting to here was there's the argument to be made that the wake up call to harden your security is probably a good thing, even if there's another exploit that someone more skilled could absolutely use to get past you.
And the example that we use is that there's this other, from Great Scott Gadgets, there's this other hacker device that actually can defeat rolling code implementations of the gas station sign changer.
So even though the flipper zero can defeat these extremely basic ones and it's starting this conversation and it's inconvenient for the owners of these gas stations, it's overall a good thing.
At least that conversation is starting.
And the flipper zero is actually specifically designed to not be able to defeat rolling code ones.
So it's more like a basic pen testing doodad and less like a serious hacking device.
Which is really good to have in the hands of people because of the reasons you were just talking about.
However, the flip side of that argument is that there is still extremely dangerous things that a ne'er do well or even not a ne'er do well, just a particularly committed individual could do with a device like that.
Even just the gas station one, because like if you own the gas station across the street and you just keep making theirs look more expensive, like you could cause genuine actual harm.
Well, I was talking more in terms of like the way that the flipper zero can be used to access apartment buildings that have older NFC access systems.
And you know, for the average prankster, so what, what they go in, they like, they tag the mailboxes or something like that.
It's really inconvenient and unnecessarily costly.
But it fits in the hands of someone like an ex-husband.
Some stalker. There's been a bunch of stalkers in like the...
And that argument, that argument that like, well, this is a good, it's good that these devices are out there and everywhere because it's the wake up call.
We all need to harden our security.
But someone who's, who's running away from an abusive relationship and is staying in some, some craptastic apartment building might not feel that way.
It's not in any position to change the security systems of the apartment building.
Yeah, that's actually not within their power in any way.
And now these, these tools are everywhere.
And so it's kind of like what you were saying about this, this keyboard tool.
It's like on the one hand, yeah, it's good that we're raising the profile of, of these attack vectors so that people are more mindful of them.
But on the other hand, even though you're right, that was an attack vector that already existed.
Just like the changing gas stations thing could have been done for 10 bucks, you know, 15 years ago with some part off of Amazon.
Laptop and some hardware.
The rolling code one's been defeated for six years by that Great Scott Gadgets one or whatever.
Just because these vectors have existed for a long time doesn't mean that they're in the hands of like your jackass, you know, ex-husband.
Yeah.
Right. And so there's a.
By the way, if streamers are freaking out about the password thing and you do have to type in passwords on stream, the the thing that I've thought of so far that I think is the most hilarious to defeat this.
And I like going with the rule of cool is make a make a stream deck thing, assuming you have one.
That's a big assumption. Oh, well, you can make some soundboard or whatever.
Make some type of way to mute your microphone and play a recorded sound and just record yourself typing in something that's like funny.
Yeah. And then use that type in your password.
And then hopefully it ends and unmutes you soon enough.
And I just like like screw off, whatever.
Just have that be what's typed in.
I think it'll be entertaining. I think that's I think that's expecting a lot.
It is. And not being able to type in passwords on stream is crazy.
And like some people are going to be like, oh, like, you shouldn't do that anyways.
I don't mean having it on screen.
I mean, everyone knows you shouldn't.
But people are going to stream for 13 hours and they're probably going to have to type in a password to something.
Looking at you, XQC.
Yeah, but like for real, like he might have to sign into something at some point.
So like I actually think and it's been out for a while.
This isn't new or anything, but I just thought I should bring it up because I wasn't personally aware that there was like a site for this.
And the usability just went through the roof.
SecItGuy says this conversation is pissing me off.
You can buy PCB printers right now. You're arguing against advancement.
If they're motivated enough, they will get in. That's actually not true, though.
It's SecItGuy by you. Yeah.
No, I know. I was just messing with it.
But that's actually not true.
I mean, in the bubble that you presumably live in, maybe every single person you know would be capable of defeating some kind of building security systems might be true with just like stuff that they buy off of, you know, Adafruit and Amazon or whatever.
Right. Maybe that's true.
But in the broader world, like just that that jerk stalker that you went to high school with is probably just like not probably, but is possibly just a slack-jawed idiot that no could never figure that out in a thousand years, would never figure it out.
There's even similar conversations with hardware locks.
The main reason why I'm bringing this up is just because there's often this situation where like people that are into software don't trust software locks and people that are into hardware, like they don't trust software locks, so they want hardware locks.
And the people that are into hardware don't trust hardware locks, so they want software locks.
And it's like, blah.
Stuff like access to bump keys and high quality lock picks and everything has never been anywhere close to how it is now.
Like the prevalence of security tools for pen testing, yeah, but also being able to get through some aged systems has never been quite as common.
And that's why I think I've also never heard as many people talking about like Swiss cheese style security approaches and home security and stuff like that is because we are in like a relatively sketchy time when it comes to that type of stuff.
Yeah. And so like, again, so you'll see in the Flipper Zero video, we ultimately make the argument that the existence of the Flipper Zero is a net positive.
But it's also important for us to consider that the widespread availability of these tools, whether it be they software or be they hardware or some combination of the two, is not necessarily, it seems like a good thing until you're the one with a stalker who broke into your apartment.
Yeah. And did it with something that they bought for 20 bucks on Amazon when 10 years ago, 15 years ago, 20 years ago, they would have had to go and build up the skill set to craft it themselves, which they probably wouldn't have done because as we've as we've seen with security levels are extremely important.
So coming back to it not being necessarily important to have the best lock, but to have a better lock than your neighbor, looking at the security footage that we've had of people breaking into things sometimes, it's very clear that it's the lowest hanging fruit.
It's whatever's fastest most of the time. And while it's true that if someone is determined enough, they will get into whatever most of just fly by theft or random vandalism is not determined enough.
It just it's impulsive, right? So you're taking a very a very rational state of mind that you're in a very calculating state of mind that you might be in and you're applying it to people who are not necessarily planning long term.
Right. Like you look at you know, think about there's this entire category, crimes of passion, right? A crime of passion doesn't happen over a span of 19 months as someone reads up on electronics engineering and PCB design and, you know, like reactionary micro microprocessor control.
That's not how that works. Whereas if someone can just get drunk, you know, drop down to the local Best Buy, pick up some tool that is going to give them, you know, easy access to someone and it's like, yeah, it's all theoretically good that these pen testing tools are out there until it's, you know, your relative or you.
It's like, oh, yeah, it's good for everyone else, I guess. Right. So it's tough. It's tough, man. I don't have the right. I don't have the answers. You know, I'm just saying it's not black and white.
Yeah. Anyways, cool.
I think that was all the first discussion question. What is the second one?
Now we can move on.
Okay. Sounds good. All the topics today are going to be rough. There's only like one that has an upside. But yeah, we'll we'll keep going. Are we talking about Internet Archive now?
Sure, go for it.
Starting in 2020, four large book publishers sued the Internet Archive over its decision to lift its user cap on digital lending as an emergency response to global library closures.
Late last week, a judge ruled in favor of the publishers. The plaintiffs include Penguin Random House, Hatchet and HarperCollins, the three largest traditional publishers in the world.
I was going to say, I recognize all of these. The fourth is academic publisher John Wiley and Sons, who I assume were just happy to be included.
That was editorial. In all seriousness, though, I could see an academic publisher being very interested in this because piracy of academic.
Yeah, well, they try to charge for all their papers.
Yeah, exactly. So so piracy of that stuff is like huge.
By the way, it's pretty common if you figure out who the author of an academic paper is and you email them, they will often send it to you for free.
I did not know that.
Yeah, that's kind of cool.
It's like definitely something you can take advantage of and something I have literally done from my personal non-work email.
So they like didn't I wasn't trying to like use my clout to figure it out.
It's a good hack.
Yeah, it's a lot of these people want to share this information, but it has to go through these publishing companies that want to loot.
So, yeah.
Anyways, the Internet Archive offers an extensive range of scanned books on the basis of controlled digital lending or CDL, a system where libraries can lend out as many digital copies of a book as it has physical copies sitting in storage.
Many publishers sell e-books to libraries at a significant markup, typically around 250 percent, while others refuse to sell e-books to libraries at all.
CDL has been used as a legal rationale for over a decade, allowing libraries to buy and scan books that otherwise would be unavailable in digital format.
The ruling doesn't just punish Internet Archive for lifting its lending caps.
It also describes CDL as a violation of copyright and form of theft, which has potential ramifications for libraries throughout the U.S., depending on fines levied.
It could also threaten other Internet Archive projects, like the Wayback Machine, which I am certain you have seen not only on the WAN Show a bunch of times, but also in LTT content, because it is insanely useful.
So important.
The Internet Archive says that it plans to appeal the decision.
This sucks.
Sure does.
I, like, don't even know where to start.
It just sucks a lot.
The loss of libraries is going to be a horrible thing.
And libraries are super cool.
And a lot of libraries have been adapting in super cool ways.
But libraries aren't profitable, Luke.
They're not.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So why should we have them?
Kind of like by design.
Why should I pay for libraries?
What did they ever do for me?
If the people can't see...
I've already read every book I want to read, so why should I pay for libraries anymore?
It reminds me, I know...
If other people want a library, they should build their own library and they should pay for it.
Some people have done that.
Have you seen the, like, what are they called?
Little libraries?
Free little libraries?
Those are super cool.
Yeah.
Those are wicked.
People will do, like, it looks like almost a big mailbox with a glass front, if that's fair to say, or like a birdhouse with a glass front.
And you'll just be like driving down a street and you'll see it's at the end of someone's driveway.
And it is like a little library.
It'll have a couple of shelves and has books on the shelves.
And you can just take whatever you want.
And ideally, theoretically, you bring it back or maybe you donate some to the little library.
Super, super cool systems.
But libraries are awesome.
And we also need larger libraries, though, because those little libraries are not going to have things like a microfiche archives of newspapers.
They're not, I mean, they're not going to have, they're not going to be able to manage digital lending.
Yeah, and the newspaper thing, like, this is why we have the Wayback Machine.
Like, it's helpful to be able to look back at what happened.
And even if you don't think, like, the subject of history in school is the most interesting thing.
I sure didn't.
I have been in a bunch of different situations in my life.
Literally one time I found myself at the Vancouver library going through their newspaper stack thing that you're literally describing now, trying to figure something out.
This has happened.
This does happen to people.
It's important for journalism and it's important for people's ability to do things sometimes, because you need to know how we got to where we are now to be able to help inform how you get to the next step.
It's just, it's just so, so many different aspects of this just suck.
And like, I appreciated that the Internet Archive was trying to step up when there was a insane amount of global library closures.
Yeah, and I do appreciate that copyright holders do need to protect their rights, but not selling to libraries is not protecting your rights.
That's just being a jerk.
And, um.
It just sucks.
Yeah, I don't really know what else to say other than that.
Yeah, this, this, this does just suck.
You know, it's a funny thing because I can't really figure out what the, what the benefit is to the traditional publisher model anymore.
Like Yvonne has this app that she uses to read all the time and people just, they just upload stories.
And a lot of the time you, you'll actually, it's more like a tip system or like a microtransaction system.
So you'll, you'll read the first chapter and then if you want to read the next chapter, it's like however many tokens, which I actually really do not like that it's tokens instead of actual money.
You lost me when we got to that part.
But overall, the idea of just, um, of people just self-publishing on a platform, like I just, why do you need a, this is definitely out of ignorance, but the biggest one that I don't understand is for music.
That one is so weird to me.
I watched an interview recently with a musician talking about how they made, they made one song that was just like a massive hit and they're like, yeah, it was great because I was with so-and-so whatever publisher.
And now that has done so well that I don't need a publisher anymore.
And I'm like, well, it's a whole, who you know, thing, right?
Like, I mean, okay, so here's something that, so, okay, the, the ABCs of gaming, we, we self-published it because I could afford to do a production run of like thousands, tens of thousands of books.
Yeah, but you're not, you know, people aren't buying CDs anymore.
Well, okay, well, uh, no, I'm pretty sure people still buy CDs.
No, for real though.
Yeah, I know.
The look on your face.
No, really though.
Is it like an appreciable amount of like, okay, sure.
People buy records too, but like, is it, is it an appreciable amount of your sales?
Is it going to make or break the situation?
No, I do think people buy CDs.
I look, I know.
What do they play them in?
It's CD players.
What?
I know.
I know.
Where do you buy those?
When's the last time you saw a CD player in like Best Buy?
What is it?
Am I crazy?
Is this a thing?
CDs are definitely still sold.
CDs are the new vinyl?
I hope that's not true.
There's no way, dude.
Our generation is so cringe sometimes.
Hold on a second.
Come on.
Hold on a second.
Why is it any less cringe than vinyl?
Let me, let me, let me come at it with the exact same arguments.
I like to hold the physical thing as part of the experience.
I like to put, I'm not done yet.
Losing this argument already.
I like to put it in the thing and it spins and it's mechanical and it comes with the
artwork and you can appreciate the artwork and you can put it on display and get this.
It's so much more compact than a vinyl record.
It's right in the name.
It's a compact disc.
That was good.
Um, and I honestly, I felt myself immediately lose that argument because I want
physical copies of games so that I own them.
Yeah.
And if you have music streaming services, if you have movie streaming services,
whatever you don't own it, they can take it anytime.
So, okay, cool.
Buy your CDs, whatever.
But I'm surprised that's a significant amount of sales is what I'm trying to get.
It's a thing, man.
It's a thing.
Yeah.
Like again, it comes down to our bubbles, right?
Even the, okay, hold on.
Even in that interview with that musician, he was talking about how many times it got
streamed.
Sure.
Yeah.
Because streams are the major metric now, but don't care.
Okay.
Especially if you have a song, but, but Taylor Swift is selling a lot of albums.
She's selling CDs.
Yeah, sure.
See, this is what I was talking about.
We're like, it's probably coming from ignorance because like, I have no idea.
Yeah.
But you're like, you're like, you're like IT sec guy over here, right?
Where, where it's, you're, you're living in your bubble.
I guess so.
You and everyone, you know, has thought, what has anyone bought a CD since the
closure of A&B sound?
Okay.
But you know, and everyone I know, which is a decent range of people that are not
in the IT industry.
Not that many.
One.
I know one.
You gotta remember.
It's like, maybe, maybe, maybe my friend group is not.
This is like, it's like Heisenberg uncertainty principle.
You by observing someone could change the outcome.
Yeah, fair.
The very fact that you know them at all could change their behavior because they
would, they would unwrap their new CD in front of you and show it to you all proud
of how shiny it is.
And you'd be like, are you a f***ing idiot?
I can't believe you actually spent real money on this.
I can't believe you've done this.
Did you get it for free?
And even then, why didn't you immediately throw it in the garbage?
Just digitize it right away.
Exactly.
So no, we gotta get ourselves out of our bubbles sometimes and realize that there
is a great big world out there full of people who are still buying CDs.
Like, I think it, wasn't it only a year or two ago that millennials overtook
boomers as the largest remaining demographic?
Oh, are we that group now?
I didn't even know that.
Like for real though.
It's the end game boys.
And here's like, here's another thing.
Okay.
Uh, man.
Okay.
I remember going to my high school reunion and so this was, this was a while back,
right?
Because I didn't even bother.
I graduated in Facebook exists.
I graduated in 2000.
So, Oh, it's okay.
So it was in, it was in the mid 2010s.
Okay.
So this is, this is already like seven, eight years ago, something like that.
Right.
Okay.
So seven, eight years ago, I mean, would you have considered buying a CD?
Would you have, would you have, would you have bought, you know, a programming book
for dummies or would you just go on YouTube?
Right?
Like actually the world was pretty similar to today.
I think is pretty fair to say.
Yeah.
Seven or eight years ago, I did have books for programming though.
Yeah.
But did you buy them?
I did.
Okay.
And I don't, I mean, did you buy them seven, eight years ago?
Or did you just still own them?
I still owned them.
Okay.
Yeah.
Okay.
It wasn't that long before that, but you are being specific.
So, okay, sounds good.
Sure.
And would you have considered buying a CD?
Yeah, probably not.
Okay.
So I technically, Oh, and it's from the one person.
No, I have.
Okay.
I received a CD for Christmas around that exact amount of time ago, but it's from
the one person that I just mentioned.
All right.
So let's go back to my high school reunion for a second here.
I completely forgot about it.
It's sitting in the glove box in my car.
Probably between 60 and a hundred people showed up.
Pretty good turnout.
Oh, to a high school reunion?
Yeah.
Yeah.
Um, and like, I didn't, I didn't want to be like, you know, like, uh, like I, I
didn't, if people asked what I was doing, I answered, but I wasn't going to walk up
to people and be like, yeah, I'm like, you know, running a, you know, YouTube
company, you know, I have a million subscribers or whatever.
Like I didn't, I didn't want it to be like that.
Um, it gets pretty douchey pretty fast.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Like I, I just, I was, I, I went out of my way to say nothing.
I would just ask people about themselves.
That was it.
I, that was like my rule for the night.
Was there any intention of, of leading people to ask you the question or just
Nope.
Okay.
Nope.
No, I, I actually just didn't want it to be, cause it's, it's honestly weird for
me when I, when I interact with people who I know otherwise and all of a sudden
they're like, whoa, you're on YouTube.
And then, and then that's all they want to talk about.
Yep.
I hate it.
And what I actually wanted to talk about was like, how are you doing?
And like, remember that time, especially if you know them through like some, like
say, say you met someone playing badminton.
Sure.
Yeah, exactly.
They knew you as like a good badminton player that they liked playing against to
test their skills or whatever.
And then suddenly they figure it out.
Now you're not the skilled badminton player.
You're now the YouTuber.
Yes.
Like, and it changes the dynamic and then they're going to ask me about, you know,
YouTube and like, it doesn't really matter, but it changes the dynamic.
Like you said, it shifts the, like, it's supposed to be about this thing that we
did together, not this other thing that I happened to do.
Yes.
Separate.
So that was my, that was my, that was my whole jam.
Um, however, I will say that at the end of the night, I was surprised that nobody
knew.
Not one.
As in, so like, cause I'm assuming people asked you about what you do at some
point.
Yeah, what do you do?
Yeah.
But every single time they didn't know that you had done interesting.
That's actually pretty surprising.
Which, and if you, if you think about that, this is in, so this is.
Yeah.
Okay.
I understand the point you're trying to prove now.
So I am, I am a well into the Linus media group era.
This is post NCIX.
We're here already, right?
Uh, yeah.
Yep.
Just barely, but we are here just barely, but we're, we're like in this building.
We're like, we're popping off.
Yeah.
We're definitely full swing at that point.
And not one of them out of, it was probably closer to a hundred people was
like, Oh yeah, I like know that.
And I'm kind of sitting here going, huh?
World's a little bigger maybe than I thought.
And you know what?
So, so, and it's like, it's the, it's the experience that I still have today.
If I go to Best Buy, yeah, people know who I am.
Right.
Context stuff.
But I, okay.
So for, for, for a shoot, uh, recently we were, we were going around to, um, uh,
we ended up using a farm as a location.
Okay.
And the, the, the people that worked there, one of the people that worked
there made an offhand comment, like, yeah, I never really go on the internet.
Nevermind.
I don't know who you, a tech YouTuber are.
Nevermind.
I don't use YouTube.
I don't go on the internet.
That is a thing.
Yeah.
Not everybody lives on Reddit.
Yeah.
I've been trying to do less.
It's been great, actually.
Like I'm, I'm saying that completely unironically.
It's been, it's been better.
Sometimes, sometimes I have to like recognize that the bubble that is the
internet, as weird as that sounds to say, kind of sucks in some ways.
It's fantastic in other ways.
But like you shouldn't necessarily be submerged in this all the time.
No, like there is a whole world out there of people who fax purchase
orders and call each other on the telephone and sometimes those things
and listen to music, plastic music discs.
Yeah.
It's, I know it's mind blowing, right?
It is a little mind blowing to me that people buy physical CDs still.
I'm not going to lie that that's still blowing my mind a little bit, but I do,
I do get it and I kind of sympathize with it.
I actually had the thought recently, I've talked a couple of times on
my show about how I was doing this.
There was much of spring cleaning going on in my house and I did a bunch of
archiving and like making sure all the hard drives that were on shelves were
actually backed up properly, all that kind of stuff and I found my old like
music folder and I had the thought of like, you know, in like 10 years,
Google music is going to forget that I listened to any of the stuff I'm
listening to now and I'm going to forget what it was called because I
don't remember the names of the songs.
Yeah.
You're very much like me that just going to be gone.
Yep.
And if I want to go back and like reminisce everything I listened to in
2020 because like sometimes I'll get tired of songs or bands or whatever,
but if I can remember the name going back a few years later, it's like, yeah,
these are bangers for minor Fort minor.
Is that a band?
Oh, I thought you might get the reference.
No, they have a, they have a, a fairly famous song.
Remember the name.
It doesn't matter.
Is this like a top 40 thing?
No, no, not top 40.
Oh, I'm actually surprised.
Yeah.
No, no, no.
Yeah.
It's yeah.
Okay.
Jack gets it.
Luke doesn't know Fort minor.
What?
I don't know.
My music tastes are 10% luck.
20% skill.
15%.
Okay.
That's the song.
Oh, okay.
Yeah.
I don't, I don't know names of this stuff.
Okay.
But you know, the song, right?
Yeah.
Okay.
That that's remember the name, but yeah, it doesn't.
Okay.
See, but the issue here is that I don't.
Yeah.
People ask me about like actors or actresses.
Oh, they, I have literally no idea who you're talking about.
Then there'll be like this person in this film.
I'll be like, Oh, okay.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Pretty hot.
Yeah.
It's George Clooney, right?
Okay.
I was trying to think of the guy who plays Thor, but I don't remember his name either.
That's not George Clooney.
No, I know, but that's, we both with the same kind of direction.
That's what I'm saying.
Okay.
Yeah, sure.
Yeah.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
What?
Yeah, no, you're good.
Anywho, where were we?
Where were we with this bit?
Maybe we should, maybe we should move on Dan.
All right.
Now's the point in the show where we tell you guys the way to message in is not to send a super chat over on YouTube.
Oh, wow.
Yeah.
Most of you are like, Oh, that's it.
See, like once again, people, people I saw, I was called out on Reddit again recently for lying about
YouTube super chats being broken, blah, blah, lying, blah, blah, blah.
No, they're just broken.
Here are some super chats.
Google has, here is me not being able to read them.
Sweet.
Um, yeah, so sorry to, I mean, even if, even if, even if they weren't broken, we don't want to use them anyways.
Anyway, the way to write into the show is not super chats, not Twitch bits, it's merch messages.
So if you head over to lttstore.com in the checkout, there'll be a field for a merch message.
It'll go to our producer, Dan.
There he is.
Nope.
Oh, sorry.
I missed the wave.
Sorry.
I missed it again.
Nope.
Missed it.
All right, cool.
It'll go to our producer, Dan, who will either curate it to pop up here or curate it for us to talk about, or he'll reply to you.
Super cool.
And if we don't do any of that stuff, then Hey, at least you get your order in the mail, get some high quality merchandise.
I do think we have a couple of LTT store things to talk about this week.
Holy crap.
Okay.
Yeah.
We have quite a few things to talk about this week.
We finally have a mystery waffle skew.
Um, that'll be more clear what exactly it is.
Once I have the site up, if you like the waffle shirt, but you don't care what color you get, you can get a mystery waffle long sleeve at a discount.
And check this out.
We're selling rack studs.
Rack studs.
Rack studs.
So you can pick up a super comfy waffle shirt and also some rack studs.
These are all those rack studs in your new shirt.
