Welcome to the WAN Show.
We have got a great show for you guys this week.
Breaking news, breaking news.
Like what is this?
Like two hours ago, three hours ago
or something like that?
Three or four, yeah.
Yeah.
SVB, the Silicon Valley Bank goes under.
What bank?
Just gone in Silicon Valley?
This is wild.
Less wild is that YouTube has apparently relaxed
their stupid f***ing profanity policy.
I'm still bleeping it anyway.
Not 100%.
Some people complained about that WAN Show.
What else we got going on today?
Ring gives police invasive user footage,
including sometimes of inside their house.
Cool.
Even without a warrant.
Just if they feel like they want it.
Good job Ring.
Yeah.
Oh, what else?
Really Luke?
Just because I get to go first
and pick all the best topics means that you sit here
and I don't see anything else I want to talk about.
Think about it for this one.
Sounds good.
Trust me, there will be stuff.
Seriously?
What would you pick?
There's something in here that was in here last week,
but we've also talked about it like three times.
So I don't know.
All right, intro.
Aren't these all girls?
The show is brought to you by fresh books.
Goliath technologies.
I heard they're online.
Squarespace.
Really?
Okay. Tarkov.
Why not that for the fourth topic?
Luke's got some Tarkov updates.
It's spicy.
First, we need to get into the big news this week.
Sources for this.
I don't know everywhere.
The ABC, CTV, the BBC, Blockworks, doesn't matter.
The point is earlier today,
the 16th largest bank in America,
which if you were a Canadian,
doesn't sound like that big of a deal,
because here in Canada, we only have like four banks.
We're also smaller than California
in regards to population.
Yeah, so it wouldn't be a huge deal here.
In America, 16th largest bank.
What?
Okay, so they suffered a good old fashioned
1930s style bank run.
And the tense of its Wikipedia page went from is to was.
There was some indication earlier this week
that the bank might not have sufficient liquid assets.
The stock price of its parent company dropped suddenly.
Venture capitalists advised their clients to withdraw funds.
And those clients rushed to get out what they could
until regulators stepped in.
This is the largest American bank collapse
since the 2008 financial crisis.
Now, here's the thing.
Under normal circumstances,
we wouldn't really be reporting on a bank failure in the US
because it's kind of a big deal, but it's not really tech.
Except that SVB stands for Silicon Valley Bank.
So let's talk about that.
The liquidity issues that they suffered
were heavily exacerbated by inflation, interest hikes,
and the overall weakness of, here it comes,
the tech markets as SVB specialized
in lending to tech startups.
And most depositors were tech workers
and VC backed companies.
Much of the bank's deposits, and this is wild,
were uninsured.
Now, this is not in our notes,
so you guys will have to forgive me
if I've got the exact details wrong,
but my understanding is that deposits were insured
up to a maximum of $250,000.
I believe so.
Now, this is something that is, you know,
from a, I would say from an individual standpoint,
very much a first world problem.
But most banks that I'm aware of do in fact have a limit
to how much your balance can be
before it just goes beyond what their insurance will cover.
And in the event of a bank run or insolvency
or other kind of, hey, poof, the money's gone event,
it is simply not covered.
It is irrecoverable.
So there's, so the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation
or FDIC.gov says that standard deposit insurance amount
is 250K per depositor per insured bank
for each account ownership category.
So 250K is insured by government.
So companies on company scale, 250K-
I was getting to that.
Is smaller.
From an individual standpoint, right?
Lots.
Oh, I'm sorry.
Your $251,000 is not fully covered in your bank account.
Boo hoo hoo, cry me a river.
So 250K, you're a person, whatever, that's tons of money.
That's a lot of money to have in the bank.
But let me tell you something.
From a business standpoint, look around you, okay?
Right, do the math.
How many people work here?
I think we're over a hundred now, we're close to it.
Does anyone know what like minimum wage is here?
In, we don't pay minimum wage.
I know, but like I'm doing like-
In BC?
I think it's like 14, let me look it up.
Okay, okay.
So we've got a hundred people, okay?
1565 per hour.
So let's assume that we paid minimum wage, which we don't.
Okay, so that would be $1,565 per hour.
What does that work out to in a work week?
Let's say everyone was working 40 hours.
We have full-time employees.
We're just doing this math live here.
That would be $62,600 per work week,
which is only half of a pay period.
So times two.
Assuming, assuming that we paid minimum wage,
which again, we do not,
that would be $125,000 per pay period.
Not including all other expenses.
Not including all other expenses.
Not including the fact that we, no,
in fact do not pay anyone here minimum wage.
Not including the fact that you should have
more than one freaking pay period
in your bank account at a time.
So in the event that our company, say,
were to experience an event like this,
where right now, anyone with their deposits in SVB,
if they didn't get them out already,
and even if they did get them out,
if they sent, if they withdrew money via a wire,
like they sent out a wire, there is no guarantee.
Now that the bank has,
my understanding is it's simply been seized
by the federal government or something like that.
I don't know.
Yeah, so sorry for any little details here,
but effectively its assets are under control
by a third party now.
If that money simply does not come out, it's gone.
Now there is some, so if that were to happen here,
we would just be out whatever was in that float account.
And given-
At least temporarily when you have bills to pay
and salaries to fulfill.
Exactly, because if you factor in that this is a bank
that specializes in startups,
where they are theoretically putting their VC raised money
that they are running off of, this is-
These are highly operational funds.
Yeah, this is wild.
This could be, even if, even a profitable company, okay?
We are a profitable company,
but if you took our operating capital and just,
even if you didn't eliminate it,
if you froze it indefinitely, how do we run?
How do I pay for whatever services you're logged in?
Flow plane, how do I pay the bill?
How do I pay you?
How do I pay that guy?
Look how sad he would be if he didn't get any money.
This is wild.
And you know what?
It's one of those things where it's something
that Yvonne and I have actually talked about.
In Canada, the banking industry is fairly well-regulated,
pretty solid.
During 2008, we kind of survived, stuff like that.
We were pretty steady up here.
But I can tell you guys from my own research
that the limit, so we used to bank with a credit union
specifically because there was no government-imposed limit
on how much they could insure.
That was the reason we did it.
So we could have a million dollars or $2 million
or $3 million sitting in the bank as our operating funds
or to cover upcoming deposits or expenses for merch
or whatever else it is.
We could have that sitting there knowing that in the event
that something went catastrophically wrong,
it would be covered by insurance and we would get it back.
But that actually changed, I think about a year ago.
It was in the last year or two.
I know that for sure.
And so I gotta be honest with you, you.
We are pretty much in the same situation.
Oh, just, but not with,
so if this happened to the bank that you're with.
And so reading about this as a business owner-
Terrifying, absolutely terrifying.
It's petrifying.
I would basically roll into the office and just like,
I just sit there.
What can I do?
How do you run a business with no capital?
And now it is possible that a sale of SVB
and its assets and its liabilities presumably,
could be negotiated.
But I pretty much promise you that whatever those,
whatever cash it owes, if you get anything back from it,
it's gonna be less than 100%.
They're gonna negotiate some reduced payout.
And you don't know which part of the queue
you're gonna be in,
in regards to people that get their money first.
So like-
Yeah, well, that was a whole thing that happened,
we saw with the NCIX bankruptcy,
where depending on where you were in the chain of creditors,
even if they extracted any money from the shareholders
who turned tail and ran away,
it was never gonna make it to you.
The lawyers or whatever,
HoldCo is currently dealing with the sale and stuff.
They're gonna want their cut too.
Yeah, they get paid no matter what,
which is really interesting to me.
Yeah, so like, there's some funky stuff.
It's gonna be interesting.
Yeah, Top Gear 1224 says, 100% honest,
this is why companies use stocks as bank accounts,
not just stocks.
So I was recently made aware
of something called a land bank.
So here in Vancouver,
where real estate generally does one thing,
it goes like this,
though not necessarily the case lately
as some of the folks here who have been on the market
can attest to,
and also I can attest to,
as someone who bought at the peak, the lab,
I get reports from our commercial realtor every once in a,
well, prices are going down, it's exciting.
I'm sitting here going,
yeah, that doesn't help my mortgage, bro.
Anyway,
right, the concept of a land bank
is that you just buy land because cash,
like, okay.
This is something that Yvonne and I
were talking about recently,
the concept of like investments being risky, right?
Investments carry an inherent risk.
So buying something like the lab,
something that an investment that has gone down, right?
An investment carries risk.
And it's like, yes, that's true,
but literally every asset class
can be seen as an investment on some level.
Like here, here's something interesting.
Did you know that the Canadian dollar
has lost 5 cents to the US dollar in the last three weeks?
I know that because I saw it on your screen, but yeah.
So the mere act of having cash in the bank,
not invested is an investment.
A good one.
Well, with inflation being what it is, I would say no,
but it is certainly an investment.
So this is where the concept of a land bank
was introduced to me where it was kind of like,
well, here's the thing.
You actually can't trust cash.
Gold kind of sucks these days.
What, crypto?
I mean, sure.
If you like riding the roller coaster, baby.
So that's why a lot of wealthy people
just put their assets into land because,
and this is the way the person explaining it to me,
explained it, they were like,
well, here's the thing about land.
They're not making more of it.
I mean, Dubai would have something to say about that,
I suppose, but in general.
Most places are.
Yeah, in general, they're not making more of it, right?
And so coming back to sort of the reason
for having this conversation,
we're already looking around the lab going, holy crap,
we're gonna rent a space in this place.
And I had wanted to explore the idea of, I don't know,
renting the unit next door or in the long-term,
because my understanding is
there's a long-term tenant there now.
So I'm kind of sitting here going, okay,
maybe if we could scrape together a down payment
between now and when that lease expires,
maybe we could acquire that.
And I was informed that the owner is using it as a land bank
and is therefore utterly uninterested in selling it
because they aren't looking to profit.
They're looking for a safe haven for their money.
And based on this SVB news, that's not crazy.
That's just sound financial planning, apparently,
when you just like have $10 million
that you don't want to just disappear
because there was a bank run.
Anyhoo, sorry, I went off on a bit of a tangent there,
but this is mind blowing.
This also is going to be quite the developing story
over the last little while.
I just Googled companies with cash stuck in SVB
because we've had a bunch of people mention Roku, right?
So we haven't said it on this part of the show yet,
but Roku has 26% of its cash stuck in SVB,
which as far as my understanding goes right now
is $487 million.
I don't know what's more surprising,
the fact that they have $487 million stuck in SVB
or the fact that they have almost $2 billion in cash.
Roku, really?
Yeah, crazy.
Go figure, Roku be ballin'.
They're doing good apparently.
Like in cash.
Yeah.
Dang, how many people does even work at Roku?
We'll see moving forward.
Yeah, I don't want to joke with that,
but Googling this, the top stories thing on Google,
there's a post from two hours ago,
there's a post from one hour ago,
and there's a post from 10 minutes ago.
This is very, very much a currently developing story.
There is some cool stuff.
There's some white nights already showing up,
even though it's been like literally hours,
like Vercel, Linear, some other companies.
I know this because I'm just creeping Fiyo T3's Twitter,
but these companies are stepping up and saying like,
if you are a customer of ours and you're impacted by this,
like reach out, we might be able to help you.
I don't know who you're calling.
There's even like, some of them are talking about,
okay, we can suspend like,
or delay payments while you figure out your accounting.
Like some companies are being very cool about it,
but yeah, this is going to be quite yikes for a while.
I don't know what I want to get into.
Hey, your money is not an SVB, is it?
Oh, I think I know who this is.
SVB, Silicon Valley Bank, it's Linus.
No, no, I just mean like you guys don't keep your money
there, right?
Silicon Valley Bank?
Okay, just checking.
You're with Chase, cool.
Oh yeah, SVB experienced a bank run.
They're like gone essentially.
Yeah, I guess you haven't been on the internet
in the last few hours.
Anyway, I'm live on Wancho, I got to go.
All right, later.
Okay, bye.
Cool.
This is the NAS software company
that I literally wrote a check to like a month ago.
What about Framework?
I don't know.
And if I did know, I wouldn't be able to say anything,
but this is the one that I was most worried about
because these guys are very much
in like stealth mode right now.
They have absolutely, like Framework has cashflow.
They're selling laptops.
That helps a lot.
You can refill the coffers.
That helps a lot.
Okay, actually, you know what?
It occurs to me that Linus Media Group
would probably be okay
because we could borrow from Creator Warehouse
where we have consistent cash coming in.
Linus Media Group, I mean, think about it.
Many of our customers are probably impacted.
Yep.
So, oh crap.
Yeah, that's not good.
Oh, I got to talk to accounting.
Oh, balls.
Anyway, the point is Creator Warehouse.
Oh, shit.
Sorry.
That was quite the thing to win.
Does any other company need a Wancho producer?
I mean, producer.
Dan, how dare you apply for another job?
Live on this show.
He's not very professional.
I'm not giving him a good reference.
Yeah, just make sure you send me the link
to your job postings
and I can find out how to apply.
Holy shit.
That's a good reference, by the way.
Any who, yeah, we would be okay
because we have money coming in regularly.
Yeah, not in large chunks from corporate partners,
but piecemeal from individual customers.
That would mean that Creator Warehouse
could lend us money to operate
and we would probably stay, we'd probably be fine.
So that was my point was that if you have regular income,
probably you can ride this out a lot more easily.
But if like this NAS software that we,
I mean, I have no idea
if I'm going to get anything back from this.
They just, they're creating a product
that I really want to exist.
It's like a simpler user-friendly
and yet still powerful NAS solution
for DIY and enthusiasts.
And they are completely in like noses pressed
against the screens, getting it going mode.
Clearly.
Yeah, clearly.
Because it's like, I don't know,
seven o'clock where he is right now.
And he hasn't received like the biggest tech news
and startups in a long time.
So he clearly focused.
I have a question for you.
That's good, that's good.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
I have a question for you.
Oh.
This is the amount of pain.
If you are, so you've invested in that company,
you've invested in framework.
I wouldn't really call you an investor
because you invest right now in things
that you just like want to exist.
I would describe myself as like an activist investor.
Yeah, yeah.
I went in in both cases.
Oh, how do I say this without it coming across the wrong way?
Not expecting a return.
Yeah, I went in in both.
If there's a return, I'm gonna be like, cool.
But like we talked about last week,
the reality of it is if I really wanted more money,
my biggest investment is Linus Media Group Inc,
Creator Warehouse Inc, and Floatplane Inc.
If I wanted to have like truly fuck you money,
that would be the way to do it.
I kind of danced around it last week,
but it was a nine figure offer for the whole shebang.
I guess you technically danced around it.
Some people misunderstood, which is remarkable.
Anyway, the point is it was a nine figure offer.
If I wanted money, I could get money.
The reason, the biggest reason I didn't take the money
is that at the end of the day, I don't have,
I don't aspire to a yacht.
Yeah.
A yacht lifestyle.
You'd be so bored.
You would actually hate that trip.
I think I guarantee, I've received photos from him
when he's on vacation, like standing on the beach
with like the I am so bored here face.
He's not gonna be entertained by a yacht.
I wouldn't even bother renting a yacht.
I don't even need to know.
Even if it was free, he'd probably be like,
I'd rather not.
I already know I don't need it.
So anyway, the point is that a big part of the reason
that I didn't take it is that my life would not be
materially changed by having a giant dragon hoard,
which is obviously a super privileged position,
but it also means that I get to just do stuff like this.
So I get to just say, hey, that's something
I really want to exist.
I know you guys are super cool.
And even if I never get anything out of it, this is great.
I will be the most hands-off investor
that you have ever had.
Like, it's really funny because even internally,
people will want to know like what's going on
with framework and stuff.
Cause it's like interesting technology.
And I'm like.
Stuff.
I read about it in the tech news, same as you.
Here's the actual question though.
Yes.
If that wasn't your method of investing.
Yeah.
If you were investing for profit.
Yeah.
I mean, to be clear, I don't mind profit.
Yeah, yeah.
But if this was what you did,
if you were a VC.
Oh, like I'm an investor.
Yes.
Like that's what I do.
Yeah.
Sure.
So I'm just, I'm putting you in this position.
If this happened to one of the companies
that you invested in and they're screwed.
Do you put in more?
Yeah.
I mean, it depends if I even have it.
What if I bank it?
Let's let's assume.
Sorry, I missed the beat, but what if I bank there?
Let's assume in this situation that you have the cash.
Okay, I bank at bank of America.
That's the only bank in America I can think of.
I bank at HSB, I don't know.
Sure.
Sure, whatever.
Cause in this situation, you like reinvesting.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Reinvesting, let's say you reinvest the same amount.
Reinvesting means you just doubled the investment.
Yeah.
So you're not getting your return.
Yeah, you haven't.
And like, I would imagine the paperwork
of putting that investment into it means
you've probably increased their valuation or whatever.
Like, I don't think you can just be say,
I need to replace the money that disappeared.
Cause you already have the shares
that presumably you were issued
based on that initial investment.
The fact that they like it away in a bank
or whether they pissed it away or lost it.
Yeah.
Or lost it or whatever.
Like the vehicle by which they lost the money
cause they bought, I don't know,
the 300 Herman Miller chairs or whatever.
Like it doesn't matter how they lost it.
It's gone.
That doesn't mean you didn't get your shares.
You've got your shares.
So if you give them more money,
well, I think they would have to dilute.
They would have to issue more shares
or you would have to find some justification
for the valuation to be higher or something
or some combination of the two, right?
Like you can't have something for nothing.
Oh.
So it would be fucked.
Yeah.
Cause I'm wondering what's going to happen
to certain companies right now.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And like there's this brutal cycle
that we just went through, right?
All of, and there's been a bunch of news articles
about this earlier this week,
literally I was reading one of them.
There's been this cycle that has happened
where a bunch of very good tech employees
were laid off recently, right?
Yeah.
And a lot of these like hard hitter,
big time tech employees spun up startups
in the last like month or two.
And a lot of these startups are like
looking really good actually.
But if they're banking here,
they might've just lost all of their VC money
that they just raised like that.
So people are talking low interest loans
is something you could do.
I can tell you from researching it,
you can't just issue like a 1% interest loan.
Even if you're just super dupey, definitely best friends.
The government's going to be like, hold on a minute.
Yeah.
This looks like a gift.
Oh man, there's people on Reddit,
apparently this is in floatplane chat,
people on Reddit posting about how their payroll companies
went through SVB so they weren't getting paychecks.
Like the fact that this is the bank of the cradle
of modern internet technology, it means that there's,
we can't even predict all the things
that are going to go wrong because of this.
Because one of the weird things is, like I said,
I Googled companies with cash stuck in SVB, right?
And the main thing that shows up is Roku.
I suspect over the next few days, week, month,
we're going to hear about a lot more companies
that had their stuff stuck, right?
Wow.
Okay.
The assets of SVB were specifically seized
by the FDIC, by the way.
Okay.
So government's got it.
Okay.
Well, good luck everybody.
Oh, do not like-
Really, really, really brutal.
Yeah.
The ramifications of this, not only is like
the main news cycle going to take quite a while
to actually pick up the impact of this,
but the ramifications of this are going to go on
for an extremely long time.
Silicon Valley Bank has been around for a while
and they've been a big deal in startups for a while.
This is going to be a massive, massive change
in how people do business.
Because it's been like a default for a lot of people.
Yeah.
Oh, you got VC money?
Time to go to Silicon Valley Bank.
This is what you do.
Got people saying the government is the reason for this.
It is not that simple.
Like a bank run doesn't just happen because the government.
I don't know.
I don't know a lot of those types of things.
There's a lot of stuff.
Like, I don't know how much of this is true,
but Floatplane Chat is just exploding right now
with apparently insiders at SVB selling shares
in the weeks leading up to this.
I mean, obviously they wouldn't figure this out
at the last second that they didn't have cash reserves
to cover their withdrawals, right?
So, man, apparently Roblox has money in SVB.
I don't even feel bad for them though.
No offense.
They're rolling in it.
I'm sure they'll be fine.
Yeah, I think they'll figure it out.
Wow.
All right.
Okay.
Well, neat.
Good luck, everybody.
What do you want to talk about next, Mr. Luke?
Should we talk about that?
I think that's funny.
The pouch?
Sure.
Last week we announced this.
It's a pouch that holds technology,
but we were informed that that name
that we announced for it is in fact trademarked.
How anyone managed to trademark a descriptive name
is baffling to me because when we went through the process
of trademarking the name of our joystick covers,
which we'll go on sale at some point,
they're little silicone covers that go on your joysticks.
Is that the thing that was in the bag last night?
No, different one.
Okay.
No, they're not for grip when you're gaming.
They're for travel.
Oh, so they're like protection
so you don't get drift and stuff.
We hope.
Yeah.
We don't guarantee anything.
No, that would be a bad idea.
We're not making any claims about anything,
but they go over your joysticks and they lock them in place
when it's sitting in a bag or in storage or-
Tight end, oh no.
When you're traveling or whatever else.
So anyway,
when we were going through the trademark process for that,
we wanted to call them stick locks
and we wanted to trademark that.
And we were basically told, yeah,
you can't really trademark a name that is simply descriptive
of the function of the product.
So how anyone managed to trademark TechPouch
is sort of baffling to me.
It's cool to me that the owner of the TechPouch trademark
apparently considers us an important enough rival
to bother to send a cease and desist to.
But any who.
We need a new name.
The point is we need a new name.
And we need a new name so that we can relaunch the page.
Cause if you notice it was taken off the site.
Yeah, so it holds tech.
I mean, it can hold anything.
We have a couple of ideas.
Do you want, do you want it?
I mean, I wouldn't recommend putting a sandwich in it.
It could though.
Yeah, but these are fabric materials.
They're fairly absorbent.
If your sandwich gets a little leaky,
get like some mayo in there.
I don't know if it would be great.
That'd be not great.
I don't need like sandwich mayo and this thing.
Anyway, the point is that we've got a couple of names.
Yeah, do you want to create a poll?
Yeah, yeah.
Idea number one.
Where does this go?
Yes, idea number one, gamer pouch.
Once again, I think that would be pretty difficult to,
pretty difficult to trademark.
So it shouldn't be an issue.
But my problem with that is it sounds an awful lot like,
you know.
Yes, yeah.
Gamer pouch.
Okay, other idea.
Mini tech sack.
That has its own, that has its own innuendo problems.
Tynan said tech bag of holding.
We also call the.
The big area in the backpack.
Yeah, we call that like the compartment of holding.
So I don't know.
Bag of tech.
Yeah, that's, that's pretty funny.
Linus is tech sack.
Okay, I appreciate the suggestions, floatplane chat.
I don't know that we're going to go with any of those.
Gadget bag, nerd bag, the pouch, tech tips pouch.
Yeah, you also don't.
Yeah, like we, you could take the mini off.
It could just be tech sack.
Yeah, it could be tech sack.
You want to throw tech sack in there?
I said tech sack in the.
How about tech tips pouch?
Tech tips pouch?
Yeah.
It's not tech pouch, it's tech tips pouch.
All right.
LOM says tech sack is fine.
I kind of like tech sack.
Yeah, tech sack's not bad.
Thanks bro.
Yeah, yeah, it's pretty good.
We could call it LTT pouch.
Yeah, yeah, that's actually not bad.
Throw LTT pouch in there.
LTT pouch?
You should probably.
I feel like we're going to have to do like a read,
like we pick the highest two and then re-vote.
You should throw pouchy McPouchface in there just.
To make sure that we're,
we've got the internet culture represented.
Would we actually launch that?
I will do, I will commit to whatever the audience
ultimately votes for.
I can actually feel Nick's cringe from here.
The energy is strong.
At least temporarily, at least temporarily.
We will.
Jane said NCX pouch.
I think we actually couldn't do that.
No, we couldn't do that.
That would definitely be an actual trademark issue.
Okay, yeah, let's go with what we've got.
Let's launch the poll.
That is six options.
Okay, hit it.
All right, oh man.
I need to see.
Who immediately takes off.
Pouchy McPouchface with almost 100% of the vote.
Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha.
Why did you agree to that?
Okay, more serious votes are starting to come in.
Pouchy McPouchface held 90% for like 30 seconds.
And tech sack looks like it's going to come away with it.
We'll do, we will do a play off between the top two
and we'll see how it comes out.
Tech sack is cruising.
Yeah, tech sack is making up a lot of ground here.
Why don't we, why don't we change gears a little bit here
and oh man, Luke, we've got so much stuff
to talk about this week.
We've got a secret shopper update.
Yeah, but we don't normally do our own stuff
in the first four announcements.
No, this is Dell.
Dell reached out to me out of nowhere being like,
hey, we have no idea if you have a secret shopper planned
or anything like that, but we're ready.
So I figured we'd talk about that.
But first, why don't we do an update
on the whole Tarkov situation?
Okay, yeah.
Chat's asking about like a parent,
I'm sorry, what happened to GOAT?
Like it got root kitted or something, what?
Like it's systems down.
People have been arrested in China.
What is happening?
Literally not one time that we've talked about GOAT
or his videos on Wancho have I expected
we were going to talk about GOAT or his videos on Wancho.
So I am yet again apologizing to GOAT
because I wasn't prepared for this,
but he has released his third video on the topic now.
It started with the wiggle that killed Tarkov,
which is currently sitting at 2.2 million views.
Wow.
But his most recent video is I was attacked
and he talks about some of what happened
in the aftermath.
One of the things that he points out
is that he was told by a number of people,
including me, that he should have wiped his drive
after all that happened.
And he did not.
And one of the things that he tried to do-
Why don't you explain why?
Well, he installed their software on his local system.
We gotta get people up to speed.
Okay, okay, okay.
So what happened was GOAT or also known as Goat Moth,
a creator in the Tarkov space,
Escape from Tarkov, a video game that I
and a number of other people play.
Oh, are we good?
Okay.
He made a video called The Wiggle That Killed Tarkov,
which was an investigative journalism piece on-
It was fantastic.
On cheating in Tarkov and how-
The pervasiveness.
And how much worse it is than most people realize
because of the type of cheats that people use.
A lot of people, when they're thinking about cheating
in first-person shooter games,
the main thing they think about is aim, yeah.
Another thing that people think about is wall hacks,
stuff like that.
But usually you think about the obvious forms of cheating.
And in Tarkov, it's not necessarily the obvious forms
that are the most pervasive.
It's the things that aren't very obvious
unless you are also cheating.
So he had to cheat in order to reveal this issue.
He then followed up talking about how his account
that he cheated on did get banned,
but he knew that was coming.
He didn't hide his RAID IDs or anything,
so it was very easy for them to detect.
And lots of things have happened in the aftermath.
We covered some of this, I believe, in last show.
But even more than that. But anyway,
after the video, you advised him
to completely wipe his drive, fresh install.
And the reason for that was because
in order to expose the cheaters,
GOAT installed the same cheat software that they were using,
which, I mean, I don't want to generalize,
but if I was gonna generalize,
I would say that if you're a developer
of cheating software for video games,
you're probably not the most...
It's very likely if you download cheats for a game,
that you are also downloading things
that you probably don't want on your system.
Whether that is...
And it's probably, well, I'm saying
if you develop cheats for games,
you are probably selling software.
Your morals might be a little questionable.
That people shouldn't have on their system.
Yeah. So it's quite common to have Bitcoin miners,
or not necessarily Bitcoin,
but coin miners installed on your system
that are gonna run in the background
that you don't know about.
Stuff like that.
It's also very possible that,
like in this particular situation,
they install a rootkit on your system
that they can do basically whatever they want with.
And he went to try to get some...
In his original video,
he talked about how he didn't want to interview
the cheat developers.
For this video,
he has interviews with some anti-cheat developers,
and he wanted some voice clips from cheat developers.
And he thought, you should watch the video.
Don't get everything from the WAN show.
For real.
Yeah. It's actually like, I'm not going to...
It's a 16 minute video and it's packed.
No, I just mean in general.
Yeah. Also that.
But he wanted like a voice clip
from the people that developed the cheat
that he used in particular,
because he brought up,
it had gone undetected for three years.
So he wants to hear them,
like being really cocky about it, basically.
Sure. He reconnected to their discord.
They now have some form of verification
and they figured out that it was a new user
from the same...
I don't know if...
I don't remember all the details.
You should watch the video.
But they figured out that it was him essentially.
Yeah. And then just like
nuked his drives.
Wow. Couldn't boot anymore.
Couldn't even find the drives
when like looking through BIOS or anything.
He thinks they killed like the drivers
on his NVMe drives.
Killed the drivers?
I don't know necessarily.
I haven't looked into it enough.
There's a few ways that that could happen.
Sure.
Without having access to stuff.
I have no idea.
I'm not good enough to make enough assumptions to know.
The controller.
If they're NVMe drives, they're like...
It's not a hard drive.
So you can fry those in a variety of ways.
Right. To be honest.
In hard drives, there's other bad ways you can do it.
And I have since told him like,
yeah, it could also be in your BIOS at this point.
Yeah. So that's a whole thing that also came out this week
that there's...
Oh crap. I forget the details.
But basically there's the first instance of...
It's been theorized for a while.
But there's the first instance of like a firmware-based
malware that can survive a complete system reformat
because it can fool all the trusted boot job.
Oh man. Yeah. Secure boot.
It can fool secure boot and like all the trust elements
in that chain that protect the pre-operating system loading.
Actually even pre-UEFI loading environments.
So that's a whole thing, man.
Like seriously,
malware that can survive a complete system format
and then just go and reinstall itself.
We've had stuff that can hide in BIOS for a while.
That thing that you're talking about is different.
This is pre-BIOS though.
Yeah.
Yeah. Which is like bad.
Oh yeah. That's super bad.
That's even worse.
Yeah.
Anywho, in order to install something like that,
they would need admin authorization on your computer.
But the thing is when you run an executable.
Yeah.
Guess what that is.
Yeah. So, so that was, that was kind of rough,
but I mean, Ghost's doing okay.
He got, he got a, he got a 2.2 million view video.
He's probably, he's probably doing all right right now.
Yeah.
And he can probably replace some drives.
Yeah. So he pitched those drives.
Hopefully that's the extent of what needs to happen there.
But there's also some other crazy news that happened
that he reported on in that video and you should watch it.
Cause he has some interviews with the devs of a game
that I don't remember off the top of my head right now.
We don't have notes for this.
I didn't know we were going to talk about it today.
And the interviews are very interesting.
And they talk about how they have totally,
their game was like overrun with cheaters.
And they talked about what they did in order to fix it.
And now there's like public community posts by users,
like players of the game talking about like, yeah,
it's a completely different world.
I don't run into any anymore.
Wow. That's cool.
And their whole approach makes a ton of sense.
And we've talked about it on Wanshow,
where they just have a bunch of systems in place.
And they, he talks about it,
they call it like the Swiss cheese approach or something.
Cause like each system is going to have some holes,
but you just have enough of them that eventually
you're not going to be able to make it all the way through.
Yeah. And maybe some can,
but like they've gotten it to a point where it's so low.
I mean, we've talked before about how there are cheats
that are literally a robot arm playing the game
that no anti-cheat can detect.
But that's not fun.
Yes. Yeah.
Very few people are going to set up a 3D printer
to move the mouse around for them to play the game.
Like that's not.
You just get to observe, maybe some RMTers will and stuff,
but like you're really massively reducing the impact.
Yes.
But like, yeah, so you should watch it,
those interviews are really cool.
Most cheaters want to press the button
and feel like a Chad cause they, you know.
I'm sick of this game.
Or whatever, right?
So I feel like for most cheaters,
that's not going to be that appealing.
Yeah. Yeah.
So, and that's all super interesting,
but one of the things that he talks about in the video,
and again, I don't have notes,
so I'm hoping I'm going to remember this well,
but that cheat that he used,
there's stuff on their Discord.
Man, I wish I could bring this up right now.
There's stuff on their Discord
talking about how the service is offline
and no one can use it right now
because it has to call to a service all the time
and their servers are like gone.
And there's people reporting that
we don't know who necessarily,
but some amount of arrests were made.
Arrests?
Arrests, like people were put in jail
and their servers were seized.
This is a cheat developer based in China.
Now, hold on a second. We have no idea who did this.
We don't know if it was BSG.
We don't know if the investigation was already running
from someone else.
I know that developing game cheats is illegal
in, I think, South Korea.
I think also using them is illegal in South Korea.
But I wasn't aware of any legislation like that in China.
Me neither.
I do know that there is a culture
of Chinese players cheating outside of China.
So I do wonder if maybe there is something
and that's why they go to North American
or European servers is because they might get caught
if they go on local servers.
I have no idea.
No clue. Just a random theory.
Wow. So very interesting.
Like the last story we were talking about,
this is very much a developing story right now.
And I cannot believe, I mean-
The level of impact.
When we first talked about this, I went,
wow, that's really cool.
Fuck that game.
Right?
Like, I love this kind of expose investigative journalism.
And he's done a great job.
Like, you know, good job, kudos and all of that, right?
I didn't expect the explosion on their community last week.