These are so much better than traditional.
Um, man, I forget what this cage nuts.
That's what they're called.
So they're plastic.
They're super quick to install.
Uh, you don't have to have any tools or fight with them to get them in and out of the rack.
Um, and they are shockingly strong.
So we are, we are an official reseller of rack studs.
They had a whole issue where we did a video recently where we featured the product and because of some of the complications around working with sellers, like big sellers that until recently were run by bald people.
Um, nothing against bald people love bald people.
Yeah.
Um, but just, you know, that, that particular seller can be pretty challenging to deal with.
They're not all the same.
What happened was they got, they went out of stock like immediately after we called them out in the video and they had no way to refill their stock.
So they just completely lost the benefit of the wave of traffic that we sent at them.
Cause we were like, yo, these things are super cool.
You should buy some.
And then they, um, so the solution is that we're just going to carry them.
Nice.
Nice.
Perfect.
Nice rack studs.
So we've got the duo and then we've also got the, I don't know.
I guess it's called the series two rack studs series two, I think.
Yeah, sure.
Cool.
So check them out.
I actually have a bunch of rack studs at my house that are like the wrong one.
I need to get some rack studs.
So I'm going to have to like get all the wording around.
All of this is just amazing.
Oh, sorry.
I guess I'm, yeah, so nope, nope.
So different thicknesses, uh, different pack sizes.
So you can add those to your cart and say goodbye to cage nuts.
This is super cool.
Oh, for those of you who are wondering, we are still working on that, like phase change.
Thermal pad thing.
I believe we've found a supplier and then the only challenge is that they come in
sheets that are like this big.
And those are, I don't think most people are going to spend hundreds of dollars on
like a giant sheet of it.
I mean,
someone will, is that what you would not want?
Yeah, not, not, not many people.
Yeah.
Uh, so what we're trying to figure out because it's a Honeywell product, right?
Honeywell doesn't give two shits about us.
We're, they're not, if we're like, Hey, um, so that's a really big sheet.
Could you, could you retool your thing to make a smaller sheet?
Um, that'd be great.
Thanks.
They even reply to our emails, like our outreach emails.
We're, we're in touch with the distributor now though.
Oh boy.
So we're just trying to figure out a, um, the order quantity cause it's like, it's
not cheap and B how to package and sell these things, but that is going to come
to LTT store as well.
I also have an update for you guys on the carabiner situation for the LTT
backpack.
Dan, could I trouble you to man the camera?
Manra.
Commandra.
Okay.
I actually don't remember exactly what the last update we gave you guys was, but
this is definitely new stuff.
So Luke, you're going to be my test monkey.
Yeah, yes.
It's going to be exciting.
Okay.
In front of you is Dan.
You got this, I believe.
Okay.
You might want to give her, give her a little more zoom.
We're we're we're on Luke's hands here.
All right, cool.
So you're going to be our test monkey in front of you is a zipper.
That's a, that's one of the flawed carabiner designs that we are, we are
recalling.
So this one's still in good condition, but I'm assuming that I am a person who
wants to swap it anyways.
Yes.
Because you are, you don't like that.
It might fail at some point in your hands is the tool for removing it safely
removing it.
This thing.
Yep.
The goal was to create a tool set and instructions that pretty much are, um,
brain dead simple.
Like you, you can't break the zipper by changing out the pole.
I want to make this very clear.
It is not designed for you to just no fashionably change your zipper poles all
the time.
You can do this like once, once that is the number.
That is the number of times to do this.
All right, back to the loop cam.
So can you figure out how to use that tool to change?
So I don't get the instructions.
Yeah.
I'm just, I just want to see if you can figure it out.
Yeah.
Test monkey.
Okay.
Well, I think the tool goes in there because you can see on the actual zipper
bit, I saw Tynan do this, but I honestly wasn't paying that much attention.
Um, there's like a part where it doesn't fully connect in here.
So I'm going to try to lift that up.
I just bent something.
I bent it back though.
It's okay.
Oh, good.
I'm not, I wasn't sure how this goes.
Maybe it's like this.
No.
Tynan is screaming right now.
Oh, you just tell me what to do.
No, Tynan is saying no hints at all.
No, it's at all.
Why?
That's hilarious.
Okay.
Is that enough?
Did I just do it?
I might've just done it.
Yes.
Oh, I think I was done immediately and just didn't realize it.
I should have tested it.
So all I had to do was put the tool in and then turn it.
And it was Dan, you can stay close.
I'll go back to the, it was just actually so easy to do that.
I don't think I realized it was done.
Yeah.
So the idea was that we wanted these tools to be small and inexpensive enough that we
could ship them to tens of thousands of people, um, without wasting any more
materials than we absolutely have to.
And while making it quick enough that it can be user serviceable.
That was very easy.
And then to put it back on.
So, so the removal tool is pretty much final because it's basically just a little
Allen.
It's a, it's a bent thing and you turn it once and then you're done.
The re uh, tightening tool that clearly is told this is not final because it's way
too big.
Yes.
And expensive.
Yeah.
And so we need to kind of solve that.
So then I'm going to put the new zipper, which like looks all actually super cool and
stuff.
Maybe we'll get a zoom in later.
Yeah.
Um, I'm going to put it on, which is easy enough now.
And then I'm assuming you just mash that down, down, down, down, down, down, down.
Yeah.
Cool.
Okay.
So that's the process.
Um, it seems to work well.
We're still working on, on a, on a, on an inexpensive way.
I was actually inspired by Derbauer's delidding tools and I've asked the guys to
explore some kind of, maybe you could take the key that you used to remove it and you
could use that to tighten a thing that sits like a little injection molded plastic
thing that sits over top of the zipper and it would press it shut or something like
that.
Um, so that's a possibility.
They're exploring that.
They've got a couple of other ideas as well.
Like super to just ask people to like, Oh no, cause you wouldn't have this strip.
It would be attached to the bag.
Yes.
And the challenge with that is that we don't want people to scuff the finish,
right?
So I could tell them, yeah, just grab a pair of needle nose pliers and go to town
and that would work, but that sucks, right?
That's not a good user experience.
And the reality of is that most of these haven't failed in the field.
Yeah.
There's some, there's some manufacturing tolerances.
Some of them are really bad and fail like immediately.
Very few.
Most of them are still fine.
So we've got time.
We've got time for, to figure this out and create a system that's pretty good.
Yeah.
So let's take a closer look at some of our, whoopsie daisies, there we go.
Let's take a closer look at some of our options here.
That's a one of our replacement carabiner options.
It's a titanium.
The cost is not low.
Yeah.
But if you play around with it, it has no moving parts.
So it has just like a, yeah, there you go.
It has just like this, man, is that all the zoom we got?
It's not like a pin on a hinge.
It's actually just how it's like, I mean, I'm just trying to get this a little closer to Dan.
Is this, is this going to work?
So we've got like this, um, I don't even know how to describe this, but it's like not ribbed, but it's kind of cut on both sides.
Yeah.
Dan's calling it herringbone.
I don't know.
The point is that it makes it more likely to bend in that spot.
And the reality of it is that it's going to bend.
Like I could, I could, I could bend this wrong or whatever, but it's titanium.
And so as long as I'm not a complete idiot and doing it all the time, I could bend it back, bend it back.
And it's going to have some like maximum tolerance.
Cause like everything does, but you just saw him bend it quite a bit out of position and it just went right back.
Yeah.
So just be like, not a big dumb dumb and we should be fine.
Uh, one thing that we're going to change if we go ahead with this particular design is right now, they're quite tall compared to the original ones.
We're going to try and shorten it a little bit to get it more in line with the original carabiners.
Now we're not necessarily settled on this exact configuration and color and Tynan has actually been playing around.
So let's go back to Luke with some, like, I don't know what he's doing with these things, but he managed to color them.
Yeah.
So he's anodizing them.
Okay.
So, so these are, these are, this is kind of, and that sounds a lot more like play than work.
This is called the stonewash anodizing test.
I think they look amazing to be completely honest.
That looks super cool.
It doesn't really match the black bag, but maybe for like a future version of the bag.
I think it kind of could though, cause basically everything matches black.
And then if you got a series of similarly colored ones, which he does have, like if I wanted, okay, I want the accent theme of my bag to be.
Dan, don't forget that there's a lower third, so you got to go a little lower.
If I wanted the accent theme of my bag to be purple, I could go with these.
These are all purple.
Look at the purple and black.
Okay.
Well, I, I'm not promising that we're going to do any kinds of options like that.
Oh, remember these are a warranty replacement part.
These are not.
Oh yeah, no, this would have to be, there's no way we're anodizing the free ones we're sending out.
Well, I don't know.
That's why I'm saying, I don't know why he's testing.
I don't know.
Stuff just gets like left here and then we're supposed to talk about it.
Okay.
Well, what else is there for us to show?
There is also the shiny anodized ones.
Okay.
We can have a look at the shiny one.
I'm kind of particular to the stonewash.
Uh, whoops, whoops, whoops.
The shiny ones are quite cool as well.
Yeah.
Those shiny ones are pretty sick.
Oh, why do I keep clicking the wrong thing here?
Yeah, there we go.
Yeah.
Those are pretty sick.
If we could get shiny and not colorful, I think that would probably be the way that we'd go on just the stock stock standard ones.
You don't, you don't like that finish?
Uh, it's okay.
I'd like to go a little shinier than this if I can, because I want to get pretty close to the original, right?
The idea is that they bought a particular thing expecting that it would be like that and then it's not like that anymore.
Okay.
Yeah, pretty similar.
Well, we're getting there.
We're getting there.
The point is that this is an update for those of you who have the backpack, we're actually making a lot of progress, even though it must feel very, very slow.
Product development.
All right.
Thanks Dan.
I think that's good.
Okay.
Uh, people are asking if we would sell these independently.
Well, that's what I'm saying.
If you, that's-
No.
Okay.
And the reason is that we don't want people opening up the zipper.
It's not designed for that.
Oh, but like Dan was talking about using one on his jacket or something.
Like you wouldn't have to sell these for the LTT bag.
Yeah, but people would put it on the LTT bag and then they would break the LTT bag.
And then that's my problem now because they wouldn't tell me they broke the LTT bag.
They would tell me it just broke.
So I don't know.
I don't know.
Their customer account would have an order for new zippers on it.
Aren't new backpacks shipping with the new zippers?
Uh, not yet.
So we're, we're still developing.
I mean, that's, um, if we made, so my issue here is that if we made it too cool, like it's not the
kind of thing where we're going to do like a stonewash series and then we're going to do like a
shiny series and then we're going to do a whale version.
Cause I don't want people swapping out the bloody zippers on their bag all the time.
Whale blue zippers though, would be so sick.
Yeah.
And I mean like the, the anodized ones you have there, yeah.
I mean those ones technically are like hand anodized.
So they're like artisanal rainbow zippers.
And they sell themselves.
And what's really cool is that because we're developing these tools, this little kit for YKK zippers.
Yeah.
Nothing would prevent you from like putting a cool carabiner.
Why do you want to sell these?
Because, because there's a huge liability.
Okay.
There's huge liabilities in like repairing things and you're pro repair.
Are you anti modification now?
I'm talking to the same person who painted a heat sink on a motherboard and wrote along the traces with UV
ink on his graphics card.
And now you don't want people to be able to do user replaceable zippers.
I'm not saying that was my GPU and I'm more than their bag.
Yeah.
Right.
But then if they come back to me and say, well, it's broken now, lol.
Yeah.
If you went back to GPU manufacturing and said, well, it's broken now, lol.
Yeah.
Well then I shouldn't do that.
Right.
Yeah.
Maybe avoid your warranty.
Well, yeah.
Okay.
But yeah, but I'm not going to be the provider of a product that voids your bloody warranty.
That doesn't seem very smart.
Why not?
Well, because it's a first party product.
If Apple sold a case for the iPhone that voided your f***ing iPhone warranty.
Dude, if Apple sold a case for the iPhone that you could swap out the back and it went into like, uh, what
is, what is that N64 model?
The translucent purple one.
It has like a specific name.
Yeah, I know what you're talking about.
If it was, that would be sick.
Yeah, but Apple's never going to do that.
Yeah, cause Apple's lame.
Oh,
yeah.
Well, okay.
They would also like cost way too much.
I mean, we could do a kit for like 20 bucks.
With zippers?
Zippers?
No, with the poles.
Yeah.
With like four poles.
Ah, four poles is a lot.
We could do two poles for like 1499.
Oh, oh, oh, this is a pole.
That's a zipper pole.
Okay.
Yeah, sorry.
Yeah.
So you'd have four poles and the kit.
Would you be able to buy them without the kit?
Like say, say you bought a kit and you're like, well, I don't need this tool and this tool again.
Cause I already have them.
I'd say probably not because the, the cost of the tools is going to be so negligible and the cost of
maintaining separate skews.
Yeah, I, well, with that said, we're actually working on a system, which you know, we're working on a
system where people will be able to buy individual bits and create their own pack.
So we're working on a price break system where if you buy 10 bits, 20 or 50, I think it, I can't
remember what the exact price breaks are, but you can just mix and match and build your own kit.
And then we're working on with our, with our distribution partner, the ability for them to
create these custom kits, hopefully without too many errors.
Oh, we're going to see how it goes.
We might just backtrack on the whole thing.
Would you ever consider releasing a product like a backpack?
I'm not going to do the poll cause you're all going to agree with me and it's actually not really like fair.
I'm so unpopular that it is unfair to poll.
What I'm saying is that people are always going to vote this way because they're not going to carry your
concerns.
So I'm trying to actually defend your argument here.
All right.
Well, thank you.
I appreciate that because up until now you've been very unhelpful.
I was going to say, would you consider like, uh, releasing a backpack with, with swappable zippers in mind?
Um, that would hurt.
Okay.
You probably couldn't go with YKK then.
Right.
Exactly.
And that's why we wouldn't do it.
That's fair.
Um, there's, it's, it's one of those things where even if there was a zipper brand that was as good as YKK, uh, one of our, uh, things you can rely on is that when you buy a product from
us, unless there is, unless they offer absolutely no option, which I don't know that we've ever run into.
They offer a lot of options.
Yeah.
We use YKK zippers, which are they the best?
I don't know.
Maybe not necessarily, but what they are is consistent, consistent, pretty darn okay.
Every product I've had that has had a YKK zipper on it, the zippers never broke.
So, um, I don't want to, I don't want to, I don't want to break that up.
I don't need that disruption in, in that messaging is that seems pretty fair to me.
Yeah.
It's that we just, we just don't, we don't around, right?
We do a poll.
I already told you guys why I'm not doing a poll.
Yeah, no, we're not, we're not going to do it.
We're just going to keep using YKK zippers and we'll, we'll do our best with it.
Now, the reason we were able to do custom polls in the first place is because the zipper itself doesn't necessarily have the pull.
You can bend it into place once it is designed for that, but that's supposed to be one time.
You're not supposed to bend it back and then back and back, back, back.
Um, so encouraging people to do that, I think is encouraging the wrong behaviors.
I'm not anti-modification, I'm not anti-repair.
What I am is anti-taking something that is explicitly designed to be closed one time and encouraging people to swap it out as a fashion statement when it wasn't broken.
No, please.
Please.
No, please.
No.
Um, when his line is going to address the mark on his arm, it's a, it's, it's a faded, um, spray on tattoo that my daughter did for me.
It was nothing.
Yeah, that's fine.
If someone's a parent and you see a partially washed away tattoo, I guarantee you that's exactly what it is.
Uh, we do have a few other things that we need to kind of talk about here.
Ooh, this is unfortunate.
I see that I've been asked to do a poll for which design, um, you guys are most into from the LTX exclusive desk pad designs, but unfortunately I don't actually see any links to the pictures.
So hopefully someone is watching and can get me links to those.
Um, and we'll get a pull up for you guys cause we're trying to figure out what our order split should be.
Also, we've heard you, I know this is a really long LTT store update.
Maybe we'll break it up in a little bit here, but, uh, we have heard you, um, you're really upset about the LTX designs being in person only.
Oh, we want to create exclusivity for the people who take the time to go to LTX, but we also understand that it's not as simple as, well, I just couldn't take the time.
It, some, maybe it just was totally expensive, totally unaffordable, or you had some kind of obligation that made it so you absolutely couldn't be there.
So what I think we're leaning towards right now is having some LTX digital experience available on floatplane and making LTX exclusive merch available on floatplane.
That last bit is.
Or two floatplane subscribers.
More complicated than you might immediately be aware of, but we're looking into it.
Oh, have I just committed a thing that is hard?
It's hard.
We can do it.
Uh, there's just actually like a lot of steps involved.
Can you do it in two and a half months?
I mean, Conrad just turned something around in like three days that I'm not going to mention.
So like, probably.
Hey Conrad, guess what?
No, he already knows.
Yeah.
Okay.
All right.
Cool.
So the floatplane LTX digital experience or whatever is, I don't know if it's going to be like a one-time charge.
I don't know if it's going to be included in a basic subscription.
I don't know if it's going to be included at a higher tier.
We haven't settled any of that stuff yet because putting on an event like LTX is shockingly expensive.
I got the, I got the internet agreement from Jake today.
Oh.
Um, and I, I, I'm pretty sure that our contract probably stipulates we can't disclose the numbers.
Uh, but what I will tell you is that it is well into five figures for two days of not that fast internet.
Event internet is just a racket.
It's completely corrupt.
Oh yeah.
It's kind of like that issue you had with that apartment building that you were looking at where Shaw had signed an exclusive agreement with the building so that TELUS could not bring their,
their fiber lines in everyone in the building had to buy through Shaw.
So many event facilities have an exclusive agreement with one internet provider, which as you can imagine, leads that internet provider to give great competitive rates.
It's actually insane.
Like you can, you can't say the price, but you can probably tell me this, those two days of internet, the amount of internet that you're receiving.
I'm sure it would have been cheaper to buy probably multiple years worth if it wasn't at this convention.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Oh, no question.
Like it's not even sort of close.
No, no, it makes it goes from two days to many years.
Probably.
It's like no sense.
And you end up in these just ridiculous conversations where, you know, they'll go, Oh, well we kind of, cause Oh, they bill wifi completely separately from wired.
And so, you know, as tech savvy people, we kind of went, okay, well, would anything prevent us from plugging an access point into the wired?
And they're like, um, well actually you might not understand it, but everything's configured on very specific channels and placements.
And I'm kind of sitting here going, we booked the whole building.
Just because you're configured on a channel doesn't mean you're actually broadcast, or it doesn't mean you're actually transmitting jack, right?
So if your access points are sitting there idle on a channel, that's actually not a problem for me.
I can put as many access points as I want on my own channels and I could distribute them however I want.
Now we're not going to do that because it is against the terms of service.
We are good boys, but tech for technical, but they gave us this technical explanation that actually doesn't make any sense because there's plenty of spectrum when it isn't being used because we're the only ones in the building and we didn't book your wifi.
By the way, I might have an idea.
Oh, I'm jumping back to LTT store just for a second.
Oh, we're going to be back to LTT store for longer than a second, but yeah, tell me more.
This looks like a potentially modifiable without compromising the integrity of the zipper zipper.
I believe you could attach cool things to that.
Oh, that's designed for like a little fabric, like literally this carabiner.
Oh, it would be enormous.
It could go right on it.
It'd be like this long.
You could go right on it.
Yeah.
That's already too long, but it's unpleasant.
I put that, I put that one on my backpack and it sucked.
This, Oh, wait.
Okay.
That's the, that's the biggest one we have, but the smaller one can go on it too.
Anyone that doesn't completely close.
The length, the length is the issue.
This is way too long.
And so when you're adding that thing to it, you're really not giving yourself a lot of options.
You can have smaller versions is what I'm saying.
The, the, the, I'm not talking like this exact thing.
Yeah.
It'd be kind of janky.
I'm just saying it'd be janky.
It's not, it's not, it's not like why you're sticking to YKK thing.
I'd rather do nothing than do something janky.
Okay.
Um, that's a very new approach on the store.
Okay.
Okay.
Okay.
That's fair.
When your minimum order quantity for literally anything is a thousand units.
That does complicate things.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Right.
I can't just be like, Oh, sure.
It doesn't work that way anymore because if I'm stuck with a bunch of crap, I can't sell like what?
Well, think about the waste too.
Think about the waste.
We don't want to just generate waste.
That is true.
Yeah.
That I am pretty against.
Not worth it.
It's not worth it.
Okay.
Back to the doc.
Okay.
Right.
Uh, Nick had in here, if you, if you've seen any other non LTT designed products,
you'd like to see us carry, uh, let us know, maybe just like, uh, contact support.
I think they're not completely overwhelmed right now.
So you could contact LTT store support.
Um, I want us to do, I think I already mentioned this to Nick and honestly, he
probably told me something, uh, smart and informative and my brain just forgot, but
I want us to do, I want us to take the, you know, stainless steel internal design
thing of our water bottles and make, uh, shakers that don't end up like stinking
because of protein.
Oh, because the plastics will like absorb, they'll stink.
They all smell really bad.
Oh, interesting.
So like stainless steel shakers are totally a thing.
I think, I think we had this conversation.
He's probably like, Oh, this, this, this dummy.
Um, but I don't fully remember cause my brain is fried.
Yeah.
We could try and figure out something like that.
Also, I have an update for you guys.
That steam deck carry bag thing that you showed off last week.
There's now an official LTT forum, um, post for it.
So you guys can go ahead and give us any feedback that you have on that.
Uh, Riley posted it in comic sense.
Okay.
Uh, thanks Riley.
That's really helpful.
Anyway, it's, uh, it's this thing.
Okay.
So it's from last week's show, but if you guys can give us any feedback, that would
be great.
And then the last thing is actually not something on the show.
You know what?
Let's do a couple of merch messages and then I want to talk about paid reviews.
Oh yeah.
Okay.
I am navigating a moral quandary here.
Oh, around paid reviews.
Okay.
But first, first Dan, do you want to hit us with a couple of merch messages, three
merch messages, three merch messages specifically that I can do first one up is
from Jack.
Suppose an employee has an idea for a product that they believe LTT labs or
creator warehouse could improve upon.
Is there an official way to submit their idea to be considered for future
attention?
Um, official way.
I don't technically think so, but internally we've always been open to those
types of conversations.
I assume they mean officially internally.
I mean, email.
Yeah.
Teams message.
Yeah.
We, we, we've been open to those conversations.
I don't think there is like a documented, this is what you do procedure for doing
there should be, maybe there should, but like, yeah, just people just like email
me random stuff all the time.
Yeah.
What?
Yeah.
That's kind of what I'm trying to get at.
It's not, it's not like those conversations don't happen, but like we don't
have like a internal form to fill out or no.
Yeah, I don't think so.
Yeah.
Okay.
Next up is from Ryan.
Uh, Hey, LLD.
I'm a trucker that listens to when show on Mondays or DLL personally, but yeah.
Yeah.
It's a computer thing.
Uh, I'm a trucker that listens to when show on Mondays, so hopefully I'll get
to hear you talk about me in the future.
What tech item would you like to disassemble if you had no restrictions at all?
Oh, you want to take apart?
Um, okay.
The first thing that popped into my, our mind, uh, into my mind is our metal
3d printer that we had to, we had to sign an agreement that we wouldn't
take it apart in order to get it.
Um, like this, that makes you want to do it so bad.
That's why I want to do it so bad.
Yep.
Yep.
That's pretty good.
Um, I take a lot of things apart, so
I don't know.
I recently had to take apart.
So, uh, someone in my household, uh, okay.