I didn't expect that we're going to be looking
at people getting literally arrested
over the development of this cheating software.
When I was like, oh yeah, I'm going to like quit
for a while because the situation is so bad.
I didn't expect things would happen.
I still haven't played yet,
but like I didn't expect things would happen this fast
that are like, oh, the like main cheat in the whole game
just got deleted from the internet.
Like that's a pretty big deal.
BBC.com, police bust world's biggest
video game cheat operation.
Several luxury sports cars were among assets seized.
Oh, for crying out loud.
Okay, this is awesome.
Were among assets seized in the raid.
Nice cars.
Chinese police and gaming giant Tencent.
They probably go faster than like all the other cars
on the track.
Cause they're like, they're like, sorry.
Cause they what?
They cheated.
Oh my God.
$76 million in revenue.
They stole, they seized assets.
76 million in rev.
How many people are buying this stuff?
Subscription prices for users began at about a $10 a day.
I don't know a hundred percent know if this is the same.
Is this the same one?
When is this from?
I don't know.
This is from March 30th.
Oh, Oh, Oh, two years ago.
Nevermind.
This is old.
This is yeah.
Okay.
I think they posted this to show that.
Yes.
It is very much a thing is a thing.
Okay. Yeah.
Okay.
Yeah.
All right.
All right.
Well, thank you for that.
Wow.
There's a bunch of people posting
in floatplane chat, wanny pack.
Andrew Tate was running a cheating operation.
Got him.
It's not a fanny pack though.
Yeah.
It's not a fanny pack.
If we were to ever do a fanny pack,
I give you my personal Linus tech tips guarantee.
We will call it the wanny pack.
I promise.
As long as it has like a wan, a wan.
It would have to be wan.
Yeah. Color scheme.
But yes, yes, yes.
We will do it.
We'll do it.
Okay.
We should remake the poll.
It's tech sack versus pouchy McPouch face.
Okay.
Guys, come on.
Oh, actually Linus tech tote had a lot
of people asking for it as well.
Should we just do another round
and then do one more after?
I think it's got to come down to two.
Yeah. We'll put these two more options in.
So let's put in the two new options.
So Linus tech tote and, or no, that's the only one.
And then tech sack and pouchy McPouch face.
Okay. Yeah.
Tote is just T O T E right?
Yeah.
Oh man.
Oh, the LTT bag.
That's pretty funny.
Actually throw in the LTT bag.
So just LTT bag.
But it's funny if you say it out loud,
cause testicles.
I didn't get it actually until you said,
it's funny if you say it out loud and then I got it.
I don't know why.
Because testicles.
All right.
Why don't we, why don't we change gears?
And oh my, is there any good news this week?
Ring is giving police invasive user footage.
I mean, we're not just talking like, you know,
porch pirates need a reckoning
and you got to like catch these guys.
We're talking last year.
Ring announced that at the end of this month,
it will require new and existing users
to buy a subscription for basic security features
that used to be included with the purchase of the camera,
including using the Ring app to arm and disarm security,
receiving notifications when an alarm triggers
or customizing the camera to record during an alarm.
It was allowing police access to users cameras
without a warrant or the owner's consent
because the police claimed it was an emergency.
Ring has also been repeatedly criticized
for providing users footage to police,
even when it has no legal obligation to do so.
Ring claims that they carefully review all requests
from law enforcement and ask for revising warrants
when the demands are inappropriate or overly broad.
But last year, Michael Larkin, a Ring user in Ohio
with 21 cameras around his home and business
was asked by police to provide footage
from his outside facing cameras
to aid in an ongoing investigation into a neighbor.
He voluntarily gave them the footage
from the time period they requested.
The police then asked for all the footage
from the day in question, which he declined.
The cameras record in short bursts
whenever there's movement
and it would have taken a long time
to download and send each file.
The police then sent a warrant to Ring
requesting all of the footage from all of his cameras,
which Ring gave them,
including footage from the three cameras inside his house
and the 13 cameras at his business,
which is at a completely separate location.
One of the cameras inside the home
is located in his bedroom.
Okay.
What the fuck?
What the fuck?
Am I the crazy person here?
There's a discussion question that said,
should consumers ever trust a large company
have access to their footage at this point?
No.
Close circuit, man.
Larkin only found out about this
when Ring sent him a notification
that police had been given his footage.
They didn't request or otherwise push back
on the warrant or anything like that.
They're just like, yep,
here's footage from this guy's bedroom.
Hopefully you like watching videos of him banging.
Yeah. Unbelievable, right?
Yeah. No, it absolutely is.
I don't know.
We've talked about this concept for a long time.
We've warned people about like doorbell stuff,
like Ring doorbells for a long time.
This is why.
Yeah, we did a couple sponsor spots
with Ring way back in the day.
I think that was like pre-Amazon acquisition.
And I forget when it happened,
but there was like a fairly early incident
where they were just handing over footage.
And we basically said, look,
you guys need to change this policy
or we're not gonna work with you anymore.
Well, we don't work with Ring anymore.
Yeah, there are solutions for this.
They're not quite as easy and they're not quite as cheap,
but there are solutions for this for doing it yourself.
And unfortunately that's the way it's gotta be
in my opinion.
Especially if you have the cameras inside your house, man.
In the bedroom, I do have, okay.
I was about to be all judgy and say,
well, why would you have a camera in your bedroom
in the first place?
That's stupid or something like that.
But I mean, okay, I don't know.
Maybe they have pets and maybe their pets
like to hang out in the bedroom and they, you know,
like to keep an eye on them for whatever reason.
Like they could have health problems or you don't know.
Right? You never know what someone's situation is.
Maybe there's a very good reason
that they have Conrad.
What the heck, man?
I personally use Eufy cameras in my bathroom.
This is one of our developers.
Surely you must know better.
I mean, he's kidding.
He's a hundred percent kidding.
Yeah, okay.
Okay, it's time for our last poll.
We do need this name.
We need to get this thing relaunched on the store.
The results-
Okay, so is it our last poll?
Yeah, this is our last one.
Because-
Oh, what now?
The tote at 16% of the vote could individually decide
any of the three remaining.
So should we do one more with the three?
No, just two.
We're going down to the top.
Oh, I see.
Yeah, because there's a 1% difference
and 16% of the votes are on tote.
So we'll like actually completely change
which one ends up in the final.
Okay, Linus Tech tote is out.
New poll.
It's tech sack at 26% of the vote
versus LTT bag at 24%
versus Pouchy McPouchface at 35.
Are we picking just the winner of that?
Or are we doing another final round?
Cause here's a question.
We could leave out,
Pouch is clearly going to be in the final.
So we could do a poll just against tech sack and LTT bag.
No, no, let's leave Pouchy McPouchface in.
Okay.
Yeah, I can just, yeah.
Yeah, let's leave the three options in.
Is this the final poll?
Let's make this the final countdown.
Okay.
Cause there's the concern here because the,
the non pouches are split.
I see.
I think if you end it with multiple non-pouch options,
it guarantees a pouch win.
Fine, Luke.
We will do the three-way vote
and then we will do a two-way final.
It's going to last the whole show,
which is really impressive
because WAN Show is like four hours now.
It's ridiculous.
Why is WAN Show four hours?
We've got to fix this.
Okay, that's it.
WAN Show's done, bye.
No, I'm kidding.
I'm kidding, I'm not done.
There's so much more to talk about this week.
How were you not able to find topics to,
oh, oh, this is great.
Okay.
I guess we're going to talk about more LTT store stuff
because this is super exciting.
That's why I couldn't find topics.
What we've been talking about other than Ring,
which I didn't want to talk about because I hate that.
I mean, it's a fair to talk about on the show,
but I just, I just,
we've been saying for so many years not to do it
because of this reason that just happened.
So it's just like,
it's good to talk about.
It's just frustrating.
Actually, you know what?
Let's get the sponsors out of the way
and then we will get to the next thing.
I'm actually very excited for the sponsors.
You're excited for the sponsors?
I am.
Since when are you excited for sponsors,
Mr. Privateer?
Because there's a Dennis integration.
Oh no.
It's all Dennis integrations?
What is this?
Dan's got a whole bunch.
He's got paperwork over there.
So the thing that we're using for WAN show now,
the new software that we're using for WAN show
stores all of the sources in like VRAM.
I see.
So it's like really quick and stable and stuff.
It like filled the card with stuff that Dennis made
for this, for these ad spots.
The VRAM is like,
seven gigs of seven gigs of VRAM.
I have 78 sources.
Anyway, do you want to do your sponsor reads?
I've been practicing all day.
They're worth it.
Okay.
Today's show is brought to you by FreshBooks.
If your math is as bad as mine, you will need FreshBooks.
Minus I know you're not that good with math.
Thanks Dennis.
FreshBooks is an easy to use accounting software
that makes it simple to send invoices and collect your cash.
FreshBooks was created specifically for business owners
and accounting professionals.
So it hits that sweet spot between usable and useful.
Plus it keeps your income and expenses organized,
which is super helpful during the tax season.
It has everything you need to manage your books
like invoicing, expense and time tracking,
automated payments and reports to tell you
how healthy your business is.
If you bank with SVP, not very,
go to freshbooks.com slash WAN
to save 90% on your first four months.
Wow, that was very choreographed.
So sorry.
So you are over there like manually teeing up this camera
and like all these different effects and stuff.
You got a whole script.
Okay, hold on a second.
How many hours today did we dedicate
to these WAN show's monster spots?
30 minutes?
Oh, okay.
You said you spent all day practicing.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
But it only took 30 minutes.
No, I'm hyperbole.
Okay.
The show is also brought to you by Goliath Technologies.
Goliath is a best in class end user experience monitoring
and troubleshooting software.
It allows you to find the root cause of any IT issue
in three clicks or less.
Wow, that is a bold claim.
With Goliath, you can solve even the most complex Citrix
or VMware Horizon user interface issues in minutes
and you get a troubleshooting expert out of the box.
So even a level one service desk can resolve issues
without escalating them further.
The technology comes with embedded intelligence
and automation so you can be set up
and operating in minutes.
And all the policies are designed by experts
and tell you what to monitor for
and how to interpret the data.
So if you have Citrix or VMware Horizon
and are having performance issues, Goliath can help you.
And if you're in healthcare,
Goliath comes with industry only modules
for Cerner, Epic and Metatech.
Sign up for a free trial and save 20%
using the link in the video description.
Man, that is like very fancy.
All these like animations and stuff and everything.
Although that LTT logo just like hanging out
in the middle of the screen looks a little clunky.
And 20% off quote Linus Tech Tips to avail the discount.
Dennis must have wrote this.
Must have wrote, must have written.
Is that also off centered?
Can you bring that up again?
Oh yeah, sure.
Can he do that?
Or is it like 16 different buttons?
I have 34 different buttons.
Oh no, it's centered.
It's just my angle.
20% off quote Linus Tech Tips to avail the discount.
He's trying, he's trying.
He's doing a good job.
Good job, Dennis.
Maybe he needs a proofreader though.
All right, finally, the show is brought to you
by Squarespace.
Building your own website may seem...
Wow.
Thank you, Luke.
That's really helpful.
May seem daunting, but Squarespace is here to make it easier
than figuring out how the self-serve line works
at your local grocery store.
Squarespace is an easy to use platform
to start building your online presence right away.
They offer customizable themes and templates
for your online store, local business, portfolio, and more.
They even look great on mobile devices.
We use Squarespace for the Linus Media Group website
and the LTX 2023 website, okay?
And if you already have a website,
Squarespace makes it super simple to port your domain over.
Their 24-7 support is always there for you
if you encounter a problem,
and you can get started on your webpage today
by heading over to squarespace.com slash WAN
for 10% off your first purchase.
That's how you avail your discount.
Well, that's certainly eye-catching.
Thank you, Dennis, very much for the helpful additions
to our otherwise bland and boring sponsor reads on the show.
We did have some frame rate issues.
Yes, I did notice that.
Next time that you trial stuff like that,
you need to trial it while live encoding.
Yeah, all right, we'll figure it out.
Holy crap, this is a close three-way race.
So that's why I didn't wanna include Pouchy,
because I knew Pouchy was gonna win this,
but then the remaining two are so close.
Tech Sack at 33% of the vote,
LT Teabag at 30% of the vote,
and Pouchy McPouchface at just 36% of the vote.
So it's Tech Sack versus Pouchy McPouchface.
Let's go, let's go.
Last poll, excuse me, last poll.
Hey, we should do a couple of merch messages
for those of you who are new to the WAN Show,
which seems to be a lot of you today.
We've got 21,000 live viewers over on YouTube.
We've got, Twitch is slow.
One moment, please, my dashboard is loading.
Holy crap, this is really slow.
5,600 over on Twitch,
and I have no idea how many are watching on Floatplane,
because we still don't have a
c**t d**ng view counter.
Get owned.
You get owned, own yourself.
Anyway, so yeah, we've got a lot of new people watching.
The way to interact with the show is not through
Super Chats, I almost said merch messages,
not through Super Chats, not through Twitch Bits,
it's merch messages.
And what makes them superior to Super Chats and Twitch Bits
is that while just like those methods,
you can absolutely throw your money at the screen
for no reason other than hoping for acknowledgement
from people that you only know through a little screen
in front of you.
Not only that, but in case we don't get to your message
or just even if we do,
instead of just like lining Google or Amazon's pockets,
you will get merchandise in the mail,
water bottles, desk pads,
whatever we're gonna call this thing
that holds tech stuff and is a pouch.
Oh, man, we've got a new product to announce today
that I'm so excited about.
We'll talk about that later.
We have multiple?
No, no, just one.
Oh, okay.
The point is that if you send a merch message,
just go to lttstore.com
and in the checkout, you can send a merch message.
It'll either pop up down there.
Dan might reply to you.
We might reply to your message live on the show.
And even if none of that happens,
you will definitely still get your order in the mail
and we make lots of really, really good stuff.
So head over to lttstore.com.
All right, do you wanna hit us
with a couple of merch messages, Dan, before we move on?
Sure, the first one I have here is from Michael.
Speaking of building moats last week,
do you think that there's still space on tech YouTube
for new channels to even come close,
as big, as popular as you guys,
or others like MKBHD?
I would have said no.
And then Mr. Who's the Boss broke out big.
I was actually literally gonna say yes,
specifically because of him.
Yeah.
I think he proved it to me that it's possible.
It's hard.
It's not easy.
Yeah.
Yeah, like it's a funny thing
because as the platform has matured
and as the tools to create video
have become more and more accessible,
like, man, the production values you can get
for a thousand dollars today
are better than what you could do for probably 10,000
back when we started.
Honestly, like really, particularly in spaces like lighting.
Lighting has gotten cheap.
It's incredible what you can do.
It was brutal at the beginning.
With cheap lighting these days.
Like you can get high CRI bulbs at Home Depot now.
You know, that's the kind of thing
that just didn't exist 10 years ago, right?
And, but what's funny is that as access to the tools
and as the strength of the platform overall
has gotten better, the competition has also gotten fiercer.
So I would say that today it is easier than ever
to have a video blow up.
Like YouTube algorithmically is so powerful.
But I would say that today it's as hard as ever
to build momentum, to build a large channel,
to build a team.
Yeah, exactly.
So it's a tough.
Cause you might be able to hit,
like if you have one concept
that you've been sitting on for years
and you make like one really sick video,
you might be able to hit with one video,
but continuing that, keeping the role going,
being able to release not only like one, two or three more,
but being able to release one, two or 300 more
is really hard.
And you have to be there for the whole time.
By the way, the poll is really slowing down
in terms of votes that are coming in.
We're only getting one or two trickling in at a time.
And I think we have a winner.
It looks like it's gonna be tech sack.
By 4%.
By 4%.
Wow, that was very close.
Yeah, we can leave it running,
but like I don't.
Yeah, we can let it run a little longer.
I don't think it's gonna change much at this point.
What were we talking about again?
Right, yeah, yeah.
Could you break out?
So yeah, I would have said,
I would have said no until.
I think we have said no in the past.
Yeah, I think, and I will tell you
that initially I thought the question was,
can you still break out in the tech space?
And for that, the answer is absolutely yes,
because I think the future of the platform
is many niche channels, more than these like,
I see us kind of like a department store channel.
And I think that we've seen a shift culturally
away from the one-stop shop,
away from the department store into the niche experts.
And that's a big part of the reason
why we're growing our team.
That's why we're building the lab.
That's why we're hiring engineers
and subject matter experts
so that when it's time for us to really get laser focused
on niches, whether they're display or CPU, GPU,
or cooling or whatever it is,
we're properly equipped for it.
Because I think that a niche that has 100,000 people
that are super dialed into it
is way, way easier to tackle these days
than trying to make broadly appealing tech content
to try to hit a million or 2 million or 10 million people,
especially when there are so many channels
that are doing that broad content so well,
because it's not just us.
I mean, you already mentioned MKBHD, right?
So you're going up against us.
You're going up against Marques.
You're going up against Aaron.
You're going up against Ajay's Two Cents and Austin.
You're going up against all these folks.
You just list names for like 20 minutes.
There's so many.
And then if you went on for long enough,
you might end up with the creators.
We're hoping to have at LTX.
Sorry, we will confirm those eventually for you guys.
We just need approval from these folks
to tell you who's gonna be coming.
So if you asked me that,
I'd say, yeah, breaking out in a niche, no problem,
but building a mega channel,
man, I'm not gonna say that I didn't work hard.
I'm not gonna say you didn't work hard,
but we would be just dishonest
if we didn't acknowledge that there was a significant degree
of right place, right time.
You know what?
It's always kind of funny to me.
Having access to NCX was such a huge-
Even back then, I thought the ship had sailed.
And it wasn't that stupid of a thought, right?
Like think back to when the channel started.
So what was that?
2009, we uploaded the first NCIX Tech Tips video.
So back then, I mean,
how long did web startup social platforms exist for?
Nothing had lasted as long as, what, 2009 to 14 years.
I think YouTube started in 2006, something like that.
So nothing lasted 17, 18 years.
So for me to look at it and go, yeah, I'm three years,
I'm four years late to the party,
PC Whiz Kid and Chilla Frilla and Locker Gnome,
these folks have all got it on lock, right?
Like how could I possibly hope to break into this space?
And it wasn't even that stupid a thing for me to think,
especially with the importance of subscribers
back in that time, right?
Once you had that critical mass, well,
how else could anyone possibly hope to get on the homepage?
Things that mattered back then.
But I ended up being wrong.
So I could be wrong again.
Maybe the next big all-you-can-eat tech channel
is brewing in the mind of someone
who's watching the show right now.
There's also other platforms.
I'm pretty sure they said specifically YouTube,
but I think one of the reasons why we did get a start
and why a lot of other creators around that time
got a start is people were slowly shifting away
from TV at the time.
Absolutely.
Something similar could happen to YouTube.
I don't necessarily,
it doesn't really feel like it is TikTok,
but maybe there's something that comes around.
No, especially not if that US ban goes through.
But like something might happen, who knows?
Who knows what's gonna happen in the world of apps
or other potential websites.
And then content types, like the tech that we talk about,
what is going to be out there eventually.
We're talking about AR stuff,
we're talking about these weird AI integrations.
We don't know the direction
that either of those things are gonna go.
And maybe you are a fantastic source
for whatever that ends up being
and that can be your niche.
Who knows?
Yeah, a hundred percent.
Floatplane chat is hilarious right now.
Absolutely right.
Hashtag not my sack, stop the sack.
Recount, impouchment.
What are you guys, Florida?
Okay, that's an old joke.
That's like going back to, what's his nuts?
Like Gore Bush or whatever.
Any who.
Bring me pouchy or bring me dead.
Oh no.
Okay, we're going back.
You guys should do,
no, I don't think it would be worth the run,
but you guys should do a version
that has like a smiley face on it
and do like a limited run of pochy McPouch faces.
It's probably not worth it.
Speaking of run,
Mr. Wage posted in floatplane chat,
at Silicon Valley bank,
North of 93% of the bank's 161 billion in deposits
are apparently uninsured per a recent regulatory filing.
Whoa, anyway, sorry.
Want to hit us with another merch message, Dan?
Yeah, absolutely.
Oh, sorry.
I'm going to say what you just said,
but I'm gonna say it through the mic.
The tech sack is apparently back up on the store
under the name tech sack.
That was fast.
Oh, what?
It's up.
No one has informed me of that.
That doesn't seem right.
It is up though.
Looking at it right now.
Okay.
Oh, okay.
Okay.
Well, okay, Nick, it's tech sack if you're watching.
Tech sack one.
No, it's as tech sack.
Oh, it's tech sack?
Yeah.
Oh, so it's up?
Yeah.
Did I not say it?
No, I think, I...
I might have misspoke.
I don't know.
No, yeah, you probably didn't.
Okay.
Yeah, all good.
All right.
It's officially tech sack now.
So if you want to get my sack in the mail,
then you can order it.
Floatplane is not happy.
Yeah, Floatplane's never happy.
It's funny because the more people love us,
it seems like the more angry they get with us.
Yeah.
Yeah, and like, we love you back, Floatplane,
and we're never angry with you.
Can I take a moment to just shout out a couple people?
First of all, shout out the Floatplane peeps
who happen to be 32,254 strong these days.
And then I'd also like to take a moment
to shout out the social team
because they have been absolutely...
Annihilating their targets
for Floatplane exclusive content these days.
Not in terms of like the volume.
They hit the volume targets,
but they are crushing it in terms of the quality
of the exclusives that we've been uploading.
This one was really good.
They were hanging out with the engineers
over in Creator Warehouse.
Just a casual 99.5% like dislike ratio
on this test run with our desktop injection molder.
It's just really cool to see some of the stuff
that goes on behind the scenes here
that normally wouldn't get any exposure being appreciated.
There's a meet the team with Yvonne, right?
Yeah, that one actually went up on LMG Clips
as a promotion for Floatplane.
And I think it's gonna stay up for either hours
or a day or two or something like that.
But Floatplane is full of meet the teams
with I think literally dozens of members
of the team at this point.
Kyle's is a recent one that has been very, very popular.
This is a sidebar thing because it's not us,
but Garbage Time also passed 3,000 subscribers.
Sick!
Let's go.
Let's go.
All right, Dan, hit me with another merch message.
Okay, I've got another one here.
Hey guys, since more OLED monitors are being made,
is there really a point to getting one
for somebody who plays mostly first person shooters
and cranks the shadows up,
thus negating one of the points of an OLED?
Wait, how does that negate?
Cranking the shadows up,
I can see where you're coming from, right?
Like if you lift up the dark parts of the image
so that you can more easily identify opponents.
I misinterpreted this.
Yeah, I see where you're coming from.
If all you ever do is play FPS games.
Get a CRT.
Well, no, I would still go OLED
because from a gaming perspective,
the biggest benefit of OLED is not the contrast
or the color accuracy.
Cause like you said, for a competitive edge,
many gamers will totally mess with their colors
or their contrast or whatever else,
the gamma curves and all that.
But from a pixel persistent,
like an image persistence standpoint,
from a pixel response time standpoint,
nothing else modern, like I'm not, CRTs aside,
nothing else modern even comes close to touching an OLED.
So the clarity of the image,
particularly during fast movements,
like if you're whipping the mouse,
it is so much higher than an LCD
that I would rather have a 240 Hertz OLED
over a 500 Hertz LCD.
I say that out of ignorance though,
because we haven't yet been actually hands-on
with a 500 Hertz LCD.
I think we're gonna get to check it out soon,
but that's how I feel about it right now.
Really, really love OLED gaming.
And it's all about that lightning fast pixel response time
and image clarity in motion.
Let me move one more,
and then we'll get to some more topics here.
The last one.
Right, I'm about to deploy
another Stratus FT server for work.
Are you?
Really, here?
Cause I don't know about that.
Oh, sorry, Luke.
Okay, merch message.
This is from anonymous.
Anyway, they basically run the CPU's and RAM in raid one.
What's your favorite fault tolerant,
high availability equipment?
Oh.
That's a difficult question.
Yeah, man, I gotta say,
I was really blown away when I visited IBM
and I got to get hands-on with IBM Z.
Because on the one hand,
I look at a product like IBM Z and I go,
there has got to be a more economical, open source,
like way to do this with off the shelf,
like super micro servers running in a cluster or something.
You know, like the geek in me is sitting here going,
this seems like yesterday's solution tomorrow.
You know what I mean?
Are they really engineering an entire CPU
for one system for like six customers?
Like, is this really the best way to do it?
You know, like that's kind of my gut feeling,
but then you go and you look
kind of like you're talking about.
You look at the way that they build,
you know, raid one directly onto like
into a memory subsystem,
or you look at the way that you can literally
just yank mains power out of this thing.
And it completely doesn't notice.
And it's pretty cool.
I would say that if you want to see me
kind of geek out over fault tolerance,
that's the video to go watch.
Because those things are, what is it?
Four nines they target?
Something stupid like that.
I'm not sure what's on my head, but-
I forget how many nines.
While I look it up,
do you want to explain the concept of nines?
Oh, it's like basically when you're looking
at something like uptime, if you have 99.9%,
well, if you look at an entire year,
the 0.1% that's remaining
is actually a pretty significant amount of time.
So you want to increase your amount of nines,
because if you go from 99.9 to 99.99,
that's actually a very significant reduction
in downtime that you just had.
So increasing, if you say like four nines,
that's the amount of nines past the decimal point
that you have.
So having more nines is more better.
IBM Z reliability.
Four Z15s, their commitment is seven nines.
So on average, 3.2 seconds of downtime per year.
Yeah, see like that's sick.
That's actually kind of stupid.
Yeah, that's kind of amazing.
And so, yeah, it was really cool
not just seeing the hardware
and like pulling cords out of it or whatever,
but some of what didn't make it into the video,
unfortunately, just like talking to the people
who work on and who designed these systems was very cool,
because it's a completely different mindset.
Like you talk about running RAM in RAID 1, right?
I think to the average gamer, if I said,
hey, you can experience three minutes less downtime per year
and all it'll cost you is spending $600
instead of $300 on your memory.
They look at you like you're a fucking idiot, right?
Apparently it includes the first two nines.
Oh, okay.
I've been referring to that incorrectly for a hot minute.
All right, my bad.
At any rate, seven nines still wild.
Yeah, so that's five past the decimal.
Yeah.
How would you include the first two?
Whatever.
Hold on a second.
If it doesn't start with 99,
you're having some problems.
Yeah, apparently it does include the first whatevers.
So that is five nines past the decimal.
Anyway, the point is if you told the average gamer,
hey, you can spend twice as much on your memory
and it'll save you three minutes of downtime a year.
Well, they tell you you're an idiot.
Like, no, I think I can handle, what is that?
Two game crashes over a span of 365 days is probably okay
and I'll save my few hundred dollars.
But when three minutes of downtime
could back up all of your client's systems
or cause some kind of catastrophic system fail,
perfect example of this,
when the Canadian debit infrastructure went down.
You remember that?
Or when our Rogers Telco,
man, I'm making Canada sound like some kind of backwater.
It's just the things we're more aware of.
Yeah, so Rogers communications had downtime for like a day.
And my understanding is in the post-mortem to that,
it basically came down to like one system
managed by one person, like had something went wrong with it
it's actually kind of amazing how patchwork our systems are.
I mean, okay, for an example, not in Canada, okay.
You get like one bank that disappears in the States
and all of a sudden it's like, oh, okay.
Well, the Silicon Valley startup scene has no money
so that's cool.
Right?
Like the way that the world is architected
for very few points of failure
that can take down the entire system.
I've said this many times and I don't know,
maybe this is a dumb thing to talk about on a podcast,
but like, if a terrorist wanted to really harm
the city of Vancouver, okay?
Oh, uh, hmm, uh.
All you gotta do is take out like two bridges.
We've had this conversation.
The entire region would grind to a halt.
I'm talking no commerce, no food, like nothing.
We have nothing.
It's mind blowing.
There's that South Park joke.
I love telling people about this
where they talk about the one road in Canada.
Follow the only road.
Yeah.
And then you realize that like at certain parts
of the country, there is one road.
Highway one is actually a very big deal up here.
And when like a bridge goes down
and it happens to be in that area
where there is just one road,
like Canada is split in half temporarily.
Yeah, interprovincial shipping is actually done.
It's out, it's out.
Pontoon bridges for the win, say people.
There are places where I don't think it would be feasible.
How would you put in a pontoon bridge
to replace the Port Man?
I don't think so.
Okay, okay, let's talk about something good about Canada.
I think the Port Man is the longest like suspension bridge.
It's like the longest freestanding suspension bridge
or something like that in something.
I don't know if it's like in North,
maybe it's only in Canada.
Longest suspension something.
Yeah, I'm pretty sure this is a thing.
The Port Man bridge, one of the longest in the world
was constructed using the balanced cantilever method.
Okay, one of the longest in the world.
Well, all right, nevermind.
But it's two kilometers long,
which in real units that anyone cares about
is 1.26.
Okay, what are we talking about?
Canada is just a road and a handful of bridges
and a trench coat.
Kind of, yeah.
No, no, we're real, I swear.
I was always confused by the South Park joke.
And then I was reading the news however many years ago
when one of those bridges did go down
and they were talking about how Canada
was temporarily split in half and I was like, wait.
And I looked on a map and I was like, whoa.
It literally comes down to one road.
In my preteens leading up to thinking about
that I would become a driver at some point,
I asked my mom to explain to me,
because I hear the terms thrown around a lot,
to explain to me the difference between a highway
and another road.
And the reason for that is that one of the major arteries
that we would travel on regularly, one low heat highway,
at the part of low heat highway where we would turn off
into like our neighborhood, like our residential region,
at that part, it had traffic lights.
It was only two lanes, not two and two,
like two lanes, one each way with not even a shoulder.
Like, I don't mean no fancy paved shoulder,
no sidewalk, I mean, it actually didn't have a shoulder.
Not only that, but the left turn that we had to make
into our neighborhood wasn't even traffic light controlled
and there wasn't a left turning lane.
Like you would just stop in the middle
of this supposed highway to perform a left turn.
And the worst part is that that was very rarely a problem.
I grew up in Ruskin, okay?
Cool.
What are we talking about?
YouTube finally relaxes their overly restrictive
profanity policy.
Sort of.
So does that mean I can say words like fuck and shit?
Yeah, so.
I think so.
The point is that it's relaxed, it's not gone.
I think some people interpreted this as like,
oh, we're gonna do whatever we want now.
It's like, no, it's not gone.
Do go on.
Chilling out a little bit.
James has a note here that on Thursday,
we had a short circuit video receive limited monetization
because the host said penis lamp at the 23 second mark.
Penis lamp?
Really?
Yeah.
Okay.
Yeah.
Are you gonna elaborate on this?
Nope, no one gets any topic information at all.
Nevermind.
Recap, in November,
YouTube changed its advertiser friendly guidelines
to be far harsher to obscene language.
We talked about that on the WAN show, among other things.
Communication was poor and the language
of the new guidelines was vague.
The changes applied retroactively,
which is the most brutal part.
Super cool.
Resulting in previously acceptable content
being demonetized without creators knowing why.
Now, after a few months of soul searching,
YouTube has announced a new set of softer
profanity guidelines. Does Google have a soul?
Okay.
Sorry.
I don't know about that.
Their language is still somewhat vague
and it does not address all creator complaints,
but there are now clearer examples
of what is and isn't acceptable.
Examples are always great in these situations.
Videos containing moderate profanity,
like asshole or douchebag or occasional strong profanity,
like outside the first seven seconds of a video,
are eligible for full monetization.
Oh, so I didn't even have to bleep that,
but I felt like it anyways.
Videos containing strong profanity in the first seven seconds
or throughout the majority of the video,
like are eligible for limited monetization
rather than no monetization.
I don't know if holding it works, Luke, but okay.
Does it not?
I'm not sure.
It should, it's just a tone, right?
Dan?
Yes, it works.
Hey!
You hold it for as long as you want.
Okay, cool.
Yeah, thought so.
Videos demonetized after November's Changes
will apparently be re-reviewed in the coming weeks.
Interesting.
So stay tuned and maybe your livelihood something.
Maybe.
According to YouTube, November's Changes
wound up being far harsher than they had actually intended.
There's a discussion question.
YouTube has to balance its relationship with advertisers
and its relationship with creators.
Is it striking the right balance?
Is it enough to fix these oversteps after the fact?
I think the biggest problem is that it was retroactive
and it didn't have, it wasn't clear enough.
Yeah, so as long as they're communicating clearly
and they're not going back through your catalog,
I think that the longer YouTube exists,
the more they're going to have to reckon with the fact
that some of the content on their platform was,
and this isn't an excuse.
There was an edgelord era on YouTube.
But it was from a different time.
Yeah.
And so whether that means that,
yeah, I don't know the best way to deal with that.
Cause I can see how an advertiser with modern sensibilities
might look at that old content
that some people are still totally watching.
Oh yeah.
And go, actually, no,
that's not really what I signed up for.