That narrows it down a fair bit.
There's still two, but, but yeah.
Um, not naming any names, but there's a 50% chance.
I'll get it right.
If I guess go ahead.
Yeah.
Uh, I'll be able to tell from his reaction if I've got it anyway.
Yeah.
They, they cooked the power, they cooked the power cable to, uh, the Vitamix.
Oh, on the stove top, was able to get it off the stove top, whatever.
But it cooked into the cable enough that it was like, I probably
shouldn't use this anymore.
Yeah.
That, I think I know who that was.
Cool.
Carry on.
I don't know.
Maybe.
I don't know.
Um, and I fixed it recently.
Yep.
I didn't do it for like a long time cause like whatever, but I did fix it
recently and I took it apart and man, that thing is annoying to take apart.
And there's no, they sell like the replacement.
Maybe it's not them, maybe from someone else.
I don't know, but there's a replacement cord, which worked great.
Um, and he's like good quality, all that kind of stuff.
I liked it, but, Oh, geez.
That was, that was quite an annoying procedure, but it was kind of interesting
to see how they get it done.
I don't know.
Um, but yeah, I just disassemble things.
I don't really, the like no restrictions thing.
I didn't know about the restriction on that.
Everything else, as far as I'm concerned, like.
Well, like the cost, knowing that you would have to destructively
disassemble something, maybe there's something you wouldn't disassemble.
I think that's a realm that I have not been cheap in.
I think we've finally found one.
Well, if I, if I feel like I need to disassemble something, I just do it.
Yeah.
MRI machine.
I feel like there wouldn't even be that much.
You'd be able to see with the naked eye.
Yeah.
But just the fun of it.
Yeah, I guess.
Sure.
All right.
Isn't it just a giant magnet?
Hit me, Dan.
I don't know anything about it.
All right.
Uh, up next is from Marshall.
Linus, what gym bag do you currently use?
I need something to hold me over until you bring yours to market.
And I know you will be doing a long time off.
Dan, you really do have a creative way of reading these.
Uh, they're hard.
Uh, I use an ancient Yonex badminton bag from like 1989 or something like that,
that I inherited from my in-laws.
I thought it was cool.
They weren't playing.
And I was like, can I use this?
And then I literally never gave it back.
I can confirm it's the same one that it has always been.
Yep.
Um, it's fine.
I have sewn it back together twice, but I, I love it.
It's like, uh, it's so, it's so old and crappy that it's not crappy anymore.
Now it's like vintage.
Um, and I, I get comments on it because even the Yonex logo is, it's not the same
as their current logo, like some ancient logo that they haven't used in a fit in
like probably the lifetime of some people who work here.
So it's, yeah, I, I don't know.
I like it.
I think it's cool.
I, I think we should do a gym bag at some point.
I have a Hayabusa gym bag.
However, I don't have a lot of feedback to give on what makes a great gym bag.
Other than, you know, probably some mesh, uh, probably a spot for us to put our
little air circulation device.
If we ever actually release it.
I would want, uh, I haven't seen this in, in gym bags personally.
I'm sure someone's be like, this one has it.
How didn't you know?
I have not shopped around for gym bags.
Uh, I would want to divide her because of like a dirty clothes barrier.
Cause there's a decent amount of time where there's like a change room.
And if you're a sweaty boy or girl or whatever else you might want to change
after you do your physical activity.
And that means you have like sweaty, gross clothes and being able to put that
in, be able to put that in a divided area that has a vent that has a zipper panel
over it so you could decide for it to not be vented more of like a waterproof
lining instead of like a, like a fabric lining, so it won't absorb anything.
Yeah.
Um, but then yeah, you could decide if you want it to vented.
So like if you're outside, you can have it vented, but if you have to like drive
home for half an hour and you don't want it to like reek in your car,
you can just close the panel.
Okay. That'd be kind of cool.
That would be sweet.
Seems like the kind of thing that has to exist.
I feel like it probably does.
I haven't seen it.
Um, and my bag doesn't have it, but like, I don't know.
Someone says Under Armour bags have it.
Um, so yeah, it's the kind of thing where we'd probably have to go buy some,
buy some competing bags and kind of see how everyone does their thing and see if
there's anything that we think we could do better.
All right.
Let's talk about paid reviews.
We have a very clear stance on our channels that you cannot pay for an opinion.
That's sort of, that's,
that's I think the most succinct way that I could draw a line in the sand.
Um, you can pay for airtime.
Sure.
For your talking points, showcase your thing,
but we will make it very clear that those are your talking points.
Yeah. And there's some we won't say.
Of course we won't say anything that we don't in good faith and to our,
to the best of our ability, believe to be true.
Yeah.
Um, and we will make it clear when there is your talking points versus our
opinion, you can never buy an opinion.
Um, now obviously, you know,
I think you guys have probably seen many creators talk about this in the past.
I don't think I've talked about it in quite a long time, but there's,
there's many brands and many creators who treat the line between paid content and
editorial content, um, as either blurry or non existent.
Um, that'll, that'll never happen here.
However,
the reason that I'm in a bit of a moral dilemma is that we've been learning a lot
more about marketing because while it's great that we can, you know,
create cool products like that desk pad and joy at James K, um,
or the backpack or that great underwear. Jason W is about to,
about to be wearing. Um, cool. Now I'm picturing Jason W in that underwear.
Anyway, the point is we can create these great products.
We can tell you guys about them,
but if we wanted to take create a warehouse from, you know,
a brand that makes merch to a brand that creates products for sale to the,
the general public, we need to figure out marketing, right?
Other than just using our own channels to communicate about our products.
And as we're learning more about it, we are learning just how
things appear to work. Okay.
So let me ask you this. Okay.
We have, uh, this was actually,
this was prompted by something really cool. Uh,
in frameworks promotional video announcing the framework 16,
their upcoming game top or something there. Yeah.
The LTT backpack made a, made a casual appearance,
which got a couple thousand up votes on our slash Linus tech tips.
Pretty cool. Um, that all, that'll happened organically.
No money changed place, changed hands.
We just, they asked for a backpack and we were like, okay. And then they,
they used it for that, which is, which is super cool.
But what we're discovering is that that doesn't really happen that much. Um,
Organics stuff. I mean, I I've called us out for doing it on the show, right?
Like it happens. Oh no, I just me. Okay. So I'm talking about, um,
in marketing the backpack.
So what we're learning is that there's a lot of pay to play affiliate
revenue is huge. So, so great. This was what sparked the discussion though,
was we were looking at, um,
the inclusion and frameworks promotional video and just sort of talking about,
okay, you know, what have we seen, you know, marketing wise,
what are some of the strategies? Um,
and then one of the other things that prompted it was, uh,
Yvonne was looking into a pool cleaning robots and we've all seen these
articles, right? Uh, just going to be ready for summer.
I don't want to talk about it. Okay. So, so we've all seen these articles.
I'm going to go past the sponsored ones and I'm not singling out the spruce,
but you know, this article where there's a bunch of,
no, it's not me. Mine's like,
sorry about that phone interference guys where there's,
there's a bunch of stuff, right? Uh,
there's a bunch of stock imagery or product page imagery.
They clearly didn't actually test every single one of these.
Um, actually this one looks like they actually have their own pictures. Okay,
cool. So shout out the spruce maybe for actually reviewing these things.
But the one that Yvonne came across was using all imagery from like Getty images.
These are super common. Yeah. Just like stock images of pools.
And I know I'm, I'm this guy, but a bunch of them these days are AI generated.
Yes. And so what we're,
what we're learning is that basically the only way to end up on one of these
lists is to offer, okay,
is to offer some kind of affiliate revenue, which to be clear,
affiliate revenue is not a bad thing.
What's bad is the completely pay to play nature of a lot of what we're seeing.
Now this is where things get even more complicated in exploring ways to promote
the backpack outside of the traditional LTT audience.
We've come across creators,
individual creators who will kind of say, okay,
yeah, I, I basically,
I'm not going to touch anything that doesn't have an affiliate program associated
with it. And I expect a flat fee for inclusion in the first place.
Now, some of the creators that we've encountered,
I mean, we have no way of knowing don't disclose, but from what we can tell,
don't appear to disclose these payments.
So tell me this, this is the moral quandary.
Are you okay with us engaging the services of such a person?
No, I'm not done yet. Okay.
If our contract stipulates that everything needs to be disclosed,
so you got to let me finish. Really?
My reason is because you almost add more credibility to that person.
And you add more credibility to the videos where they don't disclose.
Cause now it looks like they would.
All right. So then.
I, yeah, I don't, I don't like it. I wouldn't touch that. Okay.
So what about the listicles? So let's forget the pay to play.
What about the ones that are basically just like, yeah, I'm not going to,
I'm not going to touch it if there's no affiliate program.
The listicles are a little bit more kind of open about that.
It seems pretty obvious to me. Okay. Then I wouldn't work with those.
Okay. A lot of the time it's not that simple.
A lot of the time it's more like you submit your affiliate program to an
affiliate program. Um, what would I call this?
Like, uh, I don't know, commission junction is one of them,
but it's like an official affiliate program, grouping of websites. Not,
not a grouping of websites necessarily, but uh, um, nah,
amalgamator, not something, something atr congregator, something, uh,
whatever I'm missing. Aggregator aggregator. Thank you.
Why couldn't I find that word? I'm getting old and stupid. Um,
so it'll be like an affiliate program aggregator or like marketplace. Sure.
You can't control who is going to use your affiliate program.
So like the bounty program through Twitch, that type of thing. Exactly. Okay.
So I'm not necessarily in control of what sites or like,
I don't even know. Right. Because you've got individuals that might run 40,
websites, beg comparison.com, beg comparison, check.com,
and bags for flights.com. Exactly. Yeah. Um,
how well do you think those websites work? Have you guys looked into that?
Incredibly well. Yeah. If we don't,
basically that's how it works. That's how it works these days.
If we do not participate in affiliate programs, we can,
we will pretty much expect everyone other than our sales,
like snazzy labs. Well, no,
we won't get only audience sales cause we'll get word of mouth, which we do.
The backpack is still moving very well. Um,
but if we want to break into the mainstream, the people who type,
what's the best bag for day trips on Google,
that's where they end up. Period.
And if we want to have any kind of foothold in that space,
that's how it works. Period. So what is that?
So what is that? Someone in float plane chat that says,
I have some of those websites, they work really well. Um,
see it. This is, this is, it's like, this, this is,
can you ask one of those aggregates for a like integrity,
report almost? No. I mean, I look,
I'm assuming, but no, I don't actually know that for sure.
How on earth would they manage that? And here's the other followup question.
Why would they do that? Why would they care? They don't.
I don't think you can necessarily say that because if you look at,
if you look at like manufacturing around the world for almost anything,
there's a range, right? There's the,
there's one end of the range where it like just straight up uses slave labor or
child labor or, or materials or whatever in, in super, super negative,
super bad ways.
And then there's the other end of the spectrum where it's like all super above
board. And you can ask like, why would they care? And it's like, yeah,
some companies don't and they will 100% go full pin as far as they can ensure
evil practices, but they're not an aggregator and some companies do. Right.
But like that there might be an aggregator that does care about those things.
Luke, you're being super naive right now. I doubt it. I don't think I am.
You can say I am. I don't necessarily think, I'm not surprised that. Yeah, sure.
The majority of them don't, I don't know everything about the space.
I don't think the only way to interface with this is through aggregators.
I'm sure it's not, it might be the easiest way.
It might be the most normal way, but you don't have to take that path.
And I don't think that accepting that is, is required or fair.
Here's the thing though.
Why do you think we're talking to individual creators and finding out how they
work? Exactly. Because we're trying to go around it. Yeah.
So what I'm telling you is the end result. Okay. So then don't do it.
So then don't do an affiliate program.
If there isn't an option to do things above board, don't do things below board.
Well, hold on a second. Why am I not above board?
Because you're working. This is, this is the same,
the same thing that I just described.
Working with people on that end is using that end.
Sure. But so then we shouldn't offer an affiliate program.
If you're like, Hey, I need protection from my building.
There's this company who tries their best to like, you know,
have some people out watching around, taking care of things,
putting alarms on stuff,
and then there's this other company that just kills everyone that's around the
building. Hold on a second. You shouldn't work with the other company.
That's still a hypothetical company though. Okay. So if that company does sort of,
there's working with the mob to gain security for your building.
Right. But hold on a second. Can we back up?
So you've still got this hypothetical aggregator that does what,
what did you call it? Like an integrity report?
What I'm saying is if that doesn't exist, sure. Don't work with them.
Oh, okay.
So then we should go find individual sort of outlets
if possible. And we should engage with them directly.
Are you trying to kill our accounting department? Then don't do it.
So don't do any affiliate program.
I don't think you should work with people who lie and cheat,
but the aggregator doesn't lie or cheat, but they work with people that do.
So then they might as well. I see. I don't think, in my opinion,
there is not a difference in that at all. So I should,
I should just cause they're like,
if you're a clothing company and you put logos on shirts,
you don't make the shirts, but the shirts are made in sweatshops.
You're selling shirts that are made in sweatshops.
I see. But I am,
but you've got my position in this transaction reversed.
So I'm the fact I'm the manufacturer with the integrity.
Sure. Ultimately it's a good product.
Why should I care how people end up with it?
That doesn't work. In my opinion, that doesn't work at all.
Why not?
Because you're still working with people that are lying and cheating.
It doesn't matter what part of the chain they exist in.
That's completely irrelevant. So then, so I should just,
you can move yourself in the chain if you want. So you make things well.
You make things with, with good labor, with good materials,
all that type of stuff.
And then you are trying to get people into the store.
The people that you use to get into the,
to get people into your store are evil. And you're like, that's fine.
That's not fine. Are they?
If you don't know. So you say the aggregator is evil.
You're saying that you are finding a lot of these sites that don't have
disclosure. You're saying that none of them will do integrity reports.
So you're saying there's probably a pretty much guarantee that they're working
with sites that are not good.
I'm not saying that they don't do integrity reports. I'm saying probably not.
Okay. Because why would they care? How is that their problem?
How is it not their problem? Well, how is it their problem? What do you mean?
I mean, like, so is it the bank's problem?
If someone withdraws money and then uses it for criminal activity, like what,
how they're all they are as an intermediary.
That is it. I don't think that comparison protocols problem that people use it
for piracy. I mean, no.
So I, I actually don't follow any sense. That argument doesn't hold water at all.
This is not what's happening. You just tried to say,
this is the wrong part of the chain. That's also the wrong part of the chain.
What you're saying,
what you're trying to say is like if someone uses our bag and puts bricks in it
and beat someone with it, is it our fault? Yeah, no,
that's not what we're talking about in the slightest.
So what we're talking about is that if we create an affiliate program,
which will enable legitimate full disclosure publications to benefit for an
affiliate program for our bag, which allows us to market it,
then because someone will be crappy and not disclose it,
we should not do that. Yes. Why?
I don't, I don't follow because you know,
they're going to do it in bad faith and you shouldn't support that.
Okay.
I mean, you can disagree with me and do it anyways. I mean, likely. Yeah,
because what are we going to not have an affiliate program? Like we,
we can't different style. We can't, what, what different style? I don't know.
I don't know the space.
Are we going to write $4 checks to like every site on the internet that talks
about, that's pretty obvious. That's everyone. Well, yeah,
but that's why nobody does it directly because they're not going to meet those
minimums. They don't want $504 checks.
That's why nobody does it that way. It's not practical.
It doesn't make any sense. I am not agreeing with, I'm not disagreeing with you.
That's literally how I just told you it works. So like, yeah. Right. Okay.
So then, so you're basically just saying, okay, then give up.
I don't think that you should use personally, and again,
you don't have to agree with this and you can do it anyways. Yeah. Personally,
I don't think that you should just say there isn't a good solution for us to do
this ethically. So we're just doing going to do it anyways.
But there is a solution for us to do it ethically. I don't agree.
We are fully disclosing everything that we're doing.
We're being completely above board.
But you know you're working with partners that are going to lie and cheat.
And so, okay.
Do I?
And so.
I think thinking that's not going to happen.
That's like saying we shouldn't build hammers because someone will get hurt.
Someone with it. I don't know. That is literally not. Yes, it is.
All we're doing is engaging a platform that allows people to legitimately use it
and also allows people to not legitimately use it. We cannot control that.
And integrity checks. Like, what are you even talking about?
You want them to police the entire internet and make sure these links aren't
posted anywhere that it's not properly disclosed. Who would do that?
If you were running those sites and someone,
if you were running this aggregator thing and someone submitted to you like,
look, this, this site that's using your thing. Yeah.
Is not disclosing that any of this is going on. Yeah.
Would you stop working with them or no? But I don't run the aggregator. Okay.
And I can tell you that they don't go anywhere and I don't think there's a point
in continuing the conversation. I think we should just move on to something else.
All right. So anyway, the situation is
when it comes to affiliate marketing, it's really,
it's a super gray field, sketchier than I thought. Yeah.
And I get a lot of emails from companies asking for paid reviews. Um,
I don't even actually monitor the inbox anymore and I still end up getting
emails from people asking for paid reviews without any kind of requirements of
disclosure. I mean,
I've generally taken the approach that I can't change the entire world.
All I can do is make sure that what we do within the small circle of influence
that I managed to maintain is above board. Um,
from my point of view,
if we are above board in terms of disclosing that we are offering affiliate
programs, that we are on platforms X, Y, or Z, um, you know,
if, if, okay, yeah, in, in, sure.
If one of those platforms was found to be issue writing checks to,
you know,
some terrorist organization or something like that that runs a network of beg
review sites to help fund illicit activities or whatever.
Like at the end of the day, anyone supporting, you know, uh, uh,
an organized crime syndicate or something like that would be in violation of
the law. Like if that happened, then yeah,
of course we would stop engaging with that particular platform. But yeah,
I don't, I don't know. This is something I'll, you know,
I'll have to talk to Nick about.
Maybe you'll have to talk to Nick about because you clearly have a very
different perspective from mine.
I also like,
I don't have to agree with everything we do here and I don't think it's like the
worst thing ever or that big of a deal necessarily.
It's just my position on it. Sure. I'm getting people in,
in chat getting very angry on each side and I don't think it really matters.
Yeah. I mean, here's the thing guys,
and this is what you've got to at least hopefully recognize is I didn't have to
tell you any of this. Yeah.
We're having this conversation out in the open. Almost nobody else would.
So like I, I don't necessarily want people like jumping into my defense and
diving on Linus or anything. They don't think any of that's productive. Yeah.
No, I don't know a lot about these affiliate programs. I just think if you,
if yeah, I don't think there's a point in continuing this to be completely
honest. Yeah. So, so we're, we're, we're trying to,
we're trying to be above board with you guys.
We're trying to talk to you guys about, well, here's how it works.
Here are the challenges. Here are where we,
here's where we share the same perspective.
Here's where we have different perspectives.
This is the kind of thing that happens a lot internally.
Doesn't necessarily always happen on the WAN show,
but at least you guys are part of the process. I guess.
I've got a lot of people saying like, Hey, yeah, it would,
it would tarnish my perception of the LTT brand if I saw the bag in one of those
lists.
Well, okay.
But that's also not even talking about all because they might just include the
bag. I have seen versions of those lists where they have, they'll like rank them.
So they'll have like number one, two, whatever.
And some of those things they won't have affiliate codes for and that they might
not even like that, right? Cause they're not necessarily making money from that,
but they might do that to help legitimize the list or they might've gotten a
flat payment for it or that like you can't,
you can't just because some product shows up in the list,
you cannot assume that it was paid to be there. So that's not, this is what,
this is one of the reasons why I don't want people just jumping to like
really either side because it's, it's an interesting world. Like if there's,
if everyone agrees that like one product is clearly the best product in a space
for, for a specific thing, but say it's expensive. Yeah.
They're still going to put that at like the top, but just be like,
it's expensive. If you want another option, there's these ones.
That doesn't mean that that company paid to be at the top.
That doesn't mean that that company paid to be on that list. It's yeah, it's,
there's more to it than that.
Oh, Hey, they're here. Uh, Luke,
do you mind doing up a poll? So the three options are zero gravity gaming,
Vancouver and tech dinosaurs.
We're trying to figure out what ratio to print for these desk pads because the
last thing I wanted was for people to end up with their feelings very, very,
very hurt because we had three of our designers each come up with creative
ideas.
These are artist edition desk pads that we're doing as part of LTX and the last
thing I wanted was for one of them to like not sell as well as the other two or
something and be the last one left on the store.
So that's a huge reason why I'm trying to get some idea of the ratio because
that can be opaque to the designers.
They don't have to know how many we ordered.
I just want them to all kind of run out in a boat at about the same time. Oh,
okay.
It came from a good place. It did a hundred percent did.
I don't know how you do this. This is tough. Um, well,
pull it anyway. Send it anyway. I need to know how many to order. Okay. Um,
so what is it like? Which one do you want to buy? Yeah, which one? Uh, uh,
oh, you should probably, oh man,
you should probably have an option for like all because there's going to be
ridiculous whale people that are like,
I have three computers and I'm going to buy each of them. Um, okay. Is it up?
Uh, okay guys, don't vote yet. I gotta,
I gotta show you what the different options look like.
So this is zero gravity gaming. All right.
And the design is just to the edges of the pad here. Okay.
It's not the name and the LTX logo. It's just, it's just the middle part. Okay.
Then we've got Vancouver, which is much more vibrant in person by the way.
It's really poppy. It looks really great. And then we've got a tech dinosaurs,
which is actually going to be slightly revised. Um,
I think this headphone is changing. Um, but there's not,
there's not too much changing about any of them. So let's, uh,
we'll get the results and then hopefully, okay. All right. Well actually things
are, things are not that unevenly split, which is, yeah,
it's decently flat. Pretty nice. Okay. That's good. All right.
So maybe we'll just go like same quantities of each and just not order too
many so that they all kind of run out fast or something like that.
This is something that like, it's going to be limited. So yeah.
All right. What are we talking about now? Oh, Holy crap.
We should do our sponsors.
Oh no. What are you doing? You're getting papers again.
This is what it is forever onwards. Is it actually, oh boy, this is,
this is how it works now. Get used to it. Okay.
Uh, well, uh,
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Okay. Thank you for that, Dennis. All right.
Why don't we pick something that we can agree on for a change?
Change. I think we're usually on the same side.
Australia debates mature rating for loot boxes.
A proposal by the government of Australia would apply an R rating and
18 plus restriction to video games containing simulated gambling games
containing paid loot boxes would carry at a minimum a mature rating and 15 plus
restriction. It won't be illegal for minors to play these games,
but it would be illegal for a minor to buy them.
I'd say that's going to be much harder to enforce in this day and age.
It used to be that at the store, at the point of sale,
someone was liable for selling the game to a minor.
I don't like trying to buy alcohol to buy like halo when you were underage or
something. But yeah, if you're just digital distribution,
it relies on parents to set up restrictions.
And that's so uncommon. That's another thing too.
Back to the bubbles conversation we were having earlier,
encountering other parents just with no tech savvy filter in my interactions
discord. Are you like what's discord parent tech friend for your,
like the people that I don't have time to be the parent tech friend, but like,
you know,
my kid was the first one with a discord server so that I knew what everyone was
talking about and could keep an eye on things.
I don't even like thought about dealing with discord. Yeah. So
anyway, all right. But yeah, so,
so imagining that parents are practicing proper,
I've heard some of the usage statistics on those tools and like,
they get used, they should keep being made, but it's not that common.