I mean, it's been kind of eye-opening.
I've just sort of randomly here and there
picked up episodes of old shows
that I hadn't watched in a long time
from like the early 2000s.
And just the casual sort of gay humor,
casual use of the hard R.
Oh really?
It's jarring.
Yeah, it's jarring now.
And for-
Casual use of hard R.
Yeah.
Yeah, absolutely.
Like, okay, it was an episode of American Dad.
And it was just like-
Really?
Yeah, it wasn't for shock value.
It was just like used.
Whoa.
Well, I mean, here's the thing, right?
That was in 2003 or something, like 2002.
Like I'm not gonna deny
that I dropped my fair share of hard R's back then
because the term hard R didn't even exist.
We didn't think about it, right?
And it's funny because to me,
that doesn't feel like that long ago,
but to my kids-
Are you talking like N-word hard R?
What? No.
Okay, I'm pretty sure that's how people use that term.
No.
I think so.
That's the N-word.
What are you guys talking about?
Am I mistaken?
I think so.
No, the one with the, like for like mental disability.
I'm pretty sure people use hard R
in a very different way than you just used it.
Oh, okay, either way.
Hard R means ending the N-word with a hard R.
I understand what you mean.
No, I'm not talking about that.
Okay, cool.
So I'm glad that we-
I'm freaking Neo over here, dude.
We're dodging bullets.
That was bad.
Okay, yes.
All right.
Thank you for that.
Right, I forgot about the part where I said,
yeah, I just like used it, yeah, no, actually.
I was pretty surprised with American Dad.
And then you were like, yeah, me too.
I was like, whoa.
Yeah, you've known me a long time.
Yeah, that's what, yeah.
And yeah.
Never been a problem.
No.
Anywho.
We can breathe.
Everything's okay.
Cool, so I hope everyone likes not having a job anymore
on Monday because apparently I'm a giant racist.
We didn't lose our money in the bank crash.
Yeah, no, in the audience run.
All right, we're good.
Okay.
We're good.
So anywho, the point is that to like, to my kids,
2002, 2003 is a long time ago.
It's kind of like, you know, 10 years before I was born.
1976 is a long time ago to me.
It's all relative.
I think so.
It's like, yeah, peace, love, hippies.
That's a world that I never coexisted with, right?
And so it was interesting to me how jarring it was,
even though, like I said, to me,
people casually using the R word then, is that better?
I think so.
Okay, casually using the R word was,
yeah, it was surprising.
All right.
So, why don't we do a couple of merch messages?
Yeah.
Okay.
That sounds like a good idea to me.
Okay, this is from Romeo.
Would you guys consider a hot dog or a burger
a form of sandwich or would they be their own food category?
No, I hate it when McDonald's calls their burger sandwiches.
A, because they're burgers,
and B, because I think that sandwich
has a connotation associated with it
that whatever the thing is, is actual food.
And I strongly disagree
that anything McDonald's sells is food.
Heck yeah.
Okay, you want another one?
These conversations make me uncomfortable.
It's like when people ask if cereal is soup.
Like, I don't even, I don't.
No.
I don't want it.
Cereal is cereal.
You would never eat soup dry,
but you can eat cereal dry.
That's the distinction.
Never had like a packet of ramen without cooking it?
Oh, crap.
Ha ha.
See, this is why I just don't,
I don't even want to have the conversation.
I don't want to know.
I want to live in ignorance.
It's just food categories.
It's not going to affect my life.
I don't like, you can't improve my life
by convincing me that, that cereal is soup.
I just, I'm just better off where I am.
Sorry, do another one.
This is awful because yeah,
even if you feel like that's a milked base,
but so is a cream of broccoli soup.
Granola bar.
Granola bar.
If you were to take cream of broccoli soup
and like freeze dry it into a bar.
What if you freeze it into a popsicle type?
Yeah, exactly.
Okay, this is making me uncomfortable.
Let's move on.
See, yeah, I don't like it.
Next one's up from Jacob.
Happy Friday, guys.
I'm an IT engineer that is often disappointed
by mature technologies or protocols.
What consumer or enterprise tech disappoints you most?
Example, Bluetooth printers, AV, SMB, et cetera.
Oh, I mean, well, you nailed it on printers.
Printers is just too easy.
Yeah, that's a super low hanging fruit.
Yeah.
Man, I feel like this is the sort of thing
that I rant about all the time.
I would say voice recognition is a huge disappointment
for me, not because it's terrible compared
to what we started with, but because the promises
were so much better than what we ended up with.
It took me four attempts to call my wife the other night.
I said, call Yvonne Ho Mobile.
And the first time, it got Yvonne Home Mobile,
which I don't have a home number listed for her,
so I don't know why it would think Yvonne anything home
anything because there is no home number.
So it was just like, I'm sorry, who do you wanna reach?
And then I said, Yvonne Ho Mobile.
And it goes, Yvonne How Mobile.
I don't have an Yvonne How in my address book.
So I try again, Yvonne Ho Mobile.
And it goes, and oh man, this is the thing
that makes me most angry.
You know how it'll do like the, like it'll kind of try
to transcribe it to text as you're talking?
So it got it, Yvonne Ho Mobile.
And then it will correct.
And then it like changed it.
Yeah, yeah.
Like, no, you were so close.
You had a perfect match for something
on my physical storage on my device and you undid it.
Yeah, that annoys me.
I'm gonna pick mine as Windows.
Really?
And this is actually kind of why,
because like I actually,
and I know a bunch of people might disagree with me
and I don't really care about that part,
but I actually quite like the design aspect of Windows 11.
I like how it looks.
I even have been won over by the taskbar thing
being in the middle.
Yeah.
No, no, you're objectively wrong.
I'm okay with that because there's an option to move it.
So I don't care.
Oh, sure, fine.
But like leaving it in the middle is objectively wrong.
Sure, but you can put it to the side if you want.
So it doesn't really matter, right?
But the search has been completely bastardized.
The search just like doesn't work.
Yeah, it's amazing how bad the search is since Windows 10.
That should not be possible.
It shouldn't, it's remarkable.
That's crazy, absolutely crazy.
The search is like the main thing Windows is like
almost four in a user experience way at this point.
And it's garbage.
Like that's-
You mean the start menu, not the same,
yeah, you said Windows,
but the start menu has basically-
No, I mean Windows in general.
And I'll get into more points in a second.
All right, okay, all right.
So the start menu is atrocious
and most users aren't going into things
like control panel these days and stuff,
to be completely honest, most users are not.
So most user interaction with Windows at this point
is just the start menu and the start menu is rough.
Or the desktop.
I know a lot of people who just fart everything
onto the desktop and the start menu.
Yeah, fair enough.
The other reason why I'm frustrated
is there's certain things that like,
I feel like Windows should be doing at this point
that it's not.
And one of those was like,
I was talking to my brother about this the other day,
cause he needed to send me or send someone or me,
I don't remember what the situation was,
but a file transfer needed to happen.
I get it.
How's there no share menu?
Like you have on Android and iOS and Mac OS,
basically everything else, yeah.
How is there no built-in screen recording?
I don't know.
And like how, at this point in time,
I should be able to have,
and it shouldn't have to go through OneDrive, okay?
It should be able to tunnel directly.
I should be able to have a family group.
And if my brother wants to share me some big file,
it should be able to set up an encrypted thing
between us and handle it.
I think I want to revise my answer
because file sharing, it has gotta be it for me.
Yeah.
And like how Windows hasn't taken care of that.
How is it that I am sitting here next to you
and we cannot transfer at line speed
over a simple A to A USB cable
or at full wifi speed over the hotspot
we are both connected to
without going through some onerous,
tedious handshaking authentication system.
It's like, no, it's fine.
It's that guy, it's okay.
Just chill.
Or the fact that my phone is sitting here
and it's not as simple as just like beep boop and it's on.
And now there are ways to do that.
Like for example,
there's actually pretty good file browsing apps
where you can just dump files into SMB shares on Android
and on iOS for that matter, which is more impressive to me,
but it all needs to be premeditated.
I can't just spontaneously be sitting in a coffee shop
next to someone that I'm meeting and go,
here, let me just drag and drop this file over to you.
That is, if Windows 12 doesn't have that,
I'm gonna be sitting there going,
what the they actually been working on.
This is like, I understand there have been improvements.
Okay, so don't just hold on.
But what out of the user experience,
not user experience, in the way that you use Windows,
what has really changed that much?
Since like Vista.
Almost nothing.
Yeah.
Vista was Vista underrated.
And I don't even necessarily want to get into that.
But like, seriously, there have been improvements.
Yes, there's been a bunch of improves.
There's the shell thing now, there's all this kind of stuff.
But for the average normie user,
I don't believe that their Windows experience
has really been improved since maybe, you know,
maybe the average computer can run it a little better now,
stuff like that.
But like, that's not really on them.
And search was better in Vista.
Search was better.
It had some innovations that have actually gone away.
Like the games folder,
that would organize all your games for you.
Yeah.
Like that was pretty cool.
Now every piece of software that has to do with gaming
has decided they're gonna do it.
So I have 87 different game managers on my computer,
because every graphics thing is like,
oh, you can launch our games through us
as if anyone's gonna do that.
And then also Steam, and then also everything else.
It's like, oh my God.
It's just, there's,
the fact that the games for Windows Live is so terrible
is really frustrating.
Like games for Windows Live,
imagine an actually really good version
of like the PC, Xbox app or games for Windows Live.
I know because it's always too bad.
Basically just the worst possible DRM.
But imagine you were like the PM of that,
and you could drive the direction.
Oh, I could've made it awesome.
Yeah, it could be sick.
Maybe, because you have to get the games industry
to cooperate with you.
So that's tough.
If there's a more fragmented industry,
I haven't seen it.
But it has potential that has been squandered.
That's true.
That's fair.
And like, there's so much you could do with Windows
to just make it an awesome experience.
And it's just, ah.
SteveJ3D says, I'm hearing 30 day Vista challenge.
Oh God.
That would actually be very risky for people like us
because of security.
We'd be, we might get harpooned.
But like really, I'm thinking back to like, okay,
from XP to Vista, yeah, there was some changes
in like how I use the computer.
But at this point, like my OS upgrades
have been for compatibility reasons only.
Yeah.
I have genuinely not wanted a new OS
since seven.
Yeah.
Like at all.
And I look back at screenshots of XP
and I feel nostalgic and I like the aesthetic and stuff.
I look back at screenshots of seven and I'm like,
oh yeah, I can just use that now
and it'd be completely fine.
Yeah.
Like, I don't know.
It's very, it's been disappointing to me.
I think that's fair.
Yeah.
Plus no drivers for Vista.
Yeah, but like those are the reasons
why people are upgrading.
compatibility, drivers, security, stuff like that.
It's not like, oh wow, there's this new feature
in the new one that is really compelling.
I can now, just because it's my brother
and I'm in the Microsoft family group or whatever,
I can just send them whatever file I want
from wherever in the world.
Microsoft's gonna find a way to tunnel us.
We don't have to pay for some extra service.
It should be fine, but that's just not possible.
Search is just borked.
So like, I can't find local files
because it's constantly just binging things.
It's just like, oh my goodness, like it's so rough.
I don't know.
Like it's even, it's like even worse
than the voice thing you were describing
where it's like, it's trying to interpret voice
and it gets it right and then corrects it to wrong
which is really bad and dumb.
I literally typed this in.
Yeah.
And it is just like,
You left no room for misinterpretation.
And it still is like, ah, there's some local files
but I'm not gonna bring them up.
I'm just gonna bing it.
Like, stop.
I thought you liked Bing.
Wow, that's super cool, Giancarlo Sar.
Basically a charity raising thing.
That's awesome.
Oh, that's sweet.
Yeah.
I don't wanna get into LLMs
because honestly, until GPT-4 comes out,
it's like not that interesting
but Bing has been neutered super hard.
Let's talk about a new product on LTT store
but not the one that we're actually launching this week.
We are planning a collab
with the original makers of the ModMat.
ModRight.
Oh.
Yeah.
We have reached an agreement in principle
to move forward licensing their trademarks and patents
to create a ModMat product.
But right now we're in the very, very early stages.
We obviously have some ideas
of what we want to make it the best possible ModMat
on the market.
Obviously the place to start for us
was collaborating with the creators of the original
but there are some things that we wanna add.
So I don't know how many of these are gonna make it
from my wishlist into an actual physical product
but some of the ideas that we've had are heat resistant.
Dan, I was thinking of you.
Heat resistance.
So if anyone were to accidentally leave a soldering iron
or a hot glue gun or something like that on one.
Did he do this?
No, no.
Oh, okay.
I just, I think of Dan sometimes.
I gotta go back to HQ too, hold on.
Yeah, yeah.
So if someone were to leave a hot item on it.
So somebody's already tagged me.
Mattie McMatt face.
No.
I'd love to have some kind of embedded like screw management
like kind of like embedded magnets
to kind of just stick iron containing screws
or ferrous screws or whatever else.
Screw sorting area built into the mat.
Onto like a little spot
or maybe it could be an attachment.
I don't know, there's lots of different ideas.
One idea we have already
that I'd really like to move forward with is right now
like whether you pick up one from Uline
or even the original ModMat or anything like that,
the way that you attach an anti-static strap to it
is with that awful like button interface.
I know it's industry standard or whatever.
It's like, that's fine.
But what if you could make it modular?
So what if you had a really strong magnetic interface
that you can stick the button thing on
so that every time you attach your strap,
it just sticks onto there.
Then.
You could theoretically use it for something else.
Then you could have different pieces.
So you could have a little, like a little, okay.
Like, you know, like those little wrist strap things.
So they have like a little bar
and then you put a thing through it
and you tie a wrist strap onto it.
So you could just have like a little bar
that you could clip an alligator clamp to.
Because I mean, that's super annoying, right?
When you have one of those button interface ones
and then you have a wrist strap
that has an alligator clamp, you're like,
this doesn't really, this doesn't really go on here.
So if you could have like a modular interface for that
and it could be magnetic,
that was one of the ideas that I had.
Yeah, so anyway, the point is that there is a post
in the merch section of the forum.
So if you guys have any creative ideas
for what you'd like to see in a mod mat,
talk about what you look for, what you like,
what you dislike, your favorite,
your least favorite and why.
And if you think there are any key features
that are missing from any mod mats
that are currently on the market
and we are gonna try to address it.
We wanna make the best darn mod mat.
And like I said, really, really excited
to be starting from a place where we're working
with like the original creators of the mod mat.
Pretty, pretty cool.
I actually still have my original mod right mod mat
on my build station at home in the basement.
And that was one of the things that sort of prompted me
to finally get off my butt and ask someone else
to do something for me.
No, I was like, Nick was the one who reached out.
You noticed like, this is a little old.
Yeah, it's pretty old.
And I was like, yeah, like what happened to these guys?
Oh, they're still around, okay.
Why don't we reach out?
Because I think that would be awesome.
Very excited.
Can you buy theirs anymore?
I actually don't know.
That's a good question.
I don't seem to be able to on their site,
but I don't know.
They still have copyright 2013, which is pretty sick.
Oh yeah, Dan actually mentioned this before the show.
They're still advertising Firefox 3.
Cool.
Oh, there you go.
Yeah, I recognize that for sure.
Ha, look at this.
Hey.
My unboxing.
This video must still be around.
Wow, that's awesome.
Mod Write Mod Mat unboxing video.
Just casual nine-year-old video.
June 13th, 2013, almost 10 years old.
Nice.
Nice.
Wow, that's awesome.
Oh yeah, no, this is the one.
Or wait, is this the one I have at home?
I'm not sure, it might be the bigger one.
Oh, no, it wasn't seeing it at home that prompted me.
It was seeing the one on Dan's desk.
So I have one of these, and then Dan,
you have one of these on your desk too, right?
That's right, yeah, I do all my electronics on it.
I came with my desk.
This one, right?
That's the one, yeah.
That might be the one.
I'm still using it.
I've seen that around a few times.
Oh my god, I'm having my own starstruck moment.
I get to use Linus' Mod Mat.
Oh my god.
Just relax, okay?
But yes, that is the actual one
from that video nine years ago.
I'm still going strong nine years later, right?
It's literally perfect.
I would not have guessed that it's been in use
for nine years, it's amazing.
Yeah, so we're going for it.
We're going for it.
I'm really excited.
I think we've got the right starting point.
I think we've got kind of some really good ideas
to evolve what is sitting at my build station
and what's on your desk.
That's gonna be good.
Okay, we will finally talk about the product
we're launching this week.
I didn't let Luke touch it,
but this is one that has been in the works
for good gravy.