Yeah. Which is kind of surprising to me because I would think that
controls. Yeah. Yeah. I don't know. I mean, it's,
it's super easy on a lot of devices. Like Nintendo makes it really simple.
I think a lot of people just here, kid, I bought you the thing.
Have fun. Yolo. Yeah. I don't know. Anyways,
like the kind of stuff you can access on a phone in like two seconds.
It's actually the internet's crazy. Safe search, even pretend to work anymore.
Like I'm, I'm a try something. You go, go ahead. Sounds good.
The average gambler using online casino games is typically 45 or older.
However,
research typically shows that gambling among teenagers is rising and that teens
exposed to gambling from a young age are more likely to struggle with gambling
with a gambling addiction as adults.
I wonder if the gambling among teenagers rising has anything to do with a lot of
the gambling creators that have been rising up over the last few years.
Over 80% of adults in Australia engage in some form of gambling. Whoa,
the highest rate in the world. Okay. Okay.
That makes sense with around 1% of the population suffering serious consequences
due to problem gambling.
That's really high because I wonder what serious comp consequences means.
It's probably actually like quite serious cause that would be,
that would require reporting.
The change would affect many games that are currently rated G such as FIFA,
Ooh,
but also games with gambling mini games such as the slot machines in early gen
Pokemon. Oh, I didn't even think.
Gambling with little kids is actually a huge problem. Yeah.
I'm glad that they're trying to do something,
but I do worry about what the effectiveness will be, where we're relying on
a lot of open world games have some form of casino. Sure.
And where's the line between a loot box that is actually paid and a gambling
like or loot box like game mechanic? I mean,
is the entire game of Pokemon just a giant gambling machine?
Cause of like walking in the grass. You don't know what you're going to find.
It might take you two hours to get that Abra and that you might be able to trade
for real money with a friend, especially with internet connectivity. Yeah.
They also go on to mention Stardew Valley.
The thing that jumped into my head was fallout new Vegas. Yeah. Like you can,
yeah, it's in Vegas. You can gamble and fallout.
Does that make it a gambling game? I wouldn't immediately think that,
but it's interesting discussion question.
If these kinds of laws become widespread, how would it affect game development?
Should this be adopted elsewhere? I mean,
like we just said, it's been interesting.
No, you can go for it.
It's been interesting watching gambling get deregulated in real time in our
lives. Yeah. Like watching, uh, like ads for sports.
It's just constantly like you want to gamble on the results of the game.
Whoa.
It was always under the table back alley stuff when we were growing up and now
it's like very in your face all the time. Yeah. Like it's,
it's kind of like going down to the States and every other ad on TV is for a
pharmaceutical product. Like weird. Yeah. It weirds me out. So you're not,
you're not allowed to advertise, um, pharmaceutical products in, uh,
in Canada, at least not in the same way that you can in the States.
Like you won't just see it a commercial on TV for Cialis or whatever. Um,
and so it's, it's jarring. It's like really jarring. And in the same way,
growing up as kids where gambling was a thing that, you know,
know your limit play within it. You know, like I know the anti gambling slogans,
far better than I know the gambling slogans.
And as someone who hasn't had a TV service,
like a paid TV service as an adult and can't see ads,
whenever I do see a gambling ad, it's like, Whoa, really?
Yeah. You could do that. I thought we,
I thought we actually invest like public funding in making sure people don't do
that. And then, but then, okay, sure. I guess. Uh, all right.
I guess that's how it works now. Right. Um, yeah, it's odd.
I do find the, just to jump on the pharmaceuticals thing,
I know this has probably been memed to death,
but it is so funny that like over half of the pharmaceutical ad is this gigantic
disclaimer about how it can do horrible things to you.
I always find that very entertaining. Oh, the CA the Canadian regulation,
according to Twitch chat, which is very reliable,
apparently you can say the medication name. Cause yeah, as soon as I said that,
I was like, no, I think I've seen a commercial for Cialis.
You can say the name, you can say what it does, but not both.
Oh, so it's kind of like, you know how alcohol commercials,
sometime in our lifetime they changed.
So you couldn't actually show people drinking it. Oh,
you could show people holding it. You could show it being poured.
You could show them having fun and being like, you know, hot or whatever. Um,
but you couldn't even fill the glass, but then they just stand there.
I never like thought about this. That's funny. Interesting. Yeah. It's a whole,
it's a whole thing. I think it could definitely affect things,
but I feel like this law would affect things significantly more if it was
implemented.
Yeah.
Like you were saying earlier when people were buying all of their games
physically and in person. Um,
As it is now you just VPN into whatever region deregulates and game developers
are not going to care. They're going to be like, yeah,
what do I care if they do that?
And then if we ever worked with a game developer,
Luke would lose his s*** because we're supporting bad people.
I said you could do it anyways and I don't need to lose everything.
I did not lose my s***.
My goodness. Um, I'm gonna,
I'm gonna take a shot back by talking about an AI topic.
Actually. Hold on, hold on. Can I just try to defeat safe search in like,
let's see how long it takes. Yeah. I'm going to start with boobies,
which presumably will be birds. Birds. Okay. Good. Okay. Oh,
Nope. That didn't take long. Not if you click on images.
There's this Obama one is pretty good. That is kind of funny. Um,
you guys, that's actually a fit. Okay. Yeah. It gets pretty, uh,
gets pretty racy pretty fast. Yep. Um,
yep. Yep. There's a lot of birds in fairness.
And it seems like it goes through phases.
Like there was birds and then there was pictures that you would expect if you
weren't on safe search. And then there was, did it just stop you?
I add nude and it says results hidden to see results,
manage your safe search settings.
If you were on a kid account, I'm assuming it wouldn't give you that option.
Yeah. Yeah, I guess that's possible. But again,
that assumes that I am,
that I am managing the kid's account properly. Right.
But there's even like, and there's, there's like you think of Nintendo,
like Nintendo is probably the company that I would say most
promotes its parental controls. Sure. If that makes sense.
People were still using like Nintendo DS's browser back in the day to look at
stuff like
people are going to find a way it's going to happen. Um,
anyways, a ton of stuff happened in AI,
but we only have one main topic. Um,
I will kind of loop in a couple of things into this topic,
but it is what it is. AI experts,
advocate pause on high level AI development.
Over 1000 experts, including engineers, researchers,
and notable tech luminaries have signed an open letter asking for a six month
pause to development of AI beyond the bounds already reached by GPT
for their argument is that in the recent rush to develop AI systems,
we have not had the necessary time as a global society to fully consider the
risks of developing human competitive AI intelligence.
The letter further argues that if private entities are unwilling to restrict
themselves voluntarily, governments should step in to regulate AI development.
Some notable signatories include Elon Musk.
Can I stop that for a second?
Stop what?
Isn't he like anti-government regulations?
Could he be, could he be less consistent in some way?
Is that possible for him to be less consistent to, to,
to throw him a bone in this scenario?
He has been highly concerned about AI for a super long time and
been calling for regulation for a super long time. Yes. Yes.
But he only calls for regulation when it doesn't affect him.
So that's consistent. This regulation. Oh, okay. Hold on. Okay.
I'm going to pause my response to that cause I want to finish the notes,
but I have a, I, I'm going to jump on your side in a moment.
This has led to, uh, Elon Musk, Steven Wozniak and the CEO of Stability AI.
This has led to criticisms that the true motive behind some signatories is to
slow down AI development so that their own AI investments can catch up to the
competition. Now we're done the notes. I'm going to jump back on that.
I'm very certain that this is specifically,
at least as far as Elon is concerned, trying to target open AI.
Cause he's really mad.
Cause this will 100% only target open AI right now.
There's all these articles about how like Google's Bard is literally trained on
GPT-4 outputs. There's, there was this website. I don't remember what it was.
I don't think it was ran by open AI,
but it was like a collection of people's conversations that they had had that
they submit to the website.
So people can see all these different conversations that have been had and they
were training it off of that website.
They were trying to get Bard's results more similar to the results that they
were seeing in that website. Right. And they got caught doing this.
And open AI like knows they did it like they are absolutely the target of this.
Also,
I have no faith whatsoever that we,
cause we're talking about the global community,
would be able to come to some conclusion in the next six months about how this
is going to go.
The global community can't come to a conclusion about anything like not
murdering each other all the time.
We can't agree that that's going to get nowhere with this. Yeah. Also, like if,
let's say,
the government of a very large militarized company or country,
sorry. Yeah, same diff. If they wanted the benefits,
not me with the spicy take this week.
If they wanted the benefits of some system, you think they're going to pause it?
No, of course not. Yeah. I don't know.
I,
in like a everything goes perfect world, like, sure,
let's slow it down and figure out how we're going to do things.
But like people that have, if, if these exist,
if there are competitive systems with GPT-4 right now that just aren't public for
whatever reason, held by governments or other companies or whatever,
you think they're going to stop? No, of course not.
Even if you shot, even if you told them to stop and they were like, yeah,
we stopped. There's going to keep going anyways. Like what,
what is everyone who works there going to do? Yeah. Twiddle there, play,
play ping pong for six months.
Probably other stuff that they can do too. This is another thing I thought of.
Like if this somehow does go through,
you think a open ad is just going to completely sit on their hands? Yeah,
of course not. They'll just build like other supporting things so that when
they're able to work on it again, they just ramp even further. I don't know.
Some of the development that's happened around GPT-4 and the hook stuff is
really crazy. My account doesn't have access to plugins,
so I've been able to do it myself. But watching it,
I've seen other people's results watching it use the plugins to think has
been pretty wild because like I've,
I've known about Wolfram alpha for a long time, which is that like math tool.
I didn't, I haven't used it since I was in university.
I didn't realize that it's error output is written in like human language.
Oh, that's cool. That helps GPT-4 a lot, right?
There's also people that are already setting up tools,
making it so that even without the support of open AI, they have,
there's a paper on this. Someone wrote a paper on it.
It was extremely interesting where they set up a system,
a series of tools that all conversed back and forth so that they were able to
externally make the project that open AI was talking about,
about giving open AI access to itself because they just
linked multiple accounts together through one controller. Yeah.
And then they gave the controller the task of telling the other accounts that
they're like what their job is in the queue and getting everything built and
it's all happening. It doesn't matter if you tell them to pause,
they're going to keep going anyways. Yeah. And if it's not like,
if you put tons of watchdogs on open AI,
I'm sure they'll find some way to work on something.
Open AI as a organization, as far as I can tell,
which this could just be them trying to convince me in succeeding.
I have no idea as far as I can tell,
they are somewhat concerned about the ethics of all this kind of stuff,
but they're marching forward anyways. That's what people are going to do.
Yup. We are actually going to destroy ourselves. We all know that, right?
Yeah. Like for sure. Yep.
I was talking to you about a thing that I don't know if I want to say yet,
cause I don't want to like claim it until I'm more sure, but, uh,
another project that I thought that's been really cool is,
do you know about Lamma? Yeah. Uh, so it's like locally ran.
People have set up, uh,
like microphone arrays in their house and some,
someone posted a project where they made it so that they use Siri voice,
whatever,
through a Mac book to write into a like Lamma
input so that they could converse with it back and forth through voice.
And I know someone else who's been setting up a microphone array in their house
so that they have like a Jarvis, like that project is happening now.
Yeah.
Yeah.
You're not going to stop this stuff.
And especially when you get to the point where people can just ask chat GPT to
write whatever plugin or whatever hook they need. Cause you,
cause like the problem right now is that these voice assistants or AI
assistants or whatever, they can't do anything.
You have no reason to talk to them.
But if any idiot with vocal cords can just say,
or, or, or, or hands or any way of inputting text can just say,
Oh,
write a thing so that chat GPT or Lama or
whatever can control my smart blinds. Here's the brand,
find them on my network or whatever.
It'll actually do stuff, which is, which is cool. Yeah.
It's interesting. Yeah. Good luck everybody. I don't want to, what, what is your,
what is your thoughts on the pause? Well, it's just asinine.
Good luck with that. Yeah. It's it's like, uh, how would they even,
how do you think they would even try to enforce something?
It's like, it's like, it's like, it's kind of like a ceasefire in like a,
in a, in a traditional war. Yeah.
Just because we're not firing rounds doesn't mean we're going to stop
manufacturing them.
Everyone's just going to super focus on logistics and troop movement and
intelligence and all this other type of stuff so that they're as ready as,
think about, uh, uh, like peace in civilization.
We were talking about sieve earlier in the show.
What happens when you declare peace and civilization?
You both build up as much as you can because it ends in 10 turns. Like,
let's go. It's coming. I don't know. Uh, atomic age ace,
I think has it nailed down.
What we really need is an AI trained entirely off of Twitch chat.
Sorry. I just, that amused me. It was in the flow plane.
Like that's a way that they could work on it without making it better
necessarily is something that's been brought up is, uh,
that making an AI that is like, uh,
good in the sense of like good nature, bad natured,
whatever is basically impossible due to all the different cultures in the
world. Because you're going to be like, my morals are good,
but that's not necessarily going to line up with someone somewhere else.
So you almost need to make it so that those parts are like modular,
right? So like,
Oh man, you know what? I am not really messy really fast.
I am not going to pick a polarizing issue to say like that could be a module
that you would unplug or replug depending on the part of the world that the AI
is operating in or political affiliation or whatever. Yeah, exactly. Yeah.
But, but like, is that the right route to go?
I don't know. I've seen, I've seen some,
some people big mad about AI's spitting out like objectively factual stances on
some very polarizing issues that significant portions of the population do not
understand well enough to know that that's actually just a way better answer
than what they think. It's like, like big mad biased.
So it's like they, they could spend this six month,
six months trying to tackle like that problem that doesn't technically advance
its, they probably just won't bother. I don't know.
It's there's, yeah, it's going to be interesting. Yeah.
The future is very
uncertain. I,
I feel bad for people that are in like, you know,
like late high school right now because you're in that stage where you're like,
okay, I'm leaving the like the nursery,
the standard required education system, the, the, the walkthrough.
I have to go to either school or get a job or whatever.
What career path do I put myself on when I have very low experience?
Because a lot of the jobs that are most at risk are non expert style positions.
But then how do you get to an expert style position if you can't gain job work
experience? So like if everyone just replaces all the low level jobs,
how do you fill the positions of the high level? So we become batteries.
Tell me more Neo.
We already are. Oh man.
Aren't we all just training data? Let's, let's, let's move on.
All right. I have to run to the washroom.
Do you want to go through some of the exciting creators who have confirmed their
attendance at LTX? At the bottom.
We have a bunch of creators confirming their attendance to LTX 2023,
including Linus tech tips. Whoa. Tech Wiki.
Whoa. I guess we should probably share my screen. There we go.
Outside of our own channels, there's I three cubed, three printing nerd,
ant venom, bad seed tech, barnacles, Brandon Y Lee.
Oh my God. He's coming. Whoa. Coalition gaming.
Dawid does tech stuff. I'm pretty sure that's how you pronounce it.
I've heard it said before. Gear seekers, Greg Salazar,
Jared's tech J's two cents. Um, M Kibitz.
I'm Kibitz. There we go. I got there. Level one techs, Louis Rossman,
nerd on a budget. Oz talks hardware, Paul's hardware, Pedro,
PCMR Sarah D.
Chi shank mods snazzy labs, strange parts, tech Joyce,
tech tech potato, the sushi dragon.
And this is tech today and UFD tech subject to change because there might be
more, or maybe someone can't make it, but that's,
that's pretty cool. That's the wrong camera. Cam only.
That's still the wrong camera. That's there we go. I made it eventually.
There's so many people that I would love to meet there. Well, you're going to,
it's weird. I don't, I don't like this feeling. It's strange. Why?
I don't know. I'm new at this.
What? I don't know. I work with, with Linus and I'm like,
he's my coworker. And then I go to this and I see other like big stars.
I'm like, Ooh. Were you, did you watch the channel?
Were you a fan of the channel before you joined? Yes and no, but yeah,
probably from the very early days. Yeah. Okay.
Was it weird meeting Linus for the first time? No.
Then I think you'll be fine. I would say no. Yeah, it'll be fine. Yeah. Yeah.
It's okay. Uh, should I go into another topic?
I mean, what else you got? Well, Linus.
Do you want me to do some merch messages for you? Sure. Yeah.
If there's any targeted towards me, let's do that. I think there's a few here.
Yeah. Let me see if I can find some. All right. For Luke. Yeah.
What scale of infrastructure is required to run float plane?
Can you reveal your server count? Um, uh,
that isn't something that I particularly keep track or bandwidth usage.
That's also up and down. Um, the bandwidth usage, I wonder if I can find it. Uh,
my phone is like hidden way under the table cause it was doing lots of
interference.
The bandwidth usage that happened when we got banned off of YouTube was absurd.
It was this like absolutely enormous spike and it didn't immediately just go
down. Like we thought like, Oh, we're back live on YouTube again.
The account is unbanned.
We're expecting float plane traffic to drop now and it was like,
nah, people are actually just using it and it's pretty cool.
All the creators already. Yeah. Okay.
Did you clarify that this is to the best of their ability and if things happen,
things happen. Yeah. Subject to change. There might be more,
some people might not be able to make it. Stuff like that.
There were almost certainly be more, but there may be less. You never know.
And it's no hard feelings. Life happens.
It could also be like super last minute, right? Yep. Like absolutely. Who knows?
Um, so yeah. But yeah, bandwidth is,
is high and server count is, is also high.
But then we also scale into like public cloud infrastructure.
So how do you count that? I don't know. Yeah. Things are moving on topic.
Should we talk about the changes to Twitter blue slash legacy verification? Sure.
I don't even know what they are. I was kind of Elan doubt for a long time there,
but this is a pretty big change. Uh, this is, this is like,
he's reached the end game now of destroying the platform. So where is this?
Um, Twitter legacy verification will be sun setting tomorrow. A note.
This does not appear to be an April fool's joke. Very amazingly timed though.
Corporations and organizations that are looking to retain their verified status
will have to pay a thousand dollars a month for their main account plus $50 a
month for any additional accounts. So that would be any users.
All the user accounts are 50 book corporations and organizations. Okay. Okay.
So a thousand dollars a month for the parent company and then like each YouTube
channel for us in, for example, would be 50 bucks.
I will not be paying that. Yeah.
In a reply to William Shatner,
Elon Musk said that the move to sunset legacy verification was about fairness.
In unrelated news,
Twitter's top 500 advertisers and its top 10,000 most followed accounts will be
exempt from the $1,000 a month fee.
Okay.
Are we completely done now?
Are we completely done pretending that any of this was about free speech,
anything or public square? Anything? What is this? Are we done?
I mean, yeah. Uh, what is this cool verification?
Do check this point, but more on April 15th,
Twitter's for you page will only contain tweets from accounts that the user
follows directly and accounts that are subscribed to Twitter blue.
So with the check Mark as promised by Musk,
Twitter recently made a portion of its code public,
including its recommendation algorithm.
The for you page currently contains an average of a 50 50 mix of accounts that
the user directly follows and those that they do not.
So you may also like that sort of thing.
It also contains a list of notable users called power users,
as well as the option to increase the visibility of these users at will from
the backend.
The algorithm also notes whether a tweet was created by a power user and what
their political affiliation is.
If they are a public figure or a political figure, excuse me,
there is a separate flag for if the author of the tweet is Elon Musk.
Okay. So as far as my understanding goes,
they open source the Twitter algorithm and I saw screenshots of this and I
literally thought it was a joke.
What? Okay. Yeah. So I, I saw this, it said Democrat, Republican,
power user and Elon Musk. Those were the four different like user flags.
I a hundred percent thought it was a joke. Really.
Musk States that he was not previously aware of the labels and that it doesn't
make sense to divide users on the basis of political allegiance.
A Twitter engineer has said that they were used purely for metrics.
In a memo to employees,
Musk claimed that Twitter is now worth $20 billion and that Twitter can be
thought of as an inverse startup, but that he sees a clear but difficult path
to a future valuation of more than 250 billion.
Our discussion question is,
is this a purposeful attempt to make the Twitter user experience more hostile?
I can't, I can kind of see it.
I can kind of see it because obviously he needs a way out of this thing.
Like this is awful and he needs to spend his time running space X and Tesla and
is he still spending like all his time, whatever it seems to be not zero.
And the correct amount of time for Elon Musk to spend managing Twitter is zero.
However, he has third party investors that helped him make this acquisition.
If he doesn't at least in good faith over some period of time that we would have
no way of knowing, um,
make some kind of arguably earnest effort to turn this thing around,
he's not only going to be on the hook for any kind of operating costs that he's
on the hook for now, but he could be on the hook for paying back those investors.
We have no idea what the terms of those deals were. Yeah.
So he must be, it seems maybe, I think again though,
maybe I'm attributing 4d chess moves to someone who,
um, I mean,
why did you buy this thing? Yeah. Um, uh, so,
so it could be that these legitimately are attempts to make the user experience
more hostile and worse so that over time hostile in this situation.
How is it exactly making the user experience hostile? Well,
it's hostile to anyone who's trying to grow on the platform.
I would make that argument if you can't get featured on the for you page.
I think that it makes a clear divide between the haves and the have nots. Yeah.
So will this, would this, I guess I have a lot of questions here.
Like would this still show, like if you, if, okay,
I won't put it on you. I'll put it on me. Say, uh, this is never gonna happen.
Say I was a paid subscriber to Twitter,
whatever paid verification thing so my stuff can show up in the verified page.
If I like your tweet and you're not,
would that interaction show up? No,
because for you is tweets. Oh, it's just tweets.
Not likes from people that you follow. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. What page shows that?
I think that's just the notification feed. I can't remember.
I I've hardly used it lately. I go on as little as possible.
I do. There's a few people like industry people that I DM on Twitter.
That's our main method of communication. So I open the app fairly often,
but I try not to linger. Um, yeah, I don't know.
This is weird that he mentioned previously about like
free speech absolutism for the town square, but no free,
what did he call it? No free, like lunch. No,
I don't know. Uh,
that we won't like broadcast your voice for free basically. Yeah.
So then it's not a town square. You can like whisper in the corner of the town.
Yeah. Which is exactly what he claimed was a problem before suppression of
particular. Yeah. Anyway, this is never going to be worth $250 billion. How,
like how, how that's one of my arguments that I've,
I believe I've been rather consistent about with Twitter is just like,
it's never going to make money. Well, I think he has to say this though. No,
I, I hear you. If he doesn't say this, then
yeah. But just like, how do you, how do you fall for that? And like,
maybe in, let's say 10 years from now,
someone brings this up and Twitter's worth a quarter billion dollars and I look
like an idiot, but like, what are you talking about? How, how
I don't get it. You bought a garbage fire and it's still a garbage fire.
I don't know. Um, I mean, that's the thing about a garbage fire though,
is eventually either eventually all the garbage and all the fire are gone.
It can't burn forever.
I feel like all the people like just continuing to use it no matter what is
adding the fuel. I, I'm,
I'm quite surprised at the amount of people that are still on the platform,
but I think for a lot of people it's like basically irreplaceable,
but they're not, it's irreplaceable,
but they are 100% not willing to pay for it,
which is a very interesting setup. Yeah.
They will not stop using it, but they also will not pay for it. Yeah.
It's the internet. Yeah. Ah, yeah. It's the internet.
Yeah. Like we, like we've, we've talked a lot about, about the,
could there be a paradigm shift between an ad supported internet and a paid
internet? And we've basically gone like, no,
it'll never happen because people are, they, they don't want ads,
but they accept them because they are utterly unwilling to pay for services.
I have not experienced this. I don't know. Broadly, obviously. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Of course someone in chat is screaming cause they're an example of the other
side, but it's not, it's not most people. Um,
I have not personally experienced this so I can't verify it's,
it's truth and images are mean literally nothing for verification these days,
but someone showed me a screenshot of apparently Bing chat,
inserting an ad into a conversation that they had with it.
They asked it about buying a certain product and they were like,
what about this one? It has a good affiliate program. Yeah.
This is exactly why I was saying I was very happy that like the,
the chat GPT thing or I was hoping that they went in the direction of a
subscription and then I'm very happy that they did. Uh, is because yeah,
like everything you have to find like other indirect ways of monetization
because no one's going to pay for stuff.
Crazy. Well,
I hated Twitter before and it sounds like it's going to be even less useful.
Yeah. Okay. I think in my opinion,
the biggest thing that gets hurt here is another point that he used to make,
which was about, which is about the proliferation of news
from like individuals because somewhat an individual will like witness
something and then they are the first point of truth for this news thing that's
going on. Um, that's now going to go nowhere.
Unless they subscribe to Twitter blue in the town square,
which I mean it almost doesn't matter how much it costs. It's in USD,
I'm assuming.
So there's going to be places in the world where it's just not feasible to
purchase for a huge percentage of people. I have no idea.
They may have regional pricing. I just, I sort of don't care at this point.
This is not going to work. This is,
this is going to disappear.
It's also not going to make them $250 billion.
I said a quarter billion dollars before quarter trillion dollars. Sorry.
Yeah. $250 billion is super de duper not happening.
Oh boy. Well, that's cool. Um,
E3 is canceled for 2023 and perhaps forever.
E3 has been canceled again this year.
It hasn't been held since 2021 and its organizers refuse to answer whether it
will return in 2024 either. Even prior to the pandemic,
many large gaming companies were holding their own separate events before or
after E3, starting with Nintendo in 2011,
leading to a slow drain on E3's industry cache.
The benefit of these separate events was that they allowed companies in
exclusive stage to present carefully choreographed content rather than sharing
the spotlight and potentially embarrassing themselves with an unscripted moment.
It likewise allowed many professionals in the industry to meet face to face and
for reviewers to get an early hands on preview with new hardware. Sony,
Nintendo and Microsoft had all officially declined attendance at the 2023 E3
well before the cancellation. Last month,
Ubisoft promised to attend E3 if it happened before canceling earlier this week.
Discussion question. How much of a loss is this? And what,
if anything will replace E3?
Have you been?
I never went. We as a company attended once, but I believe that was you.
Yeah. Was it once or was it more than once?
One time and I was asked if we should go again and I said, no.
This might be throwing some fire, but what a like useless show.
I don't want to be that guy. I'm sorry. But attending that show,
I love this type of stuff.
It's like literally one of my favorite things to do is go to shows.
We were not known in the gaming space at that time.
So we got to do nothing because all of the cool stuff is like behind doors or
it's in a gigantic conference room with tons of cameras anyways.
Cause it's like Xbox announcing something,
which people are just going to watch the stream anyways.
I love these types of shows, but functionally
it there's a reason why these companies are stepping out exactly like what you
just said. Nintendo directs get huge attendance and coverage.
People watch those religiously. Like they're, they're crazy about them.
The amount of people that are going to be able to walk through the Nintendo
booth at E3 is not that high.
And if Nintendo has something like really crazy to show off,
that's like borderline unannounced and like they have one prototype,
they're not going to put it on the floor.
They're going to put it behind closed doors anyways. So it's just like,
the future of these types of events are the games,
comms and paxes of the world because they're community events.
But the industry events here, I don't, I'm not surprised E3 didn't happen.
I will be extremely unsurprised if it happens again.
And I'm sure I just pissed a bunch of people off by saying the stuff I just
said. But like back when we went to it, I was already thinking like, wow,
I'm stunned this exists.
You see it happening to CES even.
And CES is more physical stuff than E3.
And people are still doing their own events or just not going and doing like web
announcements of their own things.
I've got some people talking about how it was good for developers, but yeah,
pretty weak for users.
Yeah, but that's, that's not then it's a different show at that point.
Yeah, that's fair.
Make it like E3 dev or something. Like Pax has a,
I don't remember exactly what it's called,
but Pax has like a mini developer conference that usually happens before the
main show of Pax starts. And that can make sense.
But it's this like E3 is set up as this huge public announcement stage
basically. And it's, it's not that good at that anymore.
So, but yeah, it could, it could absolutely be this like developer event.
Tons of those exist. Yes, of course it could do that,
but it's not set up that way. I think it is very TV era.
And we're, we're pretty out of that now. So yeah, I'm not surprised.
We should probably do some merch messages actually. Oh yeah, no,
we've still got, we've still got a couple topics. Oh wait,
we've got, holy crap. I knew I need to do this first.
My light switches. Oh boy. Have been a problem for me. Yep.
Even though I was clearly desperately
seeking a solution to my wifi troubles a little while ago when I misdiagnosed
that, you know,
they're not actually causing interference at least on my local network.
They don't work very well.
I went through and I was trying to add some more to my controller and they're
doing this weird thing where they two on the network will end up with the same
ID and then one will wipe out the other one.
And then I don't know which one it wiped out and then I have to go
exclude both of them and then try re-including them.
And maybe they'll grab a unique ID or maybe they won't. They're just,
they're not working very well to Jasco's credit.
They did make their firmware available,
but I'm still not happy with the product and the overall experience.
So
a more sort of community oriented company in a valley who we were very close to
using a product from when we were originally setting up the place,
but ultimately didn't because they didn't have a switch with motion or presence
detect.
We wanted to use motion as part of a presence detection system and they didn't
have anything that did motion detection or presence detection integrated into
the switch. Well, guess what?
Let me just go ahead and click on this.
Okay.
It is not currently live because I told them we were going to,
we were gonna go for it live on the show and
I think they were hoping to kind of punch it at the same time.
So I'll give them, I'll give them another few minutes.
I feel terrible that we took this long to get to this cause maybe they've like
gone to bed. I don't know what time zone they're even in. I feel,
I feel terrible. The second link does load a page. Yeah.
So I'll bring that up in a second. Anyway,
Eric and his team at Inovelli saw our struggle and decided to do something about
it by bringing the smart back into smart home. This is, this is from,
from them I think by creating the ultimate smart switch,
one that uses millimeter wave technology as a form of radar to sense the
presence of a person in the room, not just movement.
So you don't have to keep like waving your hand every few minutes to keep
yourself from sitting in the dark.
Today they are launching a crowdfunding campaign for what they are calling
internally.
And this was actually a source of tension between me and Inovelli because they
called it project Linus without talking to me about it. And I was like, Hey,
that's actually not that cool cause it really sounds like we're affiliated in
some way. We're still not affiliated, not an investor in Inovelli.
I have no skin in the game other than that. I just want a good switch.
And they are still calling it project Linus internally, apparently.
So they're launching a crowdfunding campaign.
They are hoping expecting to be able to meet their goal,
a minimum of 125,000 to cover the engineering fees and the minimum order order
quantity. But if not,
they will be refunding all backers and they are planning to launch,
I think during the show today, let me see if it's actually, it is live.
All right. So I'm going to post this in the chat,
really excited about this switch. It's, um, I've kind of,
I've kind of told them all the pain points that I have with my existing Jasco
switches, uh, flickering, um,
not really very broad control of dimming across a variety of different
lights, um, adoption problems, uh,
configuration limitations. Uh, the fact that they're just motion, like the,
the original plan was to use a combination of motion and other factors.
And we just, because we, the switches don't work at all.
We haven't gotten around to integrating motion with the cameras or integrating
motion with, um, some kind of IR presence detector, anything like that.
Uh, but this looks like assuming they get everything nailed down,
the solution to my problem, I hope,
and they've got a pretty good track record.
We don't promote kickstarters or Indiegogo's.
We didn't take any advertising fees or anything like that. Um,
so no money has changed hands. I just really want this to exist.
I really want this switch to exist. Um,
I just noticed it doesn't need a neutral wire. Um, that's,
that's pretty amazing. That means I could use it in my house.
I don't have neutral wires. Oh yeah.
Another thing that drives me crazy about my existing ones is that they have like
a main switch with the motion sensor and then they have a secondary switch that
doesn't have a motion sensor. It's just a regular rocker.
So in a large room, like in the rec room,
there's parts where there is a motion sensor and there's parts where there
isn't one. So my understanding is these shouldn't need that relationship.
I could have the millimeter wave sensor in both locations,
so it doesn't matter what part of the room you're hanging out in. Uh,
it's particularly problematic on stairs because where you have a three way
switch on a staircase, it only automatically activates on one end. Yeah.
She's just like, okay, guess I don't need to see. Yeah, I got,
I guess when I'm going down, it's like whatever. Um,
automated led bar notifications. Um,
I've been looking at that led bar thing. That's cool.
Upgradable to matter.
Pretty excite. Uh,
they're working with home assistant to make sure that it integrates with home
assistant. Ooh, smart bulb control.
Yeah. All right. So, so if this makes it, are you,
are you doing a full rack of these? Yeah, I hope so.
I mean it has to not be crap, but like I said,
they have a pretty good track record so far. So I'm pretty excited.
I hope hoping for the best. All right.
Well they've got their 1% of the way to their goal so far.
The page is having a hard time loading now. Oh, sorry. I guess we,
why do you think Indiegogo would hold it together? Yeah. What's up with that?
I don't really know. It could just be this laptop.
This laptop sometimes does have problems. Nope. It's a, it's me too.
It's you too. Yeah. Yeah. Hugged it. Okay. Well I didn't think you'd,
you'd hug Indiegogo,
but maybe a Kickstarter style stuff is not as in vogue these days.
Yeah. Maybe the, the server hamsters are tired. Yeah. Um,
got some backers going already. Okay. Uh,
I think we have one more small topic and then we're onto,
let's do some merge messages first. Okay. Yeah.
All right. Let's get set up here. Yeah, we've got a, we've got a few today. Um,
actually, hold on. First of all, Nick messaged me. I think I,
I think his intention is to, or his,
his leaning is for us to do affiliate stuff. Um,
and by extension of this argument,
we should not accept sponsorships from any brands that works with any influencer
that might not disclose their sponsorship that could basically remove all
brands. Um,
all we can really do is be the change we want to see in the world.
And if we say you have to disclose, you don't have to. Okay. Well look,
I mean people are like super mad and I'm like,
I don't think that's a good stance either. And yeah. Yeah.
Yeah.
Okay. You want some merchants? Yeah. Yeah. I do want merge messages. All right.
I think,
I think the thing that was maybe lost is that my argument was that you should
try. Sure. Oh,
I think the thing that you may be lost when I was trying to explain that the
reason we were talking to go like that to people and no, no, calm down. No.
When we were, when we were talking to people individually,
the reason we were doing that was because we did try. Okay. That was my,
that was my point. I was like, well, okay. Um,
yeah, we did try. They don't,
I got a lot of pushback on asking if they had some type of integrity checks or
anything.
I think both you and I are going to go back and watch that segment and be like,
this seriously, this happens. Yeah. Because I thought,
this is why I was telling them that I like don't want people necessarily on my
side. Okay. It's like,
I think there's more nuance to the entire discussion and we just got wrapped up
in like whatever and it's like actually probably not a big deal.
That's why I also wanted to move on. I thought I made that clear,
but I thinking back, I probably didn't. I also might've just missed it.
I don't know. Yeah, whatever. It's, it's really not that deep.
And like you guys should really not be like that worried about it.
I think one of my favorite things about LTT store is the level of integrity that
the store has.
And I have always enjoyed how we do stuff as a company.
It's not going to change because of this thing.
And all I want to make sure is that we're doing due diligence as much as we
could. And if we're like, we're pretty sure these guys are cool.
That's often as far as you can go.
It sounded like you had a very unrealistic expectation for what I could do,
which is why I sort of took it too far. And I kind of went, well, what should we,
should we check every site on the internet to see how people are using the link?
Like, cause obviously you can't do that.
I also strongly enjoy, we're coming back, we're, we're making it happen.
That's why I enjoy like when we dropped like anchor, for example,
well if we do detect, that's also when I was trying to talk about like, well,
of course if we do detect stuff,
we have a very extensive track record running the entire length of the company
of being willing to drop.
And then maybe if they shift things and they change whatever.
That was intentional, wasn't it?
What? Drop?
Our extensive track record of dropping things?
Oh, it actually wasn't, but I, I enjoy that. That should have been,
I should have just claimed it. But no, I wasn't trying to dig you.
And then maybe being willing to work with them again if they,
if they change or improve or whatever. But like, I, yeah,
I don't like the idea that we just like, oh,
this is just a weird space to shotgun everything.
Well, we're not going to do that.
I will say a hundred percent that we will require all the legal disclosures that
we require of ourselves when working with partners.
All I'm saying is we should do everything we can to try to ensure that if we're
working with aggregates, they're the best ones we can. Okay.
If we're working with whatever sites, they're the best ones we can. Sure.
And we're transparent about what we're doing.
And then I think we're in the clear, but like it has to, and this,
I probably did a bad job of communicating that. I don't know.
I don't know what's going on, whatever.
But like if we're transparent about what we're doing,
then the audience can also be somewhat of a watchdog for us.
It sounded like what you were saying was we should just, if the space is ugly,
then we should not participate at all. We should just leave status quo.
Maybe, but it depends how ugly it is.
And I was sitting there going, well, the status quo isn't good.
If we come in and we say, okay, well, anytime you engage with us,
you need proper disclosures, net net. We are a positive space.
We are a positive influence.
I think I still think it like, like it depends on how muddy the space is.
Well, I'll tell you this.
We're not going to pay anyone a flat fee without disclosure and our
affiliate program. I think really the safest thing would be for it to be open,
for it to be a hammer.
Yeah. And honestly in, I do agree with that because like
at a certain point, like you were trying the argument you were trying to make
about the, I don't remember what it was.
We can't sell hammers because people might use them to hit people or whatever.
Yeah. We got really off the rails.
At a certain point, you can't control everything.
But if you're doing that open affiliate thingamajig,
if there's maybe some way, I don't know.
If you detect someone using it in a stupid way,
you can try to get them to stop. But like,
it just is what it is.
Hopefully buddy on float plane is ready for us to come after them.
Was that a float plane chat where they were saying, yeah,
I run a bunch of those sites and they're super effective. Yeah. Yeah.
We're coming for you. Yeah. We're coming for you. Yeah. I don't know. It's,
it's really not, it's really not that deep.
I don't think audience people should be that concerned about it.
It's very normal. I just don't, I'm not,
I think you and I both don't really like marketing. Yes.
Yeah.
So there's a lot of concerns, but there's a lot of concerns with everything.
And you have to, I was talking to a, a YouTube creator about this recently.
You have to make the bag. You have to. And like, as much as that's like,
when I was growing up, I was very,
Make the backpack, not like get that bag.
No, I mean get that bag. Oh, you have to make money.
Oh, Oh, okay. Well, okay. Like get that bag has sort of,
does it a semi-negative connotation of like YOLO take the,
get the bag. Like I, I'm not, I'm not one of the cool kids.
You have to make money and
you should try to do it with integrity of course,
but you do have to make money and going with the stance.
Like when we first started working together,
I was very against like any advertisements ever. It's not,
it feels like we're checking out our forum. Yeah. Yeah.
Which doesn't make money by the way.
And I still believe in that stuff to a certain degree at this point we can,
and back then it hurt us a little bit,
but I appreciated your approach on it because we only worked with people that we
thought we could verify.
And then we got to a certain size where it's like we have some weight to throw
around so we can increase the amount of companies that we can work with.
But then if they start doing things in bad ways, we can drop them.
And we have a diverse income portfolio and we'll be okay. Yeah.
And we'll be moving forward. We can lose any one partner, probably any 10.
And that's the other thing I said, you should diversify your stuff a bunch,
but you should try to make money because especially as a creator,
you're going to have lows and you're going to have highs,
but you can have lows and you need to survive through that low until it comes
back. We've had lows. Yeah. So like you have to make money.
You have to do these marketing things even if they're uncomfortable or weird or
whatever. You have to do some amount of it. Yes and no.
Cause like that's another thing too is I haven't even talked about some of the
conversations we've had around like forget.
So there's different kinds of marketing.
I'm only like just learning about it. Cause I kind of, I kind of hate it.
Like we,
it's funny because I've made a career out of like companies spending their
marketing budgets on me.
And you technically used to do some amount of marketing cause I wasn't very good
at it. Right. I was more of a product manager than, yeah,
I wasn't in the marketing department. Right. I was,
I was sales and I've always believed the best way to sell is to educate because
that way the customer who is uneducated will buy one thing.
The customer who is educated will buy more because they will trust you.
And so it's, it's mutually beneficial.
We both win when we create a more educated buying environment.
It has always been my philosophy and marketing is kind of like the opposite of
that. Marketing is truth be damned. Uh,
we need people to buy our shit.
It's always the way I've kind of felt about it.
And so I'm just kind of learning about it now and it's,
there's like these different like branches of, of, of marketing,
like outreach marketing and retention marketing and this kind of marketing and
that kind of marketing. Like, yeah, I, I can see now,
there's going to be a lot of internal debate about what we use and how we use it
because the argument is always going to be, it's effective. Yeah.
And the counterpoint, like you said, I mean,
I don't mind you pushing back on it. We have to be realistic,
but we also have to have these conversations because the counterpoint is always
going to be, you know, but what about, how do we, how do we differentiate?
We can't just look at what everyone else is doing and what's working.
We have to also think about who we are.
And like we'll be okay if we don't.
Oh, we'll survive.
So sure.
But you can't take that approach with everything.
Cause like I was just saying about what I was talking to that other creator
about, like you have to,
you have to make money or else you're just going to have to quit.
Yeah. Or else you're not going to be making any difference to anything.
Yeah. So like shades of gray, baby. There was,
there was a conversation that we had years ago. Um,
where I was, I was impressed with something that someone did.
And I said that I was,
I was more impressed because they found a way to do this thing that I agreed
with in a way that was profitable. Right.
And people were unhappy that I pointed that out,
but I'm still standing by that because they are now able to still do that
thing to this day and eat and employ other people and push it to a degree that
there is no possible way they would have been able to get to if they didn't
monetize it. And like, this is a, always find a way.
I will do it. Um, this is another argument that opening,
I made recently got them, boom, brought it all the way around. Um,
where that would, and I don't know if this is legit and whatever,
but they were talking about how they would never have been able to scale the way
that they wanted to,
if they didn't take that outside investment because the money that they needed
to keep driving forward was just not good enough when they were staying,
uh, completely nonprofit. That's a tough one, man.
I really don't know what to do. Like I can tell you now,
it's not today and it's not tomorrow, but I can see a wall where you can't.
Yeah. Because I mean, we've talked about this, it's already,
it's not that bad right now. Yeah.
But it could get worse transporting between these two buildings. Yeah.
It's a pain in the butt is rough. I recognize that. I mean,
I have people complain about it internally and I'm kind of sitting here going,
okay, well, what do we do? Yeah, well, what do we do? Because we can,
we can lease and we can be at the mercy of a landlord who in five years,
which we have to, we have to think longterm like that in five years might mean
we have to move just like pick up and move,
which is brutal or you have to build all these sets and stuff. Even worse. Uh,
we might not be able to find anything. So our base might move 10,
20, 45 minutes. I don't know. I don't know where we're going to be.
And now you need like a campus sized place. Um,
or, or,
or we buy something which is not an option anymore without outside investment.
Um, like there's, there's just, there's,
there's no way with the way that you go up in the scale that you would need to go
up without that money. It's just impossible.
So like there's,
there's inflection points and at those inflection points you have to do the best
you can. And I think where I'm trying to figure out where we got lost in the
trees, I know I got lost in the trees.
I'm trying to figure out where that was a point that I was trying to make was
that if you are 100% certain that a certain entity is bad,
you shouldn't work with them. I mean, well, yeah,
that's the point I was trying to make. Okay. Uh,
but like there's also degrees of bad. Yeah.
And you might be okay with mildly bad.
Someone else might not be okay with mildly bad and there might be like, okay,
there's a mild amount of bad,
but the amount of good that it also brings can supersede that.
Or the amount of gain that we get from this mild bad is so high that we can use
that gain to create significantly more good. That's a dangerous one.
It's all dangerous. Yeah. It's not particularly dangerous.
It's all kind of rough. It's all kind of rough.
We're going to build a good product. Yeah.
That's what I can say for sure. Something that lasts,
something that we can stand behind. It's going to be okay. Everyone can relax.
That's the goal. Uh,
KG four WWN on float plane says I dare you to try to sell your stuff on QVC.
What is that? QVC? It's like the shopping. Is that the TV thing? Yeah. Yeah.
Yeah. Um, also Sydney broke. It says I have a marketing degree. Uh,
this isn't all that marketing entails.
Marketing can include pre development conversations.
Like how do we make a product that fits the market? Uh, yes. Okay.
But that's not the connotation of marketing. That's,
that's market research, which, which, yeah, yeah, 100%.
Like I'm not going to argue with you. You're right.
That's your program that you did. Uh, but when,
when normies like us say marketing,
we mean post development. Yeah. Um,
assisting sales. It's like, like indirect sales essentially. I mean,
they're both marketing and sales go hand in hand.
All right, Dan, hit us. All right. First one. Here's from John.
Linus, you said that physical keyboards on phones suck.
If you were recent experience with a landscape oriented keyboard,
like you showed, then how can it be representative of portrait ones?
I E blackberry. Um, I mean,
I checked out a blackberry not that long ago and it sucked.
Try to input a special character or an emoji like so much of how we
communicate through text has changed since physical keyboards were the
norm because of the options that we have with
touchscreen keyboards. Um,
so when you go back now that you are used to having every character in the
alphabet and every special character at your fingertips, you kind of go,
how do I even use this? Also,
where is all that screen real estate when I don't need the keyboard?
That's the big one.
The amount that you hamper your device through that keyboard is pretty crazy.
Well, the one I talked about recently was one that was like a slide.
So theoretically it didn't hamper anything. It's also super thick,
but it's also thick. And if I was going to have a super thick phone,
give me even more screen. Let's go.
That's a good point. I, yeah, I don't know.
I really like physical keys on things,
but phones are kind of, uh,
like an almost a weird exception to that in my opinion. Um, like if you're,
if you're ever using a device like out in the wild,
like if you're trying to interface with like a ticketing system or
whatever else, not having physical keys can be really annoying.
I also find a lot of like clicker style devices.
If they don't have physical keys, they just suck. Oh yeah. Like across the board.
I mean, unless they had like apple 3d touch level haptics or something like that,
but they don't.
Yeah, exactly. Yeah. But,
but the phone's keyboard is actually pretty good and they have done things to
try to bridge that gap. Like you were talking about, um, where like it'll,
it'll,
it'll almost feel like you're actually pressing a key cause of how it'll like
vibrate and whatever else. Um, so yeah, I don't know.
I just do the swipe texting. Just wiggle your finger around. You're done. Yeah.
I'm, I'm convinced that that's probably faster,
but I'm also convinced that I'm probably never going to do it.
I am never going to swipe. Yeah.
I am actually not convinced that it's faster. No, I've seen some people do it.
It looks really fast, but the second I try to do it, I was like, well,
I can pretty sure I can slap her on this keyboard a lot faster. Yeah. And um,
like I, I, I use like my,
my prediction has been trained on my phone for years and years and years and
years now.