I'm pretty sure we started this before Bridget joined.
Whoa, okay.
Wait, no, is that quite right?
No, no, it must've been very early in her tenure.
So it's been well over a year in development.
So we completely missed like an entire spring,
winter, fall cycle of availability that we had targeted.
And we are now through the fall and winter
and it's getting dangerously close to the spring
of like the next target for it.
But we wanted to take the time to get it right.
And it's finally here.
It's the 3D down jacket.
Do I go now?
We did a, oh, is that, wait, which one?
That's yours, that's yours.
Oh, no, this isn't mine.
This is the small.
I have mine in my backpack.
Okay, so yeah, you get to play with it now.
So what's really cool about this thing
is the material.
Sometimes-
It feels nice.
Sometimes you start the product development process
with a garment you're trying to create.
The shirt that Luke is wearing, for example,
we set out to create a t-shirt that was really comfortable
and blah, blah, blah, et cetera.
And we sought a material to make it out of.
They can't see any of that.
Actually, Dan, do you wanna man the camera?
Hold on, let me redo it.
With the 3D down jacket,
we found this really cool material.
It's not quite down.
It's not quite 3D printed,
but there is a down layer out of the,
I believe it's 11 layers on the jacket.
Let me double check.
3D printed down fabric features, stain resistant,
breathable, four-way stretch, lightweight, heat retention,
wind resistant, water resistant.
It's not, okay, it's not 3D printed
in the same way that you would imagine like a plastic part,
but it is an additive process.
Did I just, oh, hello, Dan.
I was like, is this a video of how it's made?
Wow.
But it is laid down with an additive process
that deposits the fibers rather than weaving them.
So what that allows you to do
is it allows you to have this kind of cobweb pattern
that puts room between them for better breathability.
And it also makes the insulation
absolutely fantastic for the thickness.
So yeah, check it out.
The outer shell is a blend of nylon and spandex.
I'm assuming this is YKK?
So, of course.
Yeah, YK zipper, water resistant?
Yep, of course.
All the seams are taped.
I believe it's 18,000 millimeters of water resistance.
We never call anything waterproof, water resistance,
internal pockets.
But what's really special about it is the 3D down
or a 3D printed down or whatever you kind of wanna call it.
There is a down component to it.
But the interior material, because it's super insulating,
it's really comfy.
So if you're the kind of person like me
and like I assume Luke who would just be in a t-shirt,
even in fairly adverse weather,
but might want a jacket when he goes outside,
it's really, really nice on the skin.
We spent a lot of time on getting the fit just right.
There is a little bit of stretch in the outer shell though.
It's breathable with good wind resistance.
It's reasonably water resistant.
It's lightweight.
I just absolutely love this thing.
It looks really sharp.
Is there any branding on it?
Just a little bit.
I haven't seen any.
On the very bottom right, I think, of the bottom there.
Yeah, if you stand up, maybe we'll be able to see it.
Whoa, whoa, and he waxed the thing.
There's a little, can you see it?
There's like little dots that make a little LTT.
We're going for really subtle branding on this.
We wanted it to just look really clean.
I'm trying to show it off.
It's a little hard.
Yeah, don't worry about it.
It's fine.
The point is that it's, yeah, it's light, it's comfy.
It's super, super warm for the weight.
And the hood is big enough.
That was something that we actually really struggled with.
That is huge.
Yeah.
I like huge hoods.
They're good.
Cause if you wanted to wear like a toque or something
under it, you actually can.
But there's two things that, okay, again, this took a while.
You can adjust the hood such that,
and the way that it pulls on it, it doesn't have to be huge.
And then there's adjustments around the bottom as well.
Another thing that took us kind of forever together.
There's another one on the other side.
Another thing that took us forever to get right
is the adhesive on the sleeves.
So the sleeves air a little bit on the long side
because we've gotten really good feedback
from people about long sleeves.
But obviously if you want them to stay in place,
you're gonna have to have adjuster things.
Okay, but hold that up to the mic while you rip it off.
It's really strong.
Yeah.
It will not come off.
And it's not like your typical hook and loop fastener.
If you look at it closely, it's like a really cool one
that really definitely super does not come apart.
Funky.
Yeah.
It's got a nice, like almost like rubbery,
like soft touch textile to it too.
Yeah.
I am so, so happy with this thing.
It's really nice.
It's really expensive.
Thanks, Dan.
It's a $250 jacket.
Like our cost is pretty high
because these materials are-
Feels too nice to not be.
Really expensive, but like,
yeah, it is what it is.
People, you know, it's a really funny thing.
Whenever we talk about pricing for stuff,
there's two camps.
There's the, oh my God,
I would never spend more than $30 on a jacket camp.
And then there's the-
Which is fine.
That seems cheap.
I would never spend less than $600 on a jacket camp.
This is also fine, I guess.
And then there's shockingly little middle ground.
It's a really interesting thing
seeing everyone's different perception of value.
Yeah, I don't know.
It's an interesting observation.
WB something, anyway, whatever, in Twitch chat says,
"$250 without apparent branding is weird.
I feel like people who shop on LTT want it to be known."
We want it to stand without the brand.
That's a big part of what we're-
I was happy that there was subtle branding.
Yeah.
Like I, yeah, I like that personally.
So I'm looking for,
I've seen a lot of people picking them up
in the merch messages today,
and I'm looking forward to seeing people's feedback
on the store.
If you're not convinced, don't believe me.
Believe what people post on the store.
I mean, our reviews are basically always excellent.
I really like the feel of the materials.
I'm really confident in this one.
Yeah.
This one's a killer.
It's taken long enough.
I want LTT branding low-key.
I get that.
I could see people wanting it.
I just, so I am someone who went to a lot of shows.
I went to a lot of conventions and my clothing
for many, many years was effectively comprised
of convention clubs.
Gaming companies.
Yeah.
Tech companies.
Yeah.
And now it's comprised of LTT store merch.
Yeah.
And it's kind of nice to have some nice things.
This is a very nice jacket.
It's not a cheap jacket.
I'm kind of happy that it isn't covered in branding.
Right?
You could wear this out to somewhere very nice.
Yeah, of course.
And it would look really sharp.
Cause it's really sharp.
The thing is that stuff is designed a lot of the time
for like, I need to wear it.
Yeah.
I don't want to be...
You guys gotta think about this, right?
On Saturday, I don't want to be a billboard for LTT.
Actually.
I don't want to get approached because people recognize
the merch.
The logo, yeah.
Necessarily.
Yeah.
So when we were putting together like an outerwear item,
I'm kind of sitting here going once in a while,
like I'm into it, I'll wear my swacket out or whatever.
But if it's raining and miserable and I'm cranky,
just on a black jacket, just don't talk to me.
To be clear, it's fine.
It's fine to talk to me.
I'm super down.
I just mean, I don't want to be,
I don't want it to be so loud.
It's also kind of better, like, at least in my opinion,
if someone just recognizes you as you,
instead of being like, I have seen that logo on the internet,
you must be the guy, you know?
I don't know.
That to me, at least.
All right.
Let's move on.
Next topic.
Secret shopper update.
No details on the date, but obviously at some point,
we will be working on another round of secret shopper,
or maybe we're already working on it.
Who knows?
But during the last round,
the company that wound up well behind the pack
was Dell Alienware.
After promising up and down,
after the first secret shopper,
that they had completely overhauled
their customer service standards,
their terrible pushy customer service
got us an overpriced underperforming gaming computer
that earned them dead last.
Dell is once again asking you to, sorry.
Dell is once again promising that they've changed.
They've really changed this time.
And they have instated extensive diagnostics
and quality control measures to find gaps
in their customer service.
They also claim that they have dialed back sales incentives
and increased focus on customer satisfaction scores,
which was a key criticism that we made about the incentives
for their sales team at the time.
There is no word on whether they've increased base salary
for reps, which we also brought up,
and is a key part of what makes those commission incentives
so tantalizing, because as far as I could tell,
these people were desperate,
absolutely desperate to sell these warranties
and onsite services and financing,
because clearly there was, I don't know.
Sometimes you get a vibe sometimes, right?
Where it's like, this is not just training.
Like this is survival, was how I felt about it.
So I told Dell, all right, I'll pass this along,
but I'm not your PR department.
I'm not a mouthpiece for you guys.
I am passing this along for only one reason.
The reason I'm passing it along is so that now you guys
and us and Dell are all on the same page
that it should be really good.
So when Secret Shopper happened or happened,
I really hope that we do not find the same things
that we did last time.
Because unprompted, okay, this is an email
that landed in my inbox.
Hold on a second, let me just check something real quick
here, because I think it was pretty much out of the blue,
like out of absolutely nowhere.
Yeah, here we go.
Okay, so my first outreach about this was in 2020.
So I heard from my Dell contact who put me in touch
with Director of Communications for Client Solutions Group,
something, something, something, something, okay.
And I basically went, yeah, you know, good luck with that.
Okay, I didn't hear anything for over a year,
since December of 2020, and then I randomly got an email
from this person on January the 6th,
and then I just have put off dealing with it until then.
But it's like this long thing that's pretty much like,
here's all the ways that we're fixing everything.
And so I'm sitting here going,
if you are completely unprompted, essentially,
gonna send me this list of ways
that you're doing way better.
Something might've changed.
I expect it to darn well be better
when it comes time to have a look at it.
Yeah.
So good luck with that.
That time might not be now, we still can't tell you.
What else do you wanna talk about?
Still got some good stuff here.
I'm kind of scrolling through right now.
We did all the main topics, it looks like.
Farewell to the Fairphone 2.
See ya.
Yeah, it'll have its last security update this month,
seven years, wow, after it first launched.
They only promised three to five years of updates
back in 2015, and they will apparently continue
to sell parts while supplies last.
If you wish to continue using a Fairphone 2,
you'll have the option of installing a custom ROM
like Lineage OS, or trading it in for a 50 euro voucher
for Fairphone's eStore.
So the discussion question here is it's clearly possible
to make a profit with a modular long-lasting phone.
What would happen if a major manufacturer took the lead
with a genuinely sustainable high-powered phone?
Well, hell would freeze over, I guess,
because the direction the industry has been going
has been the complete opposite of that.
Yeah, not that.
And I don't know, their investors would probably be mad
because I don't think you can make as much money.
I mean, that's the problem, right?
I think we've proven with LTT Store
that you can make money and not be super toxic about it.
But can you make enough to satisfy investors?
Because it's not enough to be profitable.
I mean, we've talked about this a ton.
You have to be more profitable than the other guys
and more profitable than last year.
It's just, in a finite world,
how can you expect infinite growth?
And like a lot of different places,
even if they can't have growth,
it doesn't mean they're not successful.
Their current amount of profit might be very healthy
and they might have saturated the market and that's fine.
And they can keep doing better and they keep innovating
to keep that profit level where it is
and that's not a bad thing.
But places just only go on growth.
Yeah, people are talking about,
yeah, it's never enough to satisfy investors.
Yeah, 100%, exactly.
Speaking of investors, Asetek says they are optimistic
despite rough financial seas.
So Asetek, you might not know of them
because they don't have much
of a consumer-facing brand anymore,
but they are best known for their LCLC
or low cost liquid cooling solutions.
The likes of which that you would have seen over the years
resold by companies like Corsair or,
I mean, Corsair I think is really the biggest partner,
but also system integrators.
They had a pretty weak last year
and they have now reported a 47% drop in revenue
in the fourth quarter of 2022 compared to 2021.
The tech sector is taking an absolute pounding.
Like, I mean that in every sense.
Yeah.
It's bad.
You see Intel's last results are like,
they lost like $700 million or something like that.
Like I'm just, I'm looking at this going, holy shnikes.
Are these guys gonna survive?
Oh yeah, they are.
They're just gonna lay everyone off.
Okay, cool.
So that's great.
But anyway, they reported a 47% drop in revenue
in the fourth quarter of 2022 compared to 2021.
I remember thinking about this.
When the pandemic boom happened.
And all those computer sales happened.
And I was like, okay.
Yeah.
You guys are riding high on this and you're super excite,
but here's the thing.
There's a finite number of computers that I need.
And I feel like it's a lot more than what most people need.
Like I'm obviously kidding.
I have a lot of computers.
And partially due to the conversation we had earlier
about windows, but also due to a lot of other reasons,
there isn't a huge reason to upgrade
that quickly these days.
The upgrade cycle has, from what I can see, gotten longer.
And so if you guys are selling twice as many computers today
there's gonna be a reckoning.
Sorry, I got to throw this out there.
Jonathan in flow plane chat saying the tech sector
is getting straight up LTT bagged is hilarious
and very topical.
Thank you for that.
So the reckoning is here.
People just don't need a new computer.
Yeah.
I really do think it's partly economic uncertainty,
but also partly people just straight up
not needing a new computer.
And when there's economic uncertainty
wants somewhat go out the window, right?
So like, even if you're like,
oh, I could run this game slightly faster.
Most games are really easy to run these days anyways,
to be completely honest, but yeah.
They reported an overall operating loss of $5.4 million
in part due to property equipment
and development investments of 22.2 million.
This drop is likely due to the same market contractions
that have been affecting other computer parts manufacturers.
In the same quarter, they announced their eighth gen coolers
and sales are currently trending slowly upwards.
So they believe the market is stabilizing
that they have the financial health to maintain operations
until conditions improve.
Anyway, the main reason for this
is not that I think you guys particularly care
about Asetek, but it was just an excuse to talk about
how that boom and bust has definitely happened.
And it's, yeah, it's kind of scary
because there's definitely gonna be some smaller players
that are struggling more than the Intels and AMDs
and Microsofts of the world.
Speaking of struggling, have you ever struggled
to get your printer to work
after you installed third-party ink?
Because HP was all like,
you and pushed a firmware that prevented
the use of ink cartridges without HP chips in them.
This, this sucks.
Oh yeah.
This sucks so much.
Oh yeah.
I love my old Samsung laser printer.
I have like an ML 2010 or something like that, 2020.
I can't remember.
It was like, it has a sticker on it.
That's like world's most compact color laser printer.
So whichever one that is.
And when Samsung sold their printer business to HP,
I didn't really think about it at the time.
Did they update it?
But the only way that HP could extract a ton of value
from that aside from just eliminating a competitor
had to be to engage in these kinds
of toxic anti-consumer practices.
Oh yeah.
HP is essentially making it so your printer won't work
if you have ink in it that doesn't have an HP chip in it.
They've engaged in similar behavior for years
using the rationale.
And this is a joke.
I remember back in NCIX,
I had to sit through a presentation like this from an HP rep
like explaining the consumer benefits of first-party ink.
And I'm sitting here going,
you know I have like whole jars of ink at home
and I'm gonna keep using them with my little syringes,
like they're talking about like the technology
of the nano droplets or whatever.
I'm like, yeah, sure.
If I was a professional printing house by all means,
but I just need to hand in my stupid report
and I need a colored bar graph on it or whatever.
Like I don't.
So they've used the rationale
that they're ensuring the customer experience,
but courts in three different countries
have ruled against them in multiple class action lawsuits
with penalties worth millions of dollars.
That's the problem though.
Millions of dollars is just cost of doing business
to a company that's operating at HP scale.
We've been talking about wimpy fines on the WAN show
the whole time the WAN show has existed.
I'm so tired of it.
They need to crank these.
It needs to actually hurt the companies
when the fine is significantly less
than the profit they're gonna have
by just continuing to do it.
There's this quote of somebody talking about how
certain things are just different for the rich.
And it's talking about parking downtown.
And they're like, yeah,
a parking ticket for some people is really brutal.
A parking ticket for other people is just like
how you pay to park your car.
They don't actually care.
It doesn't matter.
It doesn't impact them.
It's still more efficient for them to just park illegally
and pay the fine than it is to go park properly.
It's the same problem.
Final Fantasy Tactics doesn't have a great translation
in its original North American release,
but this is a gem.
We graph says, if the penalty for a crime is a fine,
that law only exists for the lower classes.
That's a hundred percent true.
Yeah, yeah, totally.
Like it's, and this fine,
if it's not more than what they're benefiting
from doing this, they're just gonna keep doing it
because they're still profiting off of it.
It doesn't work.
Have you still not played Final Fantasy Tactics?
No.
It is so good.
It is so good.
I think they released it on Android.
There is no excuse, sir.
You need to play Final Fantasy Tactics
because aside from the stellar gameplay,
and it really is good and it really does hold up,
the story is outstanding.
Everything is morally ambiguous
and it's not clear who the good guys are
and who the bad guys are.
And it's deep and it's wonderful.
What is Waddle or War of the Lions?
Is it Final Fantasy Tactics, War of the Lions?