So the amount of stuff that it will auto and maybe part of my problem is that I
input a lot of acronyms and stuff. A lot of what I talk about is tech.
So it's, it's things that you've like kind of added to the library or whatever.
It's things that would take forever to input manually. Um,
so even though I'm a fast typist on my phone,
I still end up using autocomplete for a lot of the terms that I ended up
talking about because, um,
it's just faster when you have to capitalize a bunch of crap or,
um, when it's not a real word or whatever the case may be.
So using swipe while also selecting predicted input words is not something that
I think I would be very good at. It's also just a learning curve.
Like, okay, what?
So I'll be 4% faster after being 20% slower for six months or something like
that. It's like, yeah, is this really worth the investment?
Like I've seen a lot of people argue, okay, yeah, if you,
if you're serious about input, you should use Dvorak like,
yeah, that's nice.
But with QWERTY I'm anywhere in the range of 110 to 130 words per minute.
I can literally transcribe an entire meeting with someone while conducting the
meeting without thinking about it at all.
That has a value to me. Like, you know,
you ask how I do something like the micron factory tour. That's how I transcribe
because it's, it's more than like, I could just record it, right?
But then I have to go back and read it by transcribing it.
The act of creating that transcription tells me where all of those things are in
the document.
It allows me to format it the way that I want instead of just relying on some
stupid app to hopefully know who was talking to who and which words mattered and
which ones didn't. Yeah, sure. Dvorak, great. It sounds great.
I like, I like efficiency,
but it is more efficient for me to keep my brain completely free of thinking
about how to type and focused on a conversation or like a meeting that I'm
sitting in.
My, my thing with Dvorak, I've always been very interested in it,
but I just use other people's computers sometimes and I don't want to go up to
the keyboard and just be like, uh, I'm like tripping over my own fingers.
I want to be able to use it properly.
Yeah. Next one.
Sure. Uh, next one here's from Gregory. Dear Luke slash Linus,
you get a call at 2am.
It is Linus slash Luke and they have been arrested before they say anything.
What is your first thought as to why?
She was naked. Public indecency.
That's it. You think that's it?
Yeah. I mean, what else? I mean, what are your vices? Like it would have,
it would have had to be nudity.
Like I don't know why you were showing off. I don't know who dared you,
but you were in the wrong place at the wrong time. Oh my goodness. Wow.
Um, hmm. No, I don't think he's like coked out.
I just, I just think that it was a, well that's where Twitch chat went with it.
Both of these are very common of occurrences. I take it.
I just, I just think, I think, I think Luke's just like cool with being nude.
I don't think it's a big deal to him. And I think that, you know,
some prude cop season being all nude somewhere where he shouldn't be in it.
I guess, I guess Jayden, come on.
Jayden's like, he literally does this all the time at the most Luke thing.
Come on. Uh, I,
I guess like peeing out in nature is a form of
public indecency. It sure is. Yeah. So, I mean, it could happen. Yeah.
I've done that for sure. Sure. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Um,
assault. What? Have you ever seen me hit anyone?
Anything? No, but I could see a reality where,
uh, oh, I see where you're going.
I don't know how far down that conversation. I don't think we're going to do that.
Okay. Moving on. It's got very real.
I love leaving that vague. That's amazing. We can give some like hints,
but I love leaving it vague.
That's
amazing. Yeah. Let's move on. Next one. All right, Ian, happy Friday.
What, uh, what tech related job do you think will take the longest for AI to
take over? Well, this one's just for Luke. Oh dude.
It is not. Oh, also get owned the longest for AI to take over.
I was going to say developing AIs, but that's not even true.
They're like already working on each other and stuff. Yep.
It's really tough. I think if you knew the answer to this,
you would probably find some way to get extremely rich over the next little bit
because that is a question that like everyone is trying to figure out right now.
Um,
how about like the business engagement side of tech?
So, so the,
the actual like schmoozing that takes place where companies work on integrating
each other's tech and making deals.
I think that while you and I might go, well,
they could easily take over that by just writing emails.
It's already integrated into office and it's integrated into Gmail or whatever.
I think you and I both know that even though it's not really our thing,
a lot of business is done over drinks, over shared experiences.
Um, whereas you and I issue all forms of social contacts. Um,
so we don't really get it, but there's a lot of,
there's a lot of times that I've encountered people in my career where I would
send an email, um,
and get ghosted or get blown off and then I would run into them at a party at
CES or something, say literally exactly the same thing.
Then bridge that connection and all of a sudden they're down to do a deal
because we hung out or something and I'm kind of like, that's stupid.
Um, but I don't, I can't change that. I, I have to play the game,
right?
I think it will be,
my, my jump is like infrastructure maintenance
because,
so like the actual hardware maintenance or, okay,
my job's safe because you could for now, for now, uh, cause you can,
you can like automate a lot of that with robots and you can do whatever.
But what if that's the problem?
What if the like networking that connects everything goes down for whatever
reason? Sure. Yeah. All right. Yeah. I don't know.
I think those were both valid answers and we should not be angry with each other
anymore tonight.
They don't like it when mom and dad fight.
Well that's why I was trying to tell everyone to like, just don't,
you guys still love each other. There's no, there's not my fault.
Did I do a bad job producing? I'm sorry. It's Dan's fault. It's Dan's fault.
He's the wedge that came between us.
One thing that we agree on is that it's your fault.
Okay.
Next up is from Casey Linus and Luke.
What's something you've always wanted to talk about on stream,
but no one has ever asked.
What has no one ever asked me a lot of hard questions.
People ask me some weird stuff.
Yeah. Like what have you never been asked about on stream?
Yeah. And I mean like maybe not technically stream,
but so much of my life has been lived in front of the camera.
Like a lot of topics, you know what?
I think this would have been a lot easier if we had never done the roast.
A lot of things were talked about,
about me in public.
That was a pretty transparent. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I mean,
if you read between the lines correctly,
especially with the people who know me best,
pretty much all my dirty laundry's out there, baby.
Yeah. Like I,
I feel like this and the degree to which you have been on camera more is
absurd. So like, yeah, I don't think there's much.
And it's like, this is what we've wanted to talk about.
And like the problem with that is like the no one's ever asked,
like we don't just talk about what people ask.
Yeah. No one's ever asked. I mean,
I don't really have a life. Um, no really though. What do I,
what do I do? I mean, let's, let's, let's go through my week. Right. So,
you know, one day a week I, I, I technically I'm off Mondays.
So on Mondays, um,
I usually attend the all hands Monday morning meeting after which
I will usually sit down and like look at a couple of emails and stuff or
whatever. Cause I'm already at my computer anyway.
After which I have our writers meeting, which is about two hours.
He's off on Mondays.
That's why I looked weird when he said I'm off on Monday. So I'm like, yeah,
sure.
After which people usually have a couple of things to follow up with me from the
meetings after which, um, I have an activity with my kids.
So I do manage to do that. And then I eat when I'm done that I eat dinner.
So like, yeah, we were at the end of the day basically when he said that.
So work and kids. All right.
So then let's pick another day of the week. Um,
I go to work and then I go home and I eat and then I go to badminton or I do
things with my kids. And you talk about badminton on the show. Yeah.
So I talk about my kids. I talk about badminton. I talk about work.
That is my entire life. Um,
and then like there's my S O right. We go to work together.
We play badminton together. We raise our kids together. It's like, what?
Do you want me to talk about the one thing we do that isn't that
it's part of that, but people have definitely asked. So it doesn't,
it doesn't qualify. Yeah. Fair enough. Yeah. Also fair.
Uh, and for me, all the other things that I do,
I often find some way to work into the show.
If I actually feel like talking about it,
like I've talked about the workouts and weight loss stuff that I've been doing
and yada, yada, yada. So like, I don't know.
I don't think there's much to be honest.
There's a bunch of stuff that I have no interest in talking about and have not
talked about. Yeah, that's fine. Yeah. So I don't know.
Well, this makes me feel a lot better about myself. Cool.
Cause you have a life. No. Cause I'm on the same page as both of you. Okay.
I thought you were just slamming us. No, I would.
That was the intention to make you think that. Um, okay. Next up,
new to the channel.
And I got to say your company is the coolest nerds I know. Nice.
I have no clue about computer technology, but because of LTT,
I have learned so much question.
What's your favorite thing about Luke and Dan? Oh, is this to me?
I think so. My favorite thing.
Did you really curate a question asking my favorite thing about you?
Apparently, apparently.
I love your dry wit and your uncanny, uh,
willingness to do whatever the you damn well, please there.
Yeah. Get owned. It's addressed to all of us.
So I think Dan has to also say what his favorite thing about Luke and Dan. Yeah.
I don't even want to know mine. Just, just what's your favorite thing about you?
I don't know. I've never been, I've never had to think about this before.
Wow. This is getting like deep talk now. What's your favorite thing about yourself?
Yeah. Yeah. You can find something.
I believe my ability to be interested in anything. That's cool.
That's a good one. That's lame, but whatever. Awesome. Good. Okay. So hold on.
I got to do Luke now. Um, I was hoping we were going to dodge this bullet.
My, yeah, I saw how you tried to redirect that, but I was right there with you.
I think my favorite thing about Luke is how we
either mind meld
or
completely disagree. We're fusion division.
We still manage to make it work. Yeah. That's what,
that's what gives us the dynamic that you guys like so much.
I think is we'll go, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yes. No.
I mean, we saw it, we saw it today, right? Like it's, um, I, my, my,
the people I tend to be most successful surrounding myself with are the ones
that, um, generally are aligned with me,
but when we're not aligned, make me better. And so that's, if,
if I was going to give you, if I was going to give you a one line,
how to pick an S O, um, your BFF,
you know, a business partner, someone that you're in it with for the long haul,
that's gotta be it.
I had a, I had a,
I had a conversation with someone recently about how they, they work with their,
with their partner and, but it's not, it's not their workplace.
They don't own it. They're just both work.
They're both employees at the same place. That's scary. And one of them, uh,
this is the, this is a, a male female relationship. Yeah.
I'm talking to the male in this relationship.
The male in this relationship is in a leadership role,
higher.
They don't directly report to each other though. No. Okay. But,
but the org chart, if you're in a meeting,
that this person is above and would,
would be placed in a situation at times where like,
if that person is super derailed or off topic or talking about whatever,
they have to get them back on board.
Complicated. And I, I, I brought up, I was like,
you know,
I feel like you should try to dodge it in every which way you can.
And Linus and I are not in a romantic relationship,
but I have never found a situation where I've been in this type of role where
I've been able to be like really good bros with someone and it's worked before,
especially with someone else who will also enthusiastically defend their
position. Cause I do that. And when two people do that,
it's not super common that you can avoid bad conflict.
Good conflict is okay. Yeah.
I feel like we've done a pretty good job of that. Yeah. And that's cool,
but it helps that we're mostly aligned. Yes.
So we don't have to have conversations like, well,
how are we going to run a forum without, uh, you know,
sound high volume sound ads all over on the screen,
how to dodge your mouse and that type of stuff. Um, so we don't, we don't,
we have maybe, okay, maybe, maybe instead of just alignment,
maybe I should have said similar principles would have been a good way to kind
of phrase that. But it's, it's,
it's definitely, it takes tending.
I mean, you guys got to witness it today. Yeah. Yeah. Cause you have to,
you can't go to bed angry, right? Like it's, you got to resolve it at some point.
It's tough. And sometimes the resolution is, you know what,
you're a lot more passionate about this than I am. Um,
I guess we're going to need to back down or I'll need to back down.
And sometimes the resolution is, um,
I actually just really do need you to understand my point here.
You need to shut the up for a second. And sometimes it's in between,
right? Yeah. But you got to figure it out. I mean,
Yvonne and I have had some, some really tough conversations. I mean,
especially man,
the stakes of everything are so low once you're
raising kids together, everything else is just like,
it's like, what's work. It's like, what money? Yeah. Like, yeah, yeah.
Money matters. Especially when you've got a hundred plus mouths to feed.
If we don't make money, what's Dan going to eat?
Right. So the stakes are, are, are really high, but with a child,
the stakes are exponentially higher. It's their future.
It's the future of everyone they ever interact with. If you, if you,
if you're willing to sort of put that burden on yourself, right.
It's the future of, it's the future of their spouse, their, their kids,
their kids kits, right? Like it's their life success. Yeah.
And their life success as, as,
as small or as great as it might be, could impact the world, right?
Like there's the stakes are so high. Um,
and so it's just like when we're making decisions about how to parent,
those are way more intense conversations than how are we going to organize this
department for best efficiency? Here's my idea. Here's your idea. We disagree.
You know what? Who the cares? Let's try yours. And if it doesn't work,
we'll try the other one because like, whatever.
Yeah. You know, at the end of the day, it's all solvable, right? It's all,
what we make a little more money or make a little less money.
Observe performance, potentially pivot. Yeah. Whereas like with kids,
will you get one shot? Yeah.
And there's certain actions that you can do that might not seem like that big of
a deal, but even if done once, we'll like never be forgotten and yada, yada,
yada. You can traumatize a living being.
And there's no like if that person deeply disagrees with your action,
they so much resentment can blossom out of that scene and you're,
you're always their dad. She's always their mom. So like,
they can't just like quit and go to another company and not care.
It takes her real high stakes are real. There's a, there's a form of that,
obviously, but there's like, yeah, that emancipation or whatever it's. Yeah.
Like there's, there's things that you can do, but there's some amount of patient.
I don't know. Emancipation is where you're like unhealthy. I think you just run away.
And I think emancipation. Yeah. But like that's not easy. And that's, yeah.
Potentially emotionally damaging and all that stuff. Like it's just very,
and it could be worse than it was, you know? Yeah. Yep. Yep. Yep.
Mystical and full of plain chat. My kids are basically loving and very feral.
How do I fix? Um, well,
usually when I want to fix a feral creature, I go to the vet. Oh, sorry.
We can move on. Speaking of ways to affect their lives.
Next. Okay. Uh,
do you think that the size of LTT is damaging to smaller tech channels?
Some smaller tech channels have expressed in the past that they aren't doing
very well and that it's hard to compete with LTT.
Sorry.
I think I would have to wager with how algorithmic stuff works.
Hey, wait, hold on a second though. We got to back up for a second.
Luke dodged answering about himself. What? I don't think so. Thank you chat.
You didn't say your favorite thing about you. Oh boy. Thanks chat.
It's hard, isn't it?
Well, I'm going to switch over to Luke cam here. Why? I don't know.
And you thought this was a bad question. I don't know.
I feel like all the things that I like about myself have very intense
downsides.
I like that I go hard, but then I take a long time to recover. Yeah. Yeah.
Like actually though, like they all have super big,
I think that I'm really loyal,
but sometimes I do things that are kind of dumb and not in my own best
interest. Yeah. I mean, if it, if it helps at all, Luke,
the answer that I gave is also incredibly damaging every single day.
Uh, I think it's probably the second one Linus mentioned.
Uh, I, I like that I stick with people and ideas, but
that can also suck a lot.
Like I going back, going way back,
you should not have stuck with the NCIX tech tips paradigm.
That was actually stupid. Yeah. Like you had so much potential.
I can see why your parents were mad. Oh yeah. You had all this potential,
like super bright future and you were wasting your time falling asleep behind
the camera at some tech store with this like guy who's not even very senior at
the company or anything. Just like, what are you even,
what are you even doing son?
I had job offers that were twice as much as the starting wage, um,
at this company, let alone one in six. Um,
but that was, yeah, that was, I don't know, but I like that and look,
I'm happy with how that resulted. So like, I don't know.
So he learned nothing and do it again. Yeah.
Okay. That line right there is also a big part of me,
which sometimes is great and other times it's terrible. I don't know.
All a lot of,
I have you ever done those like personality test things?
I probably at some point, not recently.
I rank like 99th or zeroth percentile in everything.
No half meshes.
It's like
I've even had other people take the test as if they were me. Yeah.
Because I'm like, am I just like skewing this or whatever? And they're like,
whoa, it ended up on like the far reaches of every category.
And I'm like, cool. I don't know how comfortable I am with this.
Yeah. So I don't know. There's the, I don't, I don't,
there's things I think of positively about myself,
but all of those things have downsides and I'm just,
I'm okay with it at this point. It's fine. I'm over it. Yeah. All right. Sorry.
Can you read that question again?
Some smaller tech channels have expressed in the past that they aren't doing
very well due to the size of LTT and it's hard to compete.
Do you think that's damaging to them?
Well, what do you want?
Do you want me to like not make the best content we can make?
What is it about our size that's problematic? I guess would be my question.
Because if anything,
our size has felt like a that we have legit,
we have legitimized a lot of the forms of monetization that smaller creators
take for granted that didn't exist or that were a source of huge audience blow
back back when we first started doing ground on ad spots. We, we,
we have legitimized advertising in the tech YouTuber space. You're welcome.
And I don't just mean this as like,
look how out of touch and arrogant Linus is, but no, for real, like we,
we shifted advertising budgets from written media and forums and like
traditional legacy magazines from many of the brand partners that these smaller
tech creators are working with today.
We fought through that,
getting it reallocated to YouTube and everyone now gets to enjoy the fruit of
that. We weren't the only ones, not even a little bit,
but we were very much the tip of the spear.
I'm not going to apologize for any of that because a lot of that,
that that rising tides thing that Luke was talking about,
a lot of that ecosystem simply doesn't exist if or would have taken longer or
wouldn't be as mature if we hadn't taken the, the,
been brutalized by the audience for a lot of the things that we've done that are
now just accepted as common practice. Because no,
I don't think they were bad. I think they were fine.
I think people just weren't used to it. So
I'm not gonna, yeah, I'm not gonna apologize for,
for, you know, killing it over the years.
I think that in some ways it's easier than ever to break out on YouTube to be
discovered. In some ways it's harder.
I've talked about how I think it's harder to become a mega size channel.
And Mr. Who's the boss is the only evidence I've seen in recent years that you
can even still do it at all, but absolutely did it.
But I would also like to point out that we've become a very big ship and we've
become kind of difficult to steer.
And that's one of the things that we're trying to address is because it can be a
competitive disadvantage for us to be a jack of all trades,
master of none sometimes.
And when something breaking happens,
who's the first one on top of it? Is it the, the,
the one person band creators that are like,
I see this now and I am going to pick up my phone and go now.
Are they the ones who are able to jump on top of highly topical,
trends or is it us where we have to go and have a meeting about our production
schedule and our release schedule and the availability of our shooting team?
Or to be topical for this show,
the ethics of potentially covering that topic. We also try to,
we are large company with people that have scheduled hours.
So like people don't work weekends. What if something happens on a weekend?
We simply cannot.
What if something happens deal with it on a late night on a wan show,
we might get less coverage of that thing than other people because those people
make reaction content to it.
And then we don't make anything about it until Monday because people are off on
the weekends. It's a, yeah, I don't know.
Sir Benny on Twitch says, I believe the excuse,
using the excuse of look at the advantage of the competition instead of
thinking, what could I improve? Isn't exactly productive.
What are we supposed to improve? Well, no, no, I, I think this is, uh,
from the other side. Okay. Yeah. Uh, like, yes, we have an advantage,
but are you going to say we didn't fight for it?
I mean, of course we did and I'm,
we got a little lucky. Right place, right time for sure. Yep.
But we also fought tooth and nail for every part of it.
So I'm never gonna,
I'm never gonna apologize for succeeding.
Um, I'm never going to,
I'm never gonna try to do anything other than my best.
I would also argue that we absolutely feel the ups and downs of the platform as
well. And I think this is specifically targeting,
it says in here smaller channels. Uh,
so it's possible that there's, there's a line right of like,
this is the line of acceptable dip.
Like if we dip below a certain line and stay down there, we can't survive.
Yep. Everybody's going to have that. If you're at a smaller channel,
that line might be a lot higher because
you're, you're like average, it's just, it's more difficult to survive.
And when those dips happen,
they might feel a lot more intense because that line is higher and that sucks.
But like, but we've also, we've also taken a lot of risks along the way.
We've increased the, the,
the minimum threshold by hiring so many people by aggressively reinvesting in
content to the point where, um, you know, again, I'm not gonna,
I'm not gonna apologize for it. We,
we have to go hard because if we don't go hard, we die.
And that dip is as dangerous to us as it is to you as an organization.
Maybe not as dangerous to me personally,
because I I've been doing this for a really long time.
Like I've, you know, got the house and the car, you know, like, all right,
cool. Barbecue.
But there's a lot of other people here that still got a,
still got to get some. And so we're not going to take our foot off the pedal.
Like everyone inside this company is a smaller creator.
So what I should prioritize an external smaller creator over an internal smaller
creator.
One of my problems too is like, how would you even do that? I don't know.
Yeah. I mean here, Luke was talking about dips.
I don't know how well you guys can see this from there. Not too well.
You know what? Here, let's, um, let's switch to Linus cam. Cool.
So, you know,
this is our view chart over the entire lifetime of the channel, right?
And so you can see here, hockey stick moment.
That was when I started focusing on content after we hired Nick as our like
business guy. Um, and then it goes up and then it goes down.
That period of like four months there that like significant dip where we went
from anywhere in the neighborhood of around three and a half to four million
views a day down to a low of one and a half.
No. Oh, just over one. Um,
I think that was over a span of about four months. Yeah,
it was about three months. Terrifying. I thought that was it.
I thought that was us succumbing to the curve was what I call the,
the rise and fall of every online creator. Um,
then we had a long period,
about a year of constant digging ourselves out of that.
I still remember the all hands meeting that we had about that where I basically
went, but I think,
was that the one where I talked about just like being more authoritative and
like, um, for being more focused and something, something. Anyway,
we, we called them all hands meeting and basically talked about how we need to,
we need to do something we have to change and we need to start changing things
immediately. Like for today's upload, we need to start changing things. Um,
I think that was, um, we, we felt,
I can't remember cause here's the thing.
I can't remember this meeting because we've gone through this.
Here's a big dip. Then we recovered.
Then we had another two months small dip where we went from like 4 million views
a day down to like two in a little bit.
Then we came back hard.
Then we went from like 4 million views a day down to like two again.
And then now we're on an upswing that's got us now in the neighborhood of around
like three and a half million views a day. Um, and you gotta like, yeah,
views aren't everything,
but they also kind of are because everything else is derived from how many views
you can ultimately attract. Um, it's,
yeah, it's, it's hard for everyone. It's not easy.
And YouTube is constantly changing the rules. I mean,
I express frustration as well. I'll send, I'll send emails to our rep saying like,
Hey, we're really for sure not doing anything differently,
but we're seeing very different results. What are you guys doing over there? Um,
and it goes both ways. Like I sent one a few months back that I was like, Hey,
everything's coming real easy right now. What's going on?
This distresses me as much as a dip because I don't like unpredictability in the
delivery of our content.
Yeah.
So I don't know. Maybe, I don't know. I,
I feel like this is one of those responses that's going to turn into some kind
of controversy because I just, I'm,
I'm uncaring or like I'm some kind of jerk or something,
but I don't know what to tell you. I mean, we've,
we've collaborated with smaller creators many times.
We're not trying to make it a negative space for anyone. Yeah. We,
we're very open about the way that we run our business. Um, and,
and I think that's a benefit to creators, small and large.
You know, when we talk about things like how our revenue is broken down,
if someone sees that and goes, Holy smokes,
like I am doing basically none of this and it's 20% of their revenue. I need to,
I could chase that. Um, that's something,
that's the kind of stuff we don't have to talk about, but we do.