Well, it depends.
So one of the releases, I think like the advanced release,
I don't know, there's multiple releases of the game.
War of the Lions, I think,
is like a more updated version of it.
Okay.
Yeah.
Final Fantasy Tactics, so good, so good.
AMD drivers have been borking computers with a rare bug.
They can put computers into a boot loop,
rendering them inoperable.
AMD has acknowledged the problem
a month after it was first noticed
and has helped at least one computer journalist
through a complicated workaround.
The glitch only occurs when installing the AMD GPU driver,
opting for a factory reset clean installation,
then having the misfortune
of having Windows automatically update in the background.
It's always Windows update.
Speaking of things that just should be way better by now,
no permanent fix yet exists,
but it can be avoided by updating Windows
before performing any installations.
We have some LTX Expo updates.
Ooh, this is exciting.
Asus ROG is our title sponsor for LTX 2023.
Let's go.
Thanks, Asus ROG.
Also, Ubiquiti is our title sponsor for the Whaleland.
I knew they were gonna provide networking equipment,
but that's awesome.
Since when does Ubiquiti ever spend money?
Well, that's a legitimate question.
That's fair.
It's like asking when does Nvidia ever spend money?
Actually, it's not like asking that
because the difference is that Ubiquiti has a philosophy
of building products that sell themselves,
and Nvidia is just the cheapest on the entire face
of the earth.
It's a completely separate problem.
And, oh, this is cool.
Epic Games XPC Build Simulator 2 sponsorship
for the water cooling workshop booth.
We're also gonna be working with EK Water Blocks.
Details coming in a future update.
I haven't seen Rod in the chat today,
but I assume you guys are coming up, right?
Got you.
If Bob and Rod aren't there, is it really LTX?
Have they missed one?
I don't think so.
I don't know if they were at the first one.
Were they at the first one?
2017 was the first one, right?
Trying to remember.
That was-
The first one's like a, it's a blur for me.
They weren't involved in running the first one.
I know that.
But they have hosted booths for us at the last couple,
and those guys are absolute-
They've been at the good ones.
Chad's.
Yeah, Rod's in there.
I'll be at LTX.
Let's go.
Has anyone reached out to you about like
doing something at LTX though?
Cause we'd love to have you,
we'd love to have both of you there.
I know you can't necessarily speak for Bob,
but yeah, we can take this conversation offline.
Like literally offline.
And we can chat.
Yeah, this is awesome.
Oh, they had a wall Peter at the first one.
Oh, that's right.
Cool.
Yes.
So they have been involved as exhibitors every single time.
Oh, I love it.
It wouldn't be LTX without Bob and Rod.
Okay, cool.
Looking forward to it.
Oh, what else do-
Oh, hide image URLs on stream.
Okay.
Oh, this is awesome.
We're going to have some special designer edition desk pads.
What exactly these have to do with LTX?
Hard to say,
but our designers have been hard at work
creating some of the coolest desk pads
that you are ever gonna see.
I'm going to start with Sarah's design.
What do you think?
These are, I've sneak peeked all of them.
Oh, you looked at all of them?
Dang it, Luke.
These are actually so sick.
Come on, man.
I really liked the, did you play Far Cry?
Blood whatever.
Blood whatever, yeah.
I like glanced at it.
I didn't really play play it.
I should.
It gives me, you don't have to play through the whole thing.
Okay.
Just like give it like an hour or two.
It's fun and then it gets old,
but it's fun for the first bit.
It reminds me a lot of that
and it's great.
I love the colors.
I love the like pixelization.
Prehistoric tech, you know,
and Sarah is a big, big dinosaur lady,
I think would be one way of putting it.
Very cool.
So that's one of them.
The next one to show you guys is from Lloyd,
who is one of our long-time designers
that many of you will probably have,
if you've ever bought anything from LTT Store Dog,
let's say this.
If you've bought more than one thing from lttstore.com,
there's a solid chance you've worn a Lloyd pen.
Okay.
So he did a Vancouver skyline.
I think this is cool as specifically,
potentially a memorabilia piece for LTX itself,
because we're like,
I don't know if we're on in frame here.
We're gonna be here.
Oh, okay.
Yeah, that is it.
So here's the convention center
and then we've got some other iconic elements
of the Vancouver skyline.
Super cool.
I haven't seen this actually printed yet.
I really hope that IRL,
it's as vibrant and bold as the work that he's done here,
but super cool.
And then finally,
this is, well, a new person you'll be meeting.
Some of you, if you just like kind of hang around
on our corporate website might know Maria
or you might see her in shorts or behind the scenes
or stuff like that.
But she, aside from just doing our thumbnails,
also has some pretty strong design chops.
So she put together what she's calling zero gravity gaming,
which is just a really fun, vibrant design that I,
man, when I saw this,
I actually, they didn't tell me who did it.
And I didn't manage to guess
because I confess,
I kind of thought of her as the thumbnail person
and not as just like,
well, because I don't think-
As other things.
A lot of thumbnails make.
Yeah, we didn't really hire her as a graphic designer.
I mean, sort of,
because thumbnails are that.
But we didn't intend to have her
just like do general design work,
especially not for like merch or whatever,
but I think she did an absolutely bang up job.
I absolutely love it.
So the only hard part is going to be figuring out
which one to choose.
Someone's asking, so are these local only?
So you can only get these at LTX?
I don't know.
They say LTX 2023 on the like image frame.
But yeah, I don't know.
I'm not sure.
I'm super excited though.
I'm super excited.
They're super cool.
Yeah, super sweet.
We should do some merch messages.
Dan, hit me.
All right, I've got an anonymous one here.
Linus and Luke regarding lab funding.
Have you thought about trying to secure grants
from the government?
Consumer research and testing feels like something
it might be possible to get grants for.
Are we doing any shred credit stuff?
Not for my team.
I'm pretty sure.
Not yet, at least.
I'm pretty sure there's some stuff that we're doing
that is eligible for shred credits,
which are like a tax credit.
I know that for some people working on the lab team,
because what they're doing is directly involved
in video production,
we can be eligible for some production services
tax credits.
I gotta be honest with you guys.
We are not the best when it comes to
optimizing our tax credits and stuff.
I don't think we've actually,
I think we've submitted but not collected
going all the way back to like 2018 or 2019.
I don't think we've submitted 2021 or 2022.
It's not out of laziness.
It's just extremely complicated.
I know companies downtown that are smaller than us
that have employees on staff, some of them more than one,
who their entire full-time job, they do nothing else
is to capture government grants.
And we don't have anyone that does that.
Yeah.
It actually takes like a lot of time.
They make it quite the arduous process.
Which is stupid.
We've complained about this on the show before.
Because it means the people who need it most
have the hardest time getting it, which is stupid.
Yep.
We've complained about that
in regards to Cavco publicly before,
but it's true about all of it.
Like it just, yeah.
Now people are talking about like loopholes or avoidance.
This is not loopholes or avoidance.
This is like financial aid from the government
to support certain industries.
And if it's there, obviously if we're not idiots-
You should be taking it.
We should take it, right?
Like we're not committing fraud.
These are all things that we're eligible for.
We just need to be on top of it.
We've even been told that we're eligible for things before.
People who tried to apply for it
ran into a massive wave of complications
and just been like, okay, we could get this grant
or we could spend the time that it's gonna take
for us to deal with all these complications.
Just making money.
Yes.
So every time, almost, not technically,
but almost every time it's just been like,
okay, well, I'm just gonna go back to work.
Yeah.
I hear that.
Yeah.
Anyway.
Yeah, go ahead.
I've got something to clarify about the desk pads.
Oh yeah.
I'm told that they're only gonna be available at LTX.
Local only.
Local only.
Wow.
All right.
Exclusive.
See you guys at LTX.
Yeah.
I told you a while ago that I was reorganizing this stuff.
I was going through all of my like,
I can't get rid of this article of clothing
because it has significance to me stuff.
I found like the LTX 2017 shirt
and I found like all this other kind of stuff.
One that I did get rid of, but I always felt conflicted on.
I just had too much.
I have this like massive benefit at this point
was the berry selling shirt.
Nice.
I still had that.
And I was like, ah, I think I can get rid of that one.
I think that would be a fun like float plane exclusive.
You and I compare our bins
because I have a shirt bin too.
I was gonna ask you if you still have your shirt
that's like us sitting together in the WAN, that logo,
if you still have that shirt,
cause I found the sweater.
You have the sweater?
I have the sweater.
We should do like,
we should do a WAN where you're wearing the shirt
and I'm wearing the sweater.
I'm totally down.
That'd be sick.
We should bring back the design
now that we have a t-shirt printer again.
Hey, yeah.
I'd be super down.
I also have that like super old,
like Christmas sweater that we had,
the WAN Christmas sweater.
Oh yeah, that thing was crap.
I like all this.
Oh yeah, it is.
But yeah, I'm keeping it cause it's just like.
I've kept a lot less of like just old merch
because like Nick gets mad at me if I wear it.
It's like, yo, people can't even buy that.
What the fuck are you doing?
Like, oh, right, okay.
I guess it's like the front man.
I'm supposed to,
I'm supposed to rep the stuff people can currently get,
which is honestly fine because it's always,
it's always forward and upward, right?
Like we're trying to make better stuff all the time,
but it's a little bit sentimental, you know?
Stuff like that, I don't plan on wearing.
Like the 2017 shirt,
like I don't want to wear it
because I don't want to ever wash it
because that logo like is still in really nice conditions.
So I don't, I don't want to trash it.
Rod's like, I've still got the mod 24 shirt.
I do too, bro.
I'm pretty sure I saved that one.
I know I found it this while I was sorting through.
I'm pretty sure it got saved.
I pulled that out and yeah, I don't know.
I was thinking when you were asking him
if he was going to come to the event,
I was like, man,
we were just roasting Nvidia for not paying things.
But the, like one of the very few times that they have
mod 24 was actually super sick.
They did not pay a lot for it.
Nope.
It was a cool event regardless.
Anywho.
Moving on, next one.
Okay, this one's from Elizabeth.
Hi Linus and Luke.
I've recently entered my first professional position
where I am responsible for delegating to others.
As leaders of your respective teams,
how do you balance delegating and perfectionism?
I knew that'd get it groan.
I'm getting better at it.
You have to, I mean, it's all training, right?
Like you have to delegate with the assumption
that everything they're going to do is wrong
or even if it's not wrong,
it's definitely not exactly the way you would have done it.
But making the mistake could be a valuable thing.
Yeah.
And so sitting down and talking through
how you feel it should have been done
can have multiple positive effects.
It can help them to reason through it better
for themselves next time.
Or conversely, it could actually open you up
to new perspectives and new approaches,
which is I think one of our biggest strengths here
is that no idea is automatically stupid
based on the position of whoever proposed it.
And that's sort of a complicated way of saying
that anyone can have a valid idea
for how we can do things better.
And so I've had to let a lot go over the years
in terms of perfectionism.
I'm not going to call it anything specific,
but like I watched a video recently
where I kind of went like in the first two minutes,
there were four obvious moments where I was like,
well, there should have been,
like the thing I was talking about,
there should have been an image on screen of it.
Like what there's supposed to imagine,
what's the point of this even being a video?
Why don't we just upload it as an audio clip?
Yeah.
Like little things like that, obviously I can be,
I can be pretty demanding.
I can be pretty picky.
But the best way to move forward with that
is to just have those conversations,
figure out what the rationale was,
and then figure out how to best move forward.
That's the only way you can do it.
Safe answer.
It's a good one though.
That's fine.
The best answer is not an answer.
Up next is from Austin.
Luke, what will you play now that Tarkow is not an option?
Honestly, I haven't been playing much.
I have to confess that I might have to extend
the AMD challenge
because I haven't touched my gaming computer.
Gaming is dead.
You heard it here first.
I will say,
I've been really busy.
Based on some of the things that have happened.
Yeah.
Like the arrests and the server seizures
and all these massive band waves
that BSG has been doing and stuff like that.
Returning to Tarkow might be fairly realistic fairly soon.
I was expecting it was going to be potentially ever
or at least a year,
but it might be a relatively short-term thing
for me to return to it.
But I've been busy, man.
I've been doing other stuff.
There's a lot going on in my life
that isn't on Wancho right now.
So I don't know.
I haven't been gaming a ton, but that's okay.
Yeah, this is great.
Back to our last one, AJ in float plane chat.
To beat my perfectionism,
I just procrastinate until I don't have time
to do it perfectly.
You're not supposed to say that.
Yeah.
Your boss and your boss's boss.
Yeah.
It's taking everything in my power
to not say mood right now.
Damn it.
Oh God.
I'm dead.
I've missed both these meatballs.
Same problem.
Stop it.
We're very alike.
No.
See, the trick here is I just give AJ too much stuff.
So he doesn't have, like,
he has to work all the time anyways.
Oh my gosh.
Solution solved.
I don't even want it.
I don't want to hear that.
Solution solved.
I don't want to hear any of this from any of you.
If you tell me to do it within the next hour
and it's like a six hour project,
then you'll get it in an hour and a half
and it'll be good and done.
That's how Luke manages.
It's been going great.
Tell him what you told me earlier
about how it's been working under my team.
Oh yeah.
It's very stressful.
Sorry.
But Luke is turning me into a confident person.
Cause I, I don't know.
I scheduled a meeting.
Don't say the company, but say the story.
Yeah, I scheduled a meeting.
Like we needed to get this thing done.
And I sent an email to the company.
Hello, can I please have a meeting with your team?
And they went, yeah, how about Friday?
And then I kind of was in another meeting,
freaked out and went, no, this has to be tomorrow at 11.
Answer my question instead of scheduling a meeting.
And then he went, okay, how about tomorrow at 11?
No, this has to be at 8.30.
We're having this meeting right now.
What?
And then the meeting happened and we got it done
and everything's been like full steam ahead.
We shipped on time.
Let's go boys.
I'm not like a big boy man person.
No, I want, I want productivity, please.
Let's go.
I mean, should we, I did a business.
Should we announce your role change?
I don't know, I don't really care.
Okay, so Luke is, Luke is, is, is out as CTO
or whatever the heck his role was at Float Play Media,
which is a lie because he actually retains that role.
But he's now, he's now officially back
in the Linus Media Group Inc fold as our CTO.
And he's going to be just kind of
unhaphazarding things,
whether it's the migration from last pass
or some of our data resiliency practices,
or whether it's our documentation,
there's things that he's gotten really good at
with his team over at FlowPlane over the last five years.
And to be clear to my team over at FlowPlane,
nothing is changing there.
He worded that really poorly.
Well, yeah, I did that on purpose.
I know everything's fine.
I know for sure he's going to get
at least one phone call tonight.
And, and no, I'm not the CTO of FlowPlane.
I don't think it has one.
Yeah, I don't even know what your closest thing to that
would probably be AJ.
So he's going to be CTO at Linus Media Group
to help us take everything that's really good
at FlowPlane technology-wise and also do it here
because no offense to some of the people
who work on some of the tech stuff here.
No, and okay, I will actually come
to their defense specifically.
Oh, I know.
In my opinion, with the time and the resources
that have been given, it's been amazing
what has been accomplished.
The fact that we have the kind of uptime we do
is a testament to the work that guys like Jake
and Dan and Jamie have put in to have,
like our security system, like always works.
Things like that.
The fact that stuff works at all is like-
It's made of duct tape and Popsicle sticks,
but it actually functions, which is remarkable.
Really good.
The problem is that their time is also leveraged
in other ways.
Everyone that's been working on it,
it hasn't been their main thing.
So then they're pulled constantly.
They're pulled constantly in other directions
and things were, it's been 80-20 ruled,
like on the line for a long time.
20% of the work, 80% of the result,
they've lived by that rule,
but certain things have been left out
and we're getting to a size, we're getting to a stage
where that can't really keep happening.
We can't keep doing it.
And certain things are starting to fail.
Certain edge cases are starting to fail
and they're impacting pretty hard.
So hoping to help solve that.
This does not mean that you're not going to see
like infrastructure tech videos from Jake anymore.
Yeah, totally.
I'm planning on setting up the system
so that you will see exactly as much of that.
Maybe more.
Maybe, yeah.
Because he should be less busy
with just like random administrative nonsense.
We don't want him to do maintenance stuff.
We don't want him to do documentation.
We don't want him to do all these different things.
We really don't want him to do documentation.
But he should still be able to have fun
and experiment with things and try things out
and then show that on video
and have that be cool for everyone.
So there will not be any less of that.
And yeah, the goal is potentially even more
if he wants to do more.
So yeah, that's my stance.
Yeah, so it's exciting.