Yeah. Next up. Okay. Um,
I actually have an interjection here from Nick light who wanted to remind you
that the gone fishing t-shirts will be gone on Monday. Oh, all right.
Yeah. If you haven't gotten one ltt store.com, um,
Sarah did a,
an absolutely bang up job of the design for it with some help from the
community. She did a long like five hour stream showing the design process,
which is really cool. Um, gone fishing.
Here it is. Boop. Super cute. Still love it.
I will, I will love it forever. And if you are on float plane,
you can go to exclusives.
This is the beta site with all the filtering and everything and the stream with
my, where's my two finger scrolling not working. What was my computer doing? Oh,
yeah, no, I just cannot scroll this at all. Anyway. Uh, the stream is here.
Don't worry. The site's working. Um, so yeah, I think it was like five hours and,
uh, and Sarah shows the entire design process for it.
So that's a good reason to subscribe to float plane. Lots of good exclusives.
All right, Dan, carry on. Okay. Um,
love the show tattoo artist here from Pennsylvania.
Just curious if either of you had any tattoos,
if any that you would like to get. We're extremely boring people.
It's true. I have piercings. You don't even have piercings. That's true.
I, I am more boring. Yeah, I used to lose the race. Well,
I used to be, I had my piercings long before I even met you. Yeah.
You also used to do crazy hair dye stuff and whatnot. Uh,
I had like pink hair, blue hair, green hair, blonde hair, black hair.
Kind of think what colors did I not do. I tried orange once.
It didn't really go very well. Just faded out to blonde. It was like, okay, well,
I could have just dyed my hair blonde then saved myself some trouble. A dye stage.
Um, yeah,
I spray painted my hair gold once like with just actual like rattle can spray
paint. Yeah. That's a, that's a, that's a five right there. Yeah. I like,
I like tattoos. I'm not against tattoos. I just, um, every,
every one that I've thought of getting, I kind of decide this,
this thing where I'm like, okay,
if I still want it in a significant period of time, like at least a year,
then I'll consider it. And every single time I'm like, nah,
it just hasn't happened.
There's also stuff where like,
what is it going to be? The only one that I thought of recently was, uh,
taquito, my bird that passed away. We have impressions of his like feet.
Oh, that'd be cool. Getting them on my shoulder where he used to stand. Yeah.
But it would just look kind of random though. Budgie feet are just wise. Yeah.
So there would just be two wise on my shoulder. Yeah. Okay.
So it would just look like I have stitches. Yeah. Like I,
I like drew it on my shoulder and was like, yeah, no, I don't know.
I can remember him other, other ways. I don't know.
I think tattoos look kind of cool,
but it's like I would have to actually go out of my way to do a thing that is
like body decorating. I mean, I'm,
I'm lucky that I have the motivation to like brush my teeth twice a day.
Like it's like maintaining,
maintaining my body is not something that I have traditionally. Okay.
I shouldn't say not maintenance. Like I, I exercise and stuff like that,
but just decorating. It's different. Yeah. It's different. Like all my,
all my piercings are from when I was in my early teens. Like I had all,
I had everything that I have plus the, I had one up at the top of the year.
I had an eyebrow ring and I used to like dye my hair and stuff.
That's all when I was like 13, 14. And then after that I just kind of,
I don't even put gel in my hair anymore. I just, just don't.
I haven't in a very long time. And I got to tell you,
Yvonne's not super into tattoos, so that's something. Okay.
And she's especially not into the kinds of tattoos that I've sort of floated
with her. Anyway.
I thought about getting like my employment history and she's like, really,
not my name. And I'm like, I mean, partner names is so,
I offered to get wedding rings in tattoo and she didn't want to do it.
I actually thought that's kind of cool because I, I, any form of jewelry,
if I wear it, it's going to disappear. So like, this is still my original one.
I'm shocked. I'm cause I take it off and play with it all the time. Yeah.
It's amazing to me.
Okay.
Up next is from Alexander. Hey Linus, as a biker,
I have many favorite roads. My top one being the Beartooth pass in Montana.
Are there any roads that you love to ride?
PS the GF is very happy about LDTs women's underwear. Nice.
Glad they're a hit. They're actually selling shockingly well. Um,
we haven't had like
a ton of success with the women's apparel so far. Uh,
just cause you know, our demo being what it is, I think. Um,
but the underwear for whatever reason, way better.
Yeah. Way better. Interesting. Yeah. Go figure. Um,
any roads you love to ride? You know, honestly speaking, I, I
gotta be careful with the N word, but I never ride for pleasure.
Never. It's a, well, it's a word that you gotta be careful about using.
I hate it here.
It's got such a brutal flashback. Oh my goodness. Do I, do I have to ring the bell?
No. Um, I do, but I don't want to name them.
Okay. That's fair. Yeah. All right. Yeah. No, I, I just, uh, I,
yeah, I commute on my, on my bike. I don't, I don't just like go, uh,
Ivan has been trying to get me to like go ride the sea,
the sky highway with him forever. Cause he's super into motorbiking now.
And I'm just like, dude, when, when am I going to just,
when am I going to just go for three hours and anything like badminton?
What helps a lot is that it's exercise. That's the justification.
Just like burning gas.
Very difficult to justify for me. That sounds like a,
sorry you didn't even say this, but my brain immediately went to like,
like nineties, like don't do drug slogans. It's like, don't burn gas,
burn calories. Cause you're like, yeah,
that's okay. We don't have to be that, you know, I don't know.
We've been over it a bunch of times, but neither of us drink,
neither of us smoke. It was do any drugs. We don't have tattoos.
I gambled on crypto that one time. It was bad. So I'm over it.
Yup. Well, at least you have vibrant lives outside of work. Yeah. Okay.
Up next is from John. Up next is from John. Linus,
do you still have that old aluminum case in a UV shrine?
No. No, I sold it back when I got my TJ07.
Next up is from Noah. Hey, two merch message questions, suggestions. Actually,
hold on one second. Oh no. You know, it's funny. I, yeah, you know what?
I remember it being hard to part with though,
even though I was constantly flipping stuff back then I,
I had put so much work into that case that I didn't,
I didn't want to get rid of it,
but realistically my wife gave me one that was so much better and from her that
I was never going to use it again. And so I did eventually part with it,
but it made me think I have only had in my,
since I was 17 and got my, built my first computer.
So in 20 years I have only had four cases.
The first one lasted, I think less than a year. It was an Antec Lanboy.
The second one lasted like a few years.
You guys saw it in its various forms in that video
recently. Then I had the TJ07 and then now I have my Rachmanin one. That's it.
That's the whole thing. I don't change cases. Like,
like PC of Theseus kind of thing. I just change all the stuff.
In something that I get flamed for all the time,
but you also are is you could also look at the cars,
the amount of cars you've had. Yeah. We're both a little cheap. Yes.
A case does not make the computer more faster.
So you don't need to get a new one every time.
I'm sure there's probably somewhat similar things with power supplies.
You probably carried power supplies between builds from time to time. No,
I was into like having a good power supply for sure. I mean,
that's a fair and power supplies were advancing really fast for a bit there.
And there were like new connectors on the graphics cards that you didn't like
really want to plug the two molexes in and they weren't modular
yet. You can get third party cables for them. Okay.
I guess there was a bunch of yeah.
I upgraded my power supplies a fair bit compared to compared to cases. Yeah.
Yeah. Yeah. Just trying to think. Yeah. All the cars I've ever owned.
So my parents got me a 91 Jetta.
And that wasn't a freebie.
The deal was that I drove all my siblings to anywhere they needed to go.
I had four siblings and we lived in the middle of nowhere.
So each one of those drives is low. So it was, it was,
it was 17 minutes to anywhere for the gas for those drives.
I don't think my parents gave me gas money.
Gas was a lot less expensive back then though. That's true. But still,
and it was diesel, which was less, less expensive, man.
When I got my civic, so then my next car was my civic. When I got the civic,
I was like a gassed
at how much I was spending on fuel. Yeah. Because even thanks for that.
Because even though it's an efficient car or whatever, a gas car,
compared to my diesel, I just, I just assumed I was getting an,
like I didn't realize what the difference was. I'm not a car guy.
And I believe you were saying effectively this,
but just to make it more straightforward,
the gap in price between diesel and gas was more back then, right?
It was more initially by the time I got the civic, the gap wasn't as much.
So I assumed that the, that the fuel economy,
like how many liters per a hundred kilometers or whatever was similar.
Cause it didn't really look that closely at it.
And then I didn't realize until I got the signal. It's like, wow,
I'm filling this thing up a lot. I didn't realize how far off it was like,
why isn't every car diesel? This is stupid. Yeah.
Then I got the volt and then the Taycan. That's it four cars.
Yeah.
And like, that feels like a lot to me, to be perfectly honest with you.
It feels extravagant, but then I don't think statistically it's that much.
I see people that change their car a lot. Yeah.
Oh, interesting. That huh. And like,
and sometimes they'll go from a new car to a new car.
And in my mind,
not only did they buy a new car and buy a new car,
but I feel like that one was still new. Yeah. Sometimes. Okay.
Yeah. I do still win cause I've only had two.
Okay. Yeah. The sun fire and the other one.
Yup. All right. Well you win. That's it. I, I, I think,
I think you're, I think you're going to get something cool maybe in the next,
like couple of years. I'd be surprised. I'd be surprised.
The economy of it is going to have to make sense. Well, yeah,
but I think that's going to come though. Yeah. Like if that happens for sure.
I think it's going to be hard for you to resist the free charging in the long
term. That is, that is definitely like playing into the equation.
As prices of used EVs come down,
keep your eye on the provincial PST exemption for used EVs.
Cause that's a big deal.
You'll have to wait a lot longer if that exemption goes away to get the same
deal as you would get now kind of thing. Yeah. Just keeping it. Yeah. That's all.
That's all. Hey, whiskey nerd, 88 1999 sun fire gang.
What year was yours? 1990. Yeah. Nice. Well,
I bought it like not even that long after like seven
years after 1999. So like it would have been not even that old of a car.
It would have been a lot more expensive at that point. I bought it for two grand.
It was actually like a really good deal. Yeah. Yeah.
We knew you'd win. We all know you are cheaper than Linus. He is cheap though.
Like it's not about surprising things. Yeah.
Yeah. Yeah. Like I will,
I will spend shocking amounts of money on some things.
Luke is very upset about how much I'm apparently willing to throw in a
fire to build an automatic scoring system
in the badminton gym that I'm very upset.
It's a little nuts. It sounds fun. I am admitting, I am admitting,
I am admitting that it sounds fun, but it's like,
kind of nuts. I, there is,
I know there's a word for what it is.
I have escaped right now. Um, what was I going to say? Uh, man,
that totally threw me completely off. Uh, Oh right. Can, are we saying what it,
so we're just saying automated scoring system. Yeah. Well, I mean,
we can talk more about it. There is, there is ways to monetize it.
It's just not a system of monetization that I probably anyone here has ever
done. I'm like, are we going to do it? Probably not. I feel like no. Yeah, no.
Cause there's like probably more profitable things that we could work on.
Oh yeah. Yeah. So it's like, we're not gonna try to monetize it properly. No.
So, but it'll be really cool. It's going to be pretty cool. You're okay.
Your argument about getting videos out of it, I don't think is legitimate.
I'm going to get videos out of it. How many? Some, not many. Two.
Oh no, no, no, no, no. Cause you gotta remember,
cause you can't saturate the audience with badminton videos. No,
but they're not badminton videos. When we,
when we build like a machine vision system to,
to track the shuttle or whatever. Um,
there'll be a video about like the hardware set up. What?
The acronym. Did you do that on purpose? No.
Automated scoring system.
We definitely have to call it that. That was, I didn't notice that.
Someone in flow playing chat pointed that out. Okay.
So when I make a video about my ass,
you guys will watch it. No strawberry this time.
Um, okay. And then we do a followup video on the, like the,
the, the machine, the machine vision,
like GPU set up in the rack that powers, you know,
all the courts or whatever.
Definitely think of like maybe an introduction to the project video where you
talk about capabilities and like what our plan is and show the hardware for the
plan and all that kind of stuff. And then like first major milestone. Yeah.
And then completion. No, no, no. There's no,
there's lots of stuff in between. Okay.
So what about the other cameras that are going to be on every court?
We could make a system about like,
how do you build the ultimate OBS like monster?
How many people watch OBS content? Yeah, but I can title it in a way. People,
they'll fucking watch it. They'll watch it. All right.
So we build this like monstrous OBS machine that can handle ingest from like
14 simultaneous streams and we like cobble it together with like firmware hacked
G-force cards so that you can overcome the,
the envenc encoding limit or whatever. Like that's content.
My problem is there's, there's no, like I talked to Yvonne about it and she was,
she was like asking me questions about like, like,
do you think it's worth it? Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
She's asking things about like my opinion on it. And I'm like, no, I can't,
like there's no, like I can't sit here and argue with him about the
efficacy because he just wants it
and like he wants it to be really good. So it's gonna like, you know,
the whole, the, the, the, the quality cheap, whatever. Yeah.
The triangle like he wants it to be really good.
He doesn't care that much about fast,
but like he wants it to be really good and he wants,
and he's definitely gonna want it to exist.
The amount of care that he seems to have about it being able to be profitable,
it making sense, all this other kind of stuff is super low.
I love that you guys have meetings about me. You told me to.
Well, okay. What I, what you said was, am I good to post the job posting?
And I said, well, those had, that has to be cleared by Yvonne. Yeah. Yeah.
So what am I supposed to do? I have to have a meeting with Yvonne, but like,
yeah, there's no argument that I can make that's going to change his mind.
Cause like, what am I, what am I going to debate him on? Yeah.
Nerdom says if I got a hundred thousand dollar gold controller past Yvonne,
I can get a badminton scoring system. Yeah. Like,
I mean, she's very sensible and she's like, she's great.
She'll make sure that I don't, you know,
lead us into financial ruin or whatever, but I wouldn't do that anyway.
And she pretty much lets me do things if they're,
well, this is pretty stupid. Um,
I was going to say if they're not completely stupid,
but I think this is completely stupid, but I'm like,
I'm really passionate about the sport, right?
It's not, not cool. Yeah. It's super cool. It's super cool. Yeah.
It just like, and then we'll make a video when we upgrade it.
It just does like, doesn't make a lot of sense.
And I don't mean sense in regards to like, it's, it seems to be feasible.
That's not the sense I'm talking about.
I mean like financially or pretty much any other way.
It's just fun and cool. Yeah. I mean, isn't that the whole idea here?
And that's fine. Yeah. My,
my biggest thing when I was talking to Yvonne about it and when I was talking to
you about it is just, you need to be super aware of that.
If you're completely okay with the idea that is just fun and cool and this is
not going to make any money and it doesn't make any sense in any other way,
then I don't care. Yeah, let's do it. Whatever. It doesn't matter to me. Nice.
Yeah. Okay. So then let's talk about the scope.
The minimum viable product is that with user intervention.
So with user confirmations and prompts and or maybe a gestures like there's
certain things that are going to be tough, like how to start the game.
Everyone might have to like go like this or something and serving because you
were pointing out like sometimes a point might be scored,
but then the person might just like hit it back.
And somebody countered to me like, okay,
but the assistant would know the rules of the game.
So they would know that that person wasn't supposed to serve as long as our,
as long as our tracking system for where it lands is perfect.
And as long as the humans don't disagree with it and decide the score is
something. And as long as the humans don't screw up,
maybe they hit it back and they were supposed to serve because they thought the
other side was supposed to serve, which happens. Yeah. Oh, sorry.
That was my point. So I can guarantee I have done that. Like, so that's it.
There's a lot of, there's a lot of edge cases and issues.
So we have a bunch of ideas like one of them is having a tablet or I have
actually kind of changed the scale of that for the testing court.
I want it to be a TV because I want it to be like impossible to ignore.
Basically. I don't want like a small little thing going on.
And I think you should be able to read it from far away. Oh,
I should have clarified every court is going to have two TVs so that both sides
can see it easily. Yeah.
Though the tablet is just to interact with the touch case. Sweet. Yeah. Perfect.
Yeah. We're on the same page there. Nice. Yeah. And then like a,
a like shrouded light thing. So if it needs to give a notification or if,
if there's something that like you need to address this now,
one of those x-ray machine ones with the green, yellow and red stripes.
Basically. Yeah. So like, like, uh,
like you could use the different lights to indicate things so that you don't
have to try to look up and read what's going on.
If you see it flash one green light as the birdie hits the ground, you're like,
yeah, someone scored a point. Boop means someone scored a point. Sweet.
I don't need to check in on what's going on,
stuff like that because the first version is going to have a lot of a edge case
issues for sure. Yeah.
So then after that it should be able to fully automatically score keep by using
machine learning to tell what is going on,
which is going to be really hard. That's tough. And then in the longer term,
I want it to track who's playing against who and the score and people's play
styles so we can build a matchmaking system and build out like a universal
ladder system and individual people's performance regarding to you. You can't,
I don't think it's stats for nerds,
super reasonable to do things like, Hey, you're,
at least right now, who knows? Maybe someday,
maybe in three years when we get to this stage,
it's significantly easier because software development does that and maybe we
can figure it out.
But I don't think we should really consider the idea of like exactly matching
people's arm movement and giving them coaching feedback.
But no could do things like, Hey, the back left hand quadrant,
every time it gets shot there,
you have a lower percentage chance of successfully returning than any other
quadrant. So if you were going to book some coaching time,
that might be something you want to focus on.
Still not going to make it profitable. No. But yeah, pretty much.
And I think that information would be really interesting.
You're also talking about like similar to a chess ranking system,
like ranking people inside. So you can, you can almost like set up like, Hey,
you're similarly ranked to me on this thing.
Do you want to show up at a similar time and play each other?
Well, I told you I wanted a phone app so that it could be like, Hey,
your rival just checked in. They beat you the last three times.
You've played. Do you want to get in the car and go, go try and challenge them.
There's some interesting stuff there with like, you know,
there's a lot of interesting, well, yeah, I mean,
privacy obviously people would have to opt into something like that.
We will figure out all the details to be a pretty overt, like, Hey,
this is what we're going to do.
Make sure you're aware of this before you just automatically click the okay.
I think that's sweet. That'd be freaking awesome. That's sick. But I just,
I know some people would maybe feel weird about it.
I think you could also have stuff somewhere else where you like customize your
visibility levels so you could like make friends while you're there. Absolutely.
And be like, yeah, I want to be a friend. Like I said,
it's like someone you played with three times recently. Yeah. Like,
like that's what we're talking about. Someone who's like friended. Okay. No, no,
not like randoms. Yeah. So it shouldn't be just everyone at the court.
I don't even think it should necessarily automatically be people that you have
played against. No, sorry. That was like, that was my implication. What's your,
what's your, what's your, what's your,
Oh, what now? So the system's called ass because it's automated scoring.
It's like, what's your ass tag. Yeah. Nice.
You should sell sweat pants and it has people's like handles on the bus.
That's actually pretty good. Add me, bro. What's your handle?
Let me just turn around.
Sorry. Can I just get a picture of your ass so that I can import it into my
phone. QR code. QR code right in the middle.
Let me just take a picture of your ass. Oh my goodness. Oh man.
So yeah, we need to hire people for that, I guess. Yeah.
And I know that you guys don't care about the badminton side of it,
but that's not what the content will be.
The content will be focused on the tech side of it because the badminton is just
an excuse to build cool tech.
There's just going to be very significant periods of time where there's nothing
to show off because like this field is very complicated.
This field is very rife with not necessarily knowing the problems that you're
going to run into, things like that.
Well, I fully expect it to go from zero to like, Holy crap,
this kind of works really fast and then go from Holy crap,
this kind of works too.
It works somewhat consistently over a really long period of time. Yeah,
probably. Yeah. Like I suspect you'll be able to get like, uh,
people's skeletal models and tracking them pretty quickly,
but like you're going to walk too close to someone and you're going to become
one monster of bones and like all these things. There's going to be lots of, uh,
lots of issues, tons of issues.
It's going to be like basically unusable for an extremely long time.
And he knows that. So it is what it is. Uh, yeah,
so that job posting is not up,
but I will be making job postings for machine vision.
I drink way too much on the show now.
It also, it also is going to need, as he was also referencing, uh,
a website and an app. So, uh, there will also be that,
that needs to be made. Uh,
but based on what Jayden has already said in the live chat, yeah, I don't know.
The, the plan is not really to use like people that we already have for this
because everything we're already doing needs like more help,
not less. So we can't really divert to this thing. Um,
but Jayden just posted an unhappy face and I don't like it when Jayden said,
so we'll figure something out. Um, but yeah,
the idea is not really to lean on the people that we have. Um, yeah,
I don't know. No, Jayden, I need you.
Um, is this after lab or sooner? Well, I mean,
what are you talking about necessarily? So like the hiring is like, I might,
I don't know, these postings might go up within the next couple of weeks.
It more depends on, uh,
like the financials and accounting and all that kind of stuff.
Then it depends on me. Um,
but it being like usable, like, no,
the lab website's going to be up before this for sure. Uh,
the timeline that I gave Linus, I was like, I don't know.
I'm expecting it's going to be closer to three years than two
for it to be like, good. Um,
because I talked to some people on the staff here.
Um, one of them was Jake Danes. The other one, I don't know,
a hundred percent know if, if, uh,
they want themselves being like named and stuff on WAN.
So I will refrain from doing that right now, but they're both the,
the second person is specifically in like machine vision and machine learning
and stuff here. And they're very good. And then there's Jake Danes,
who I don't know if I can say specifically anything because he just works on as
far as I can tell literally everything. Um,
but I sat down with both of them and we had a conversation about feasibility
and stuff like that.
And they quoted a certain amount of devs in a certain amount of time.
And then, um,
that was a lot of people and not really that much time.
So we're opting for probably less people, but more time.
Are you still talking about how dumb I am?
I never said you were dumb.
Don't call me out like that, Luke.
What? I never said anybody was dumb. Um,
I just said it's not a financially viable direction.
Yeah, but it is fun. It's interesting. Like I'm not,
I'm not completely against it.
Gotta live a little.
Yeah.
Conrad, just me three days. I got this. There you go.
Nice. That's pretty, uh, that's pretty accurate to be perfectly honest.
But yeah, it's, it's going to be extremely hard to do it.
If you think it would be easy.
I don't think you fully thought about all the problems.
Yeah. Yeah. It's going to be very extraordinarily challenging.
I think it's going to be pretty fun though. Like even the early version,
like I would want to play on that court,
even if we just did scorekeeping through verbal communication,
but like you just watch like what it's doing.
And I think especially for the early versions,
it would be funny to like put up like what it's like, I'd want to see the,
the skeleton models. Yeah. Like I just, I just think it'd be really entertaining.
I don't know. Yeah. A hundred percent. Like I,
I like pass behind you quickly or something.
We become this like giant bone mass.
I'd probably get distracted, but it would be fun. Focus on the game.
I'd also like, we,
we talked about how the immediate computation if we try to do some complicated
things might be really difficult,
but we might be able to do like scorekeeping real time performance
rating later. Oh yeah. Way later. So, but MVP is scorekeeping.
Yeah. Oh, I don't mean timeline wise. Oh, I mean computationally.
So like while you're playing, it's keeping score and it's recording the match.
I understand, but I want it all in real time. I'm kidding. I'm kidding.
Blast. I'm kidding. I'm kidding.
It can crunch overnight or whatever if it comes to that.
I just don't know the feasibility of any of this stuff. Um,
I put in enough power
for every court to run, hold on,
let me think for a second for every court to run about
three GPUs. Okay. I mean,
I still don't know at all the feasibility of that, but that's, that just,
I just machine learning and machine machine vision stuff.
The computation required balloons really rapidly. Yeah.
Okay. That's fair. So like, uh, I don't know. Um,
but it's done a lot of computer vision. Yeah.
Like I don't know. We'll figure it out. We have,
we have barely dipped toes in thinking about the idea. Like this is not,
yeah, don't worry about it. Three 40 nineties. Honestly,
by the time this thing was like working, working,
we're going to be past 4,000 series. Oh yeah. Like it's going to take a while.
Okay. Um, but if we can do real time, everything, that's great.
I'm not saying I'm not trying to commit to anything right now. I have no idea,
but there's a,
there's a potential reality where you're like performance data comes later.
Yeah. Um,
it might even be able to use the local stuff for like the scorekeeping
and yada, yada, yada. And then it like offshores some of the data to,
to compute elsewhere. Well, given that we're planning to run LA lands and stuff,
there will probably have like a decent connection coming in.
So if we have to send out, I have no idea, we'll figure it out.
We'll figure it out. I think it'll just be cool.
I think it'll be a fun thing to work on. Um, but yeah, it's not,
it's far from profit driven. Ace Archer says, want to run it on FPGAs.
I work on doing machine learning on FPGAs for particle accelerators in my day
job. Nice. Uh, no, but that sounds sick.
You should probably keep doing what you're doing. Yeah. All right. What's next?
Oh, uh, this next one's from Noah. Hey, two merch message slash questions.
First is, will you ever make an ARGB mouse pad? Noah.
Get it? Cause that's his name. Oh, was it? Oh yeah.
Probably not. I think that, um, I don't like them.
There's a spicy take. Yeah. Well,
the issue is that we've never found a good diffusion material
that, um,
manages pretty consistent brightness all the way around the track and I'm just
not happy with it. Next is the screwdriver.
Could you use the same material? The bits are made of for the shaft.
I guess you could, but you wouldn't want to necessarily.
There's different kinds of strength for metal. Um,
some things you want to be harder,
even if it means they're more brittle while other things you don't mind if
they're softer because it's better for them to be more malleable.
You want them to them to fail before the other piece. Um,
we're and we're definitely using industry standard materials for our,
for our shaft and for our bits. Okay.
Next up is from Rick. Hey, Luke and Linus.
Just messed up my merch message on my order. So here's a gift card to Linus.
Have you ever had any interest in testing medical stuff like ultrasounds that
connect to tablets? I mean, it's really cool,
but it's so niche and sketchy and like, yeah.
Am I qualified to evaluate the quality of an ultrasound? Yeah.
Like why? I don't want to test that.
The only time we thought about doing something medical related was something
I was trying to do where I was trying to get a cardiology lab to collab with
us on evaluating fitness trackers and we got real close and then they bailed.
Yeah. That would have been super cool. That would have been cool.
And that's the only way I think personally, uh,
we'd need real scientists. Yeah. Yep.
Okay. Next up. Yay. Women's options.
I'm a robotics engineer with the new human robot interface, uh,
options, chat, GPT, et cetera.
Do you think that there will be more in-home office robots coming pets,
companions, assistants?
I'm amazed that some of those like weird like pets that, um,
that you've seen out in Japan or whatever,
I'm amazed that they haven't moved on rolling out a subscription based model
that interacts with chat GPT like it. I'm sure they're working on that is, yeah,
that is, that is happening.
That's coming like a Tamagotchi that actually just chats with you.
There is already those just on your phone. Yeah. Um,
so how long until it comes into the physical world? Like, I don't know.
How long, how long is it going to take them to manufacture it?
Like I'm sure they're working on it right now.
I'm sure real dolls has got a team like working on this like right now.
Probably. Okay. And last of the curated,
Hey DL and L I moved to a rural area not too long ago,
uh, that has come with some downgrades, reduced work space and slower wifi.
Have you ever downgraded on purpose that wasn't for a video?
Oh, town created on purpose. Yes, yes I did.
I downgraded to a small form factor rig with the radion
3870. I, uh,
I went MATX because I was moving and I was going to be in a small space and I
didn't want to take a big tower with me.
I don't count that one is one of my cases because it was kind of like a
temporary setup. It was a whole thing.
I was going through this like weird thing when we were in the lead up to
getting married and I was like, Oh, I like,
I never like lived with a roommate.
So I had moved in with a friend and like a couple of his like school friends.
I think I lasted like less than a month. Yeah, it was the whole thing.
Don't worry about it. Yeah. So yes,
I downgraded cause I had a better GPU than would fit in like that case with
like water cooling and stuff.
I think I mostly just wanted to build a new computer.
I can't answer this because it's going to be in an upcoming video. Nice.
Do I know about those spoilers? Uh, I think technically yes.
All right. Well I'm looking forward to it. Pretty sure. Yeah. All right.
We're into potentials and stuff.
Oh, some of this has already been done. Really? Yep.
There was like asking about physical keyboards on phones.
We definitely did that today.
Hi. I heard Linus talk a few times about the upcoming game sea of stars and I've
wondered if he heard about or played chained echoes and other awesome 16 bit
style JRPG. No, I think that's on my list too.
I'm going to start replying to some,
so you guys feel free to to pitch in with any you want to talk about.
That's one other question for me. Hey guys,
been following since the NCX days. Crazy,
but awesome ride question for all of you, but mostly Luke.
Any thoughts on what quantum computing could do with AI in the future?
Uh, I don't know. It's going to be nuts.
What we understand about quantum computing coding for quantum computers and even
what AI is going to look like in six months,
let alone three to five years is
a very very fog of war type situation. Um,
I think it's going to be pretty wild though.
My excessively limited understanding of programming for quantum systems,
uh, is that it's, it's very math based. Uh,
and traditionally you would say like LLMs are not good at that because they're,
they have like memory issues and stuff. Um,
but with Wolfram plugged into it,
that changed rapidly and LLMs are not like the only thing exists that exists in
the AI space. Um, so
who knows? I don't know.
Eamon, love your talks on AI.
What's the scariest and least scary part of the future of AI, Luke?
Uh,
he's tired. Yeah, he's trying his, I can hear his brain spinning.
Okay. I'll give you the easier part of their question.
Would you ever consider getting a parrot?
Would I consider getting a parrot? Same, same merge message.
A budgy rar is a form of parrot. So I have one.
I have two. There you go. Yeah. Um, okay.
The scariest and least scary. Uh, I'm not going to answer this perfectly.
I'm going to edit it slightly. Uh, I,
the scariest part is the amount of disenfranchised people,
the amount of displaced people,
the amount of people whose lives just get completely turned upside down.
I am personally feeling very Sag for people that are in education right now.
And if that path gets destroyed and they are not on very privileged financial
grounds, that could be extremely negative for their lives.
And that is something that I'm concerned about.
Cause I was thinking about like the, the,
the situation that I was in when I was back in school, if,
if like this thing never happened and my path was to continue going on the
school route, it looked pretty bright when I was on it. If that just disappeared,
I would have been pretty screwed. I had other routes for sure.
I could have followed my dad and what he was doing.
I could have done other things, but
not everyone's kind of like that.
Someone brought up AI misalignment like, yeah, that's a thing too.
There's a lot to fear about it. I, I also, however,
think that there's so many
unknowns and there's also a lot to be excited about with it.
I think it is the single biggest thing that can contribute
towards, what's the right word for this?
Like self agency, isn't it? Being able to be self-reliant,
which is kind of weird,
but you could use it and then potentially future robotic implements or whatever
else to get an insane amount of stuff done as an individual.
So you could become more self-reliant. You could become more self-sufficient.
Does this mean you can live anywhere you want? Maybe not necessarily.
You might need cheaper housing.
You might need some form of land so that you can grow stuff, whatever,
but like the ability to get things done on your own,
the ability to teach yourself the ability to do all this other kind of stuff is
going to absolutely balloon. Someone, yeah,
headline AI will displace 300 million jobs. That was a headline.
I did read that headline as well. I don't think,
just like with a lot of technological advancements in the past,
there's been a huge amount of displaced jobs.
If you don't think the internet completely wrecked entire industries,
you're delusional. The internet also created a ton of jobs. Yep.
This one has a huge potential to not replace the jobs.
Yeah. So that's scary.
Just like performing menial. Yes.
But there's other arguments to that too.
There's a huge amount of people that do that already.
There's a huge amount of people that show up to work. There's like memes about it.
Oh, I show up to work because like the, I get paid to look at Reddit,
stuff like that.
There's also a huge amount of people that work really darn hard.
The one of the main things that seems to be getting replaced,
if you want to call it that by AI right now is software development, right? Yeah.
Yeah. Okay. Except totally not,
because the amount of like code that we need to improve and automate things
around the world is insanely immense.
And like the amount of workspaces that would benefit from having developers at
them that can't not afford to have developers at all is super expensive.
Like they're never going to hire one. They can't. Yeah.
Now they would be able to have that benefit and the places that can hire
developers, be able to use them to, to, to guide these things.
Cause even if it's like better than you, okay,
well you can still help guide it. You can direct it.
A car is a lot faster than you. You can still drive it. Like I,
I don't know. I don't think,
I don't think just doom and glooming about it is fair.
I also don't think just looking at it with positivity is fair.
It's going to be extremely destructive.
It's also going to be extremely constructive.
And I think if you want to be ahead of the curve,
the right approach is not to just be freaked out 100% of the time.
It's to try to keep riding that wave.
As much as you can.
While I've curated a few while Linus for the replies to a couple more,
I've got another one here for you, Luke. Good morning to all from Malaysia.
Want to ask Luke, since you can eat chicken and rice every day,
did you change the seasoning for the chicken and any substitute for rice?
Quinoa changing the seasoning decently often.
Sure. But if I'm being completely honest, probably 90% of the time,
it's Frank's red extra hot. I don't seem to get tired of that.
So it is what it is. Yeah.
I've started trying to get more, uh,
like beef and fish incorporated to try to mix things up a little bit,
just because it's probably not like good for you to only eat that all the time.
But yeah, veggies, chicken and rice is still a vast majority of it.
So I got to wait to lose, man. I'm I'm, I'm like, I've come pretty far,
but I still have a long way to go. It is what it is.
I don't think I'll be at what I will personally be happy with for,
for a bit now over a year and that's fine. I'm on the path. It's going okay.
You can feel free to start hitting me with them.
I'm down to just a few den. Okay, excellent. Um, hi Linus,
are you planning to upgrade your framework to Intel 13th gen or Ryzen?
I've gotten 11th gen and pre-ordered Ryzen seven.
So a framework actually reached out to me about that today. They were like, Hey,
so we did that video where you talked about the upcoming launch,
but are you going to cover the new stuff at all?
And I was kind of sitting there going, Oh,
I hadn't actually really thought about it on my intention was to wait for
Ryzen,
but 13th gen is also pretty interesting and could be an opportunity to do a
completely different kind of video.
So there's that cooler master case that's designed to take your old framework,
uh, your old framework motherboard.
So I was kind of thinking it would be really cool. I got it. Oh,
I got it. Go. Okay.
I was thinking it would be really cool to do a video where the main focus is
actually on building that, that cooler master gaming rig.
Maybe when we do the LTX whale land,
I build the framework gaming PC.
So it's just my 12th gen framework motherboard in the cooler master case with an
external GPU or something like that. And I take it,
I do all my land gaming on just this like tiny framework,
laptop motherboard. I think that'd be super cool. And then as part of that,
well, I guess I'll have to have a motherboard to put into my computer,
so I'll get the 13th gen one, I'll put it in there.
But what the one that I'm really excited for is the Ryzen one, man,
AMD's current Zen 4 is so freaking efficient.
And if I,
if I don't end up doing the video with the cooler master case,
then I'm just going to wait. And I think I'm going to upgrade to Zen 4.
I don't think I'm going to go to the framework 16.
I just don't think I want to carry around a 16 inch laptop ever again,
no matter how cool and sexy it is. But I'll be,
I'll be really happy with the,
I'm really happy with the upgrades they keep providing for the framework 13.
So who knows? I might do one, might do both. We'll see how it goes.
Okay. Next up.
What was the most annoying bugs from the early days of developing floatplane?
Something that was hard to patch and it was frustrating for users,
but not necessarily harmful to them.
I have a kind of an answer for this, but I'll see if Luke has something.
Oh, okay. Um, it wasn't necessarily harmful to users,
but we had a lot of issues with payments in the early days,
back when it was running on the forum.
And I think Luke will probably remember some of the specific bugs,
but we would have people try to buy a subscription and just wouldn't bill them.
We would have people try to buy a subscription and it would double bill them.
And like we could do, we could do certain amount of things with the forum,
but the payments portion was closed code. So like I,
we could not fix them. That was very frustrating. We've obviously had our,
our fair share of bugs.
We've been in production 100% of the existence of the platform.
That's like, that's something I can say of for pretty much no one.
And it's, it's been a rocky road at times, but in general we do pretty good.
But yeah, we've had our fair amount of bugs,
but that that was extremely frustrating because the team has never shied away
from squashing bugs and we've been able to fix things generally,
but we couldn't fix that.
That was actually a big part of the reason why we wanted to move to an external
site at all was just the payments being so impossible
to fix. Yeah.
Someone just asked me what acoustic about using acoustic cameras in the lab.
Do you know what an acoustic camera is? Isn't that a microphone? I guess not. Um,
no, but I made a note for myself to follow it up with Gary and see if,
see if that's something that would be useful. What? Yeah.
Acoustic cameras. I don't know. I don't know, man. Uh,
it's one of the incoming merch messages. I'm just going to show that.
All right, Dan, what do you got? Portable acoustic camera. What is this? Oh,
they're going to nerd out about it. I'm excited. Um, yeah. Okay.
Uh, I forgot to archive that one. Okay. Hello.
Apple launches their devices almost at the same time worldwide.
Why do other big companies like Samsung not do that? For example,
the galaxy S 23 is not available in Japan even now,
but the yellow iPhone is.
It's really hard. I don't know what to tell you other than that.
Everything from the localization of the product to the, uh,
producing enough to sustain a launch. Cause like, think about it.
If valve had launched the steam deck globally, right out of the gate,
all they would have accomplished is that everyone would have been
mad that it's backordered, right?
If they can't produce enough of them for one region or two regions,
what is the point of opening up orders to the entire world?
It's tough. It's really, really hard. Um, I think that was,
that was basically, I think that was basically going to be my answer.
Apple is an incredible logistics company.
Unbelievable. The fact that they launch a new iPhone every year,
come hell or high water is a modern miracle and their shareholders love it and
their users love it. And they're really good at that.
There's some things I don't like about Apple,
but their their global logistics management is absolutely
not one of them.
Have you figured out what an acoustic camera is?
Uh, I figured out that they exist. Um,
I don't think they're actual cameras.
Oh, so it's like a raise of microphones that, that,
so it's a directional like microphone. I think so.
Like it's computational and it figures out where, you know,
I have a weird ticking in my house.
Maybe an acoustic camera could be the solution.
I'm trying to figure out where it's coming from because I don't have any clocks.
So what's ticking could be a bomb.
It might be two.
That's true. You're right. Two bombs. That would be worse.
Yeah. A lot of the sites that I try to jump to have very aggressive. Wow.
That's a, that is aggressive. Yeah. Yeah. Right. Like he can see my screen,
but yeah, I don't, I don't know. Yeah. They, they look really interesting.
I've just never heard of them before. Okay. Next up. Hi Luke and Linus.
How do you think Microsoft should compensate writers for the web pages that
Bing chat is accessing?
Cause if people aren't seeing ads to support those websites,
they might disappear. This is a huge problem.
Age old problem as old as the internet. Yeah.
But just like with all AI things,
this just like blows it up to such a ridiculous degree that it's like, Oh wow,
we actually really need to address this now.
I mean it was already a big problem.
You Google search something and they have like kind of the answer and you could
click through to the website, but you won't because the answer is already there.
This is that like roided out so hard.
Yeah. Yeah. This is actually crazy.
And it's an interesting topic for us because we're building the labs website,
which like the way that it's built so far is very
beneficial to one of these systems just taking everything from it. So
it's rough, man. I don't know. There's,
there's this whole problem where like if,
if these AI systems continue to work how they currently do,
and then everyone starts to use them for everything,
all these companies that generate the data are going to disappear.
And then the AI systems aren't going to have anything to lean on for having the
data.
But big tech has shown that they're willing to just consume everything like a
swarm of locusts in their path. Yep. And they don't want to compensate,
say for example,
journalists for doing the actual primary sourcing of news.
Yeah. Yeah. It's going to be a big problem. It's going to be a huge problem.
Yeah. The creators of information potentially vanishing
is a bit of an issue for the system that utilizes that information.
But does that mean that the system that utilizes that information is going to
want to compensate them? Probably no. So is it going to eat itself?
Ouroboros AI. We'll see.
Yeah. So it's an interesting discussion. Okay. Next up. Hey Luke,
can you tell a story of what happened to that red car that got you stuck on a
bridge that one time? Sorry if you've already answered this before.
Love the show. Can I tell the story? Um, the,
the fuel pumps blew up on a bridge. Um,
sick.
And I was in like the middle lane of the bridge and the car just died.
Like it wasn't like, Oh,
it's sputtering for awhile and I can do whatever I can pull over. Like, no,
it just, it just died immediately. Um, I was on the uphill of the bridge,
so I, I, uh,
I called Linus because I was too cheap and I knew he had BCAA so he could get my
car taken out of there. That's AAA for you, my American friends. Yeah. Um,
so I called him and he, he came and saved me,
but also roasted me in classic Linus fashion.
I was flattered that you called me instead of your parents.
Now I know it was just about the money. Got it.
He was also calling to say he was going to be late for work. That too. Yeah.
I was on my way to work. Um, and then, yeah,
I stood in the back of the convertible and flagged traffic, um,
which a local radio show thought was quite funny,
but actually did totally work. Yeah. Like very helpful. He saw it, it,
traffic kept flowing like quite effectively. Um,
police came by and were like not a hundred percent stoked about me standing in
my car to direct traffic, but they were also like at the same time,
usually this would like stop bridge traffic and it's flowing just fine.
So like we're not going to necessarily tell you to stop.
And then they just took off, which was interesting. Um, but yeah,
I mean that's about it. Once, once I got it to a mechanic,
I was basically told like this is extremely not worth repairing. Yeah. Uh,
because there, and I knew this, there was a lot wrong with it.
Other than just the, the fuel pumps,
there was like a very considerable amount wrong with it. Um, cough, cough,
zero of the gauges in the car worked. Um,
Oh no, the tack worked. Nothing else worked except for the tech. Um,
but it was old and it was kind of fairly poorly maintained and stuff.
So it was, it's time and that's it. Sounds like me.
Um, next up is, well, the last one we have today is from Nicholas.
Hey guys, excited for the ABCs of gaming for my baby on the way. Nice.
So I love tinkering with my home server and 3d printers.
Is there any tech that keeps coming back over and over to tinker with as a
hobby? Water cooling.
It's totally stupid and no one should use it,
but I have a water cooled computer because I'm just a big idiot.
I just, I just, I can't stop Luke.
I just always have a water cooled computer. I don't even overclock for real.
Yeah. I get no, it's in a completely separate room.
It doesn't have to be quiet.
Isn't it not even quiet in that room that it's in? Is it quiet? I don't know.
The room isn't quiet. The computer's quiet. Sure. But like the room is,
and it doesn't matter because it's allowed. It doesn't matter at all.
Is this, is this purely because you want to water cool or is,
how much of it is the channel and content? I'd probably do it anyway. Yeah.
Cause I did it before. Yep. I just, I don't know.
I just, I have a water cooled computer.
I just have that water cool my computer cause I'm big idiot.
That's all there is to it. How about you?
I don't know. Mineral oil. But it's like not though. Yeah.
But where's the update? Oh,
it's like kind of somewhat impossible to tell if it's okay or not. Oh,
okay. That's tough then. They're like pretty sure it is okay.
And they have pretty good reasons for it. Okay. I mean that's good. Right.
But they can't like be a hundred percent sure. Well,
what if we just found a way to like pretty much seal it probably
so we seal in the top better.
My other concern is maybe if I move,
I'd be more open to it because of leaks.
Yeah, that's fair. Okay. Well I can wait. Yeah. Okay. I'm
on the eventually scale. I am a hundred percent down.
There's a reason I still have those cases. I want to do it. Let's do it.
I'm just not a hundred percent in this second.
I don't know that this is the right time, but those cases are going nowhere.
All right. And I'm down. Okay.
And even if those cases like end up not working, like I'm down to find a way.
I have wanted to get back into oil cooling because I'm big
dumb idiot, just like your water cooling thing.
It just hasn't been the right time for a while.
So what would you pick as something that you do keep going back to? Well,
I mean, honestly, probably that I just haven't been able to,
because of living situation for a bit. I've wanted to for a long time though.
I there's a bunch of different build ideas I have for it.
I've wanted a home theater one for a while,
just cause I think it would look sick in like a home theater set up.
I also have always had this idea. I'm pretty sure I even talked to you about it.
And there's probably 47 reasons why this is really stupid. It wouldn't work,
but I've wanted to do a like nested tank system where there's two tanks.
The outside tank is an actual fish tank with actual fish.
Hey, guess who has someone, something that can make that dream a reality.
I've been meaning to try and donate my fish tank to the company. Oh, this is,
this would take an obsessive, like way too much work. Oh no, it could be done.
So all we need is like,
we need a really good temperature control system for the fish tank cause you
don't want to cook them. Yes. Or let them die.
And the load of the computer is fluctuating.
So what you would need is I think if you could just create like a,
like a relay system on some kind of Peltier heating,
cooling thing as long as it was powerful enough to like deal with fluctuations.
Cause you don't want to just, there's, there's,
I'm pretty sure it's super bad for the fish for the temperature to just do this
all the time. So that's tough. It's going to have to be pretty good.
But if you have a large enough amount of water than that shouldn't matter that
much. The way that I was kind of thinking of doing it,
um, was making sure that the,
I don't know how fluctuatey, whatever, whatever, whatever.
I don't know much about tropical fish. I had non-tropical fish.
I don't know much about tropical fish. Okay. Um,
but making sure that the heating system was always pushing towards a minimum and
making sure that the computer could not push it past that by itself.
So the heating system is always going to have to be on,
but it's onto a varying degree. I think that might be more effective.
And then the other thing that I was going to bring up is leaks.
Cause the fluid going into the water would be an extreme issue.
Someone brought up some solution for that. I don't remember what it was.
I think it was an air gap between the two. So it's not like one,
one tank and then another tank in it. It's, it's almost like three.
Because the outer tank would actually have to like seal and then there would be
a gap between, um, doing that.
I think you might have issues with like, uh, like fog.
Yeah. I think it could be done.
It's maybe the idea has been floating there in the back of my head.
It's gotta be doable.
What was the exact question? Was it tech ideas or was it general?
Something you tinker with that you just kind of always come back to.
I think it was tech. Okay. If it's tech then yeah, that's my answer.
All right. And my answer is thank you very much for tuning in.
We'll see you again next week. Same bad time, same bad channel.
How is it that your gamer bladder is so strong that you can sit here through the
entire show and I have to go to the bathroom twice. Never surrender. Mind you.
I already, I drank all of this. Yeah. I didn't drink all of this. Okay.
I might be part of it, but it is pretty strong. Yeah. No kidding.
Say the line Bart. Bye.
Okay.
Bye.