Hit me, Dan.
Okay.
Lord knows I deserve it today.
Yeah, for those comments.
This one's from Mac.
I do like that.
This one's from Max.
Hey, from Guernsey, where's the weirdest place
that you've seen LDT store purchases from?
Oh, so I curated this one because I'm gonna steal one,
which was the figure skater.
Oh yeah, that was awesome.
That was so sick.
Yeah, our water bottle showed up
in an Olympic broadcaster.
Yeah.
Oh shoot, what's his name?
I follow him on Twitter,
but I don't remember off the top of my head.
I feel like I usually can, but I don't remember right now.
Canadian figures.
I'll find it, I'll find it, I'll find it.
Trying to find...
Nope, I'm having a really hard time finding it.
Anyway, it was super cool.
So I'm pretty sure we sent over a care package.
Yeah, that was awesome.
Just like seeing the water bottle out in the wild,
just casually supporting an elite athlete,
keeping him hydrated.
That was super cool.
All right, hit me with another, Dan.
I'll find it.
Oh wait.
We did this one.
Okay.
Me too.
Roman Sadovski.
I thought it was Sarovski and I couldn't quite find it.
Roman Sadovski.
Sorry, that was really rude.
What bed tech would you like to see?
You've got a cool bed now.
Yeah.
Didn't you do it?
I thought you were gonna do it.
Yeah, I'm using it.
I don't know that I like it as much as you do.
So we're both playing around with the sleep eight
or eight sleep, the eight sleep.
I kind of find that it's either like when I have it on,
okay, both of us run pretty warm at night
compared to our SOs.
And I kind of find the, oh, Dan was muted.
Okay, basically bed tech ideas.
I find that it's either really warm.
Okay, how do I put this?
I don't really like just stay on one side of the bed a lot.
What, I'm a cuddler.
So because Yvonne runs her side with the heater,
what ends up happening is if I move around in the night,
I'm either boiling,
cause I'm like over the threshold to her side
or I'm freezing because I got all sweaty on her side
and I'm on my chilled side.
And I just, I don't know.
I'm actually, I'm not really liking it that much,
but I also don't have the subscription.
So their function where it's supposed to keep you
at the right temperature all the time doesn't work.
You just have to set this like super course adjustment
for like a curve to be cooler in the middle of the night,
apparently, or something like that.
And it's not great,
but I'm not paying a subscription fee
for a $3,000 mattress topper.
That's absurd.
So I just-
It's got a knock to a fan, bro.
It does, like, oh, that's the thing.
Maybe, and maybe it's worth it.
Like maybe by that time-
Have you looked into the specs of the actual computer
that like runs it?
Yeah, it's like actually-
It's surprisingly like, oh wow.
Yeah, but I already bought the computer.
I just, I find it so offensive.
No, I hear you.
But like, okay,
it's not like there aren't subscription services
that I do pay for.
I pay for like a Nabu Casa,
the home assistant cloud subscription.
And it's not even the only way to do that.
You can work around it with your own thing,
but it's just, it's way more convenient.
It's like $5 a month or something like that.
And honestly, for the bed, maybe I just should,
cause it would be more comfortable or whatever.
But like, I mean, you've been pretty happy with it, I think.
I've had a good experience.
I find AC off is now like tolerable.
It doesn't completely solve it for me
because even with,
so it's minimum possible temperature is negative 10 degrees.
Is it actually running at that?
I don't think so.
But it feels pretty cold,
but I am a big boy and I am running very hot.
So it'll get into a situation where like my,
if I'm laying on my back,
my like back will be a nice temperature,
but my like chest is roasting.
Yes.
Cause it's not enough to like get all the way through me.
So you need a cooled blanket too.
I need a cooled like everything.
Which would be inherently weighted
and weighted blankets are apparently really good.
So you need a cooled weighted blanket.
My favorite-
LTTstore.com, next project.
Kyle, are you watching?
Let's go.
The thing right now that has made it
so I get just like actually amazing sleeps
is when it's so hot that we need to turn the AC on.
And then I can bundle a bit and take like,
instead of the thinnest blanket I've ever found
on the market, which is what I normally sleep with,
I can actually have like a thicker blanket on
and I have the eight sleep
at the lowest temperature it can possibly go
and the AC on, then I'm like, oh wow, I am a cozy boy.
And then I sleep super, super well.
And I feel very rejuvenated in the morning.
It isn't-
Tynan's in the chat.
It isn't quite enough just on its own, but it helps it.
So it's way better with it for me,
but it's not a hundred percent of what I could hope for,
if that makes sense.
But I still like it.
I wouldn't recommend it for everyone
cause it's really expensive.
It's really expensive, but like it does help me.
And other stuff, I don't know.
If anything could magically cure my insomnia,
I'd be down for that.
Like I don't need another device to tell me
you had a terrible sleep last night.
It's like, yeah, thanks.
Yep.
All right, what's next?
Yep.
All right, let's have a look.
Oh my goodness.
The merch messages are coming in too fast
for poor Dan to read them to us
and also curate and reply to them.
Yeah, sorry, I'm not ready for, I'm doing other things.
This one's from Maxwell.
Hey Luke, a couple of WANs ago,
you mentioned a viewer in Antarctica.
Sorry, that was me.
I work in McMurdo, a US station.
I was wondering what you guys had to do
to make the surface work better.
A hundred percent, honestly, I don't remember,
but I'm pretty sure AJ's watching.
Yeah, AJ's in the chat, so maybe AJ remembers
cause I'm pretty sure that AJ did it
and Luke just supervised.
Probably.
That was a long time ago, so.
That was when AJ was doing literally
all of our infrastructure, so.
Yeah.
I mean, he did that for a long time.
Yeah, that's.
Yeah.
Look, I was trying to make us sound
like a real company, Luke.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
So maybe AJ will get back to us in the float plane chat
or maybe AJ doesn't have to be working right now
cause it's late, but whatever.
Yeah, I don't 100% know that he's still around.
I just think he is.
Okay, just wouldn't surprise me.
Next up is from Kyle with Ring being on the outs.
What is your recommendations for home security
and surveillance?
I'm really happy with my Ubiquiti stuff.
It's tough though, because obviously it's easy
for me to say when Ubiquiti is a long time collaborator
of ours and sends us a lot of the stuff
that we need from them.
It's really expensive, especially for home use.
So it's tough, right?
There was that, man, what was that, Wise.
There was that cheap brand that everyone loved for a while
and then they started locking things down.
So it like apparently sucks now.
I haven't completely looked into it.
We did a video on like a DIY solution back in the day.
Jake did something up and it was like a Pi Zero
like DIY security camera thing.
Something like that could obviously work.
There's, yeah, I don't know.
Maybe this is something that we just need
to really dig into and do a video.
I know I'm off topic, but I am just so happy
that Antarctica Guy is still subscribed.
That's actually so sick.
Well, you don't actually know that.
That's fair.
Antarctica Guy is not actually in the float plane chat.
It was a merge message, yes.
So maybe not.
He's still around in some way.
Okay, AJ says we had a VM with a specific host at the time
where we did pretty much all our CDN things.
Okay, that's a really vague posty explanation.
Thank you for that, AJ.
It was a surfer.
Probably we just put an edge node closer
on a route that was good for getting there.
Probably.
Thanks, captain probably.
I asked captain actually knows.
I'm sorry it's late.
That's fair.
Yeah, it's what it is.
Go to bed.
Exactly that, yeah, okay.
Yeah, so it's what I said.
I was like 99% sure from the beginning,
but I didn't know 100%
because it's been a bajillion years, so.
We're not shipping anything to Antarctica, Jayden.
All right, Dan, hit me.
Speaking of shipping, this one's from Cody.
What type of food would you sell on LDT store
if shipping food internationally wasn't a terrible idea?
CBD gummies.
There's great margin.
Is there? Probably.
Yeah, I actually had a former colleague from NCIX
who wanted to start up like a partnership
doing like alertness gamer CBD gummies and stuff like that.
And they sent me over some of the products.
Actually like seemed really good.
I actually really liked it.
The sleep one was not bad.
Not a perfect solution.
I still do struggle to sleep sometimes,
but definitely better than nothing,
which is about all you can really ask for
when it comes to like supplements and stuff.
I don't know if there's just like a lot of margin in it
or what's going on,
but it seems like every single like fitness influencer
sells their own protein powder.
Yeah. Good margin. That's it.
Cause it's like nothing.
It's what like ground up snail shells or whatever.
Right? Like it's worthless.
It's way, yeah, it's just way.
Yeah.
Oh, I thought you were legitimately correcting me
cause you thought, I thought that it was actually
made of that.
I love how you, you mix, I let you pour it into milk.
So you're just pouring like a milk,
like a part of milk into more actual milk.
And then you drink milk.
You're drinking like hyper milk, more milk per mil.
Yeah. That's basically what's happening or energy powder.
Yeah. They all have their own like pre-workout creatine,
which is the same thing, protein powder, whatever.
They all have their own like range of supplements stuff.
It's because you can just find an OEM that just slap a label
on it. And it's the simplest thing ever.
And so he had a relationship that he was forging with like a
big manufacturer of CBD gummies.
And he was like, you know, go for it.
If it's good enough for Martha Stewart,
it's good enough for you.
You probably based on what I just said,
probably know who this was.
I knew it was from the beginning.
Oh, okay. Yeah, fair enough.
But my, my hesitations were twofold.
You know, one was I had a lot of concern about even,
even if I don't give a rat's patoot about CBD or weed or
whatever, there's a lot of uptight people out there.
And it's one of those spaces that as a,
as a loosely regulated industry,
there's just a lot of like crap going on.
A lot of shady stuff. A lot of shady people are involved.
And I just, I don't need the association.
Number two is I've always been extremely hesitant about
anything that people ingest.
Yeah.
I thought, frankly speaking,
I thought Mr. Beast was absolutely bat crazy.
Beast burger.
Yeah. And then he did these like stuff too.
These like random, well, the chocolate one,
I don't even mind as much.
Cause at least it's coming from presumably some kind of
factory that actually has some kind of actual safety
protocols in place.
But all these like random ghost kitchens with like,
Lord only knows how long these things are sitting on a
warmer before they get delivered. Like, I don't know.
I promise you he doesn't know.
And it only takes as far like,
depending on how your company is set up,
it only takes one person to like die for the whole thing to
come crumbling down. So anything that people ingest,
I've just, I've just been very sketched out by,
it's possible we'll do like gamer snacks or something at
some point, but it just hasn't, hasn't happened.
Yeah.
Okay. I've got another one here from Joshua Linus.
Has your wife vetoed any ideas or purchases you still want
to make? If so, what were they?
Um.
She's pretty permissive.
I was going to say, doesn't really do that that much.
Yeah. Like we had this,
we had a concept a while back where we were going to buy
very disappointed. Yeah.
We were going to buy a sex doll for like a channel super fun
or something. It was like $12,000 or something like that.
Well, yeah. That's why we didn't do it.
Cause we found out the price, but she wasn't the obstacle.
Like she's a, yeah, she's, she's, she's pretty chill.
Like she's okay.
What's great about Yvonne is that she,
she lets you buy sex dolls.
I mean.
It's pretty reasonably priced.
Is that not great?
At that price, they're very realistic.
So I've heard, that's what I've heard.
Yeah.
So she's, she's, she's a great, um,
enable. Yeah.
Yeah. She, she will,
she will try to talk you down off of the branch,
but if you insist on climbing more or jumping or swinging
from it or doing whatever stupid thing it is.
They try to help you do it the best way.
And make sure you don't get hurt. Right.
That's her, that's her thing.
Um, yeah.
So I can't think of anything that she's really vetoed.
I think if she could go back in time,
she would veto the smart light switches.
But other than that, we don't disagree about that much.
Yeah.
All right. Hit me.
Okay. Next one's up from Michael.
My friends and I use the dollar per hour ratio
to judge game value.
You've both spoken about how you don't care
for MTX or cosmetics.
One of our group has spent 2,400 US dollars in Fortnite,
but with 5,000 hours.
Thoughts?
I have lots of thoughts.
5,000 hours in Fortnite.
Yeah. That was where I went first.
Is that, is that in game or does that include menus?
I mean, it would include menus probably.
Some games don't.
Oh, okay.
Most games do, but this isn't like a Steam Tracked game.
Right?
Steam counts menus. I know that.
Yeah. Um.
Woof.
That's a lot of hours in Fortnite.
We're still on that.
That's also just a lot of money.
What is that?
You didn't have to spend that money.
You could have also gotten 5,000 hours in Fortnite
and not spent that money.
And then the dollar per hour ratio would be even lower,
which would be even better.
I am, I am down with supporting things that you use a lot.
Like I remember I got Rocket.
I've told this on the show before.
I got Rocket League on some crazy sale
for like three bucks or something.
And then I've just played the heck out of it.
So I bought a couple of seasons passes or something.
And I'm sure my total in on that, not that much,
probably like less than 50 bucks.
And I played a ton of it.
Let's talk about World of Warcraft.
Okay.
You've probably spent more than $2,400 on WoW.
It was like 50 bucks a month back in the day,
if I recall correctly, wasn't it?
Oh, no, it was 50 bucks to buy the thing.
Okay. With all the expansions though, are you sure?
It's 15 per month.
15 a month.
Okay. So that's almost $200 a year.
I bet you're close.
To 5,000?
No, no, 2.4.
Oh, 15 times.
Let's say that.
Let he who is without sin cast the first stone here, sir.
I promise you, I have never spent $2,000 on a,
oh, wait, hold on.
How much did I spend on Star Citizen?
No, I have never spent $2,000 on a video game.
You have committed to though.
Yeah.
If it actually ever comes out, you're gonna have a big bill.
Okay. That's true.
For a ship that is hopefully good.
Who knows?
Yeah, I guess we'll see.
Okay. But one of the things,
my brother and I shared an account for like literally
the majority of the time that I played the game.
Okay.
And then another significant portion
of me playing the game was definitely private servers,
which you don't pay for monthly.
I see.
I just think, I think you're not that far off probably.
15 times 12 is 180.
Yeah.
So let's say I played for four years.
Is that it?
I don't know.
Cause I played,
Cause I thought you played for a long time.
Classic.
Yeah.
I played like three quarters of,
I never played consistently.
I played three quarters of classic.
I played like half to three quarters of Burning Crusade.
I played one quarter of Wrath.
Okay.
And then I never played consistently again
until classic came out again.
But I am pretty sure I got like almost every expansion,
but I never, I very rarely got them right away.
I would get them when they were like basically free right
before the next one came out.
Sure.
We get it.
You're a cheapskate.
Yeah.
But my point stands, when you compare,
Five's a bunch on games.
Yeah.
When you compare this ratio to something like a wow,
does it actually seem that outlandish?
I don't know.
I think it depends how much you play each month.
Subscription model game.
Does it need to be a subscription model game
for the amount of content you get
versus the content cycling that Fortnite does go through?
Yeah, they do innovate a lot.
They do big map changes.
They do things like, I mean,
I'm not necessarily interested in it,
but you can turn into like the Hulk or something.
I don't remember.
I don't know, who cares?
Yeah.
You can turn into like Ariana Grande, I think.
Sure.
Yeah.
I have no idea.
So yeah, I don't know.
Um.
It doesn't seem right to me.
Okay.
But if the math's there and they're fulfilled,
like I don't really care what they do
with their own personal money.
You can do whatever you want.
All right.
Okay.
All right, Dan, hit us.
Okay.
Next up is from Christopher.
Honest question.
What is the goal of right to repair?
I have been buying replacement parts
and repairing my electronics
since I broke an iPhone 3G ages ago.
Have I not had the right to repair?
I don't really understand your question.
What?
The goal of right to repair
is that the ability to repair your device is a right.
And more so that your ability to do that,
your right to repair it cannot be impeded by other parties.
So the fact that you have been able
to get replacement parts for your electronics
since you broke your iPhone 3G ages ago
is not for their lack of trying
to make those replacement parts impossible
or inordinately expensive to get.
You've been lucky and you should be thankful
to the right to repair advocates and crusaders
that are out there pushing for this
because without them, no, companies like Apple
would absolutely restrict your ability
to get any of that stuff.
They would want you to come to them
for first-party repairs
or they would want to sell you a new device.
So right to repair is what you're talking about
except it is establishing it as a right.
It's establishing that you actually have ownership
of the things that you have bought
and that they're no, not in fact,
still the property of the company that produced them.
If you do not sort of, hmm,
if right to repair is not a priority for you
or you don't think that it's important,
you do not understand it.
It really is very black and white.
There's not any room for negotiation or nuance on this.
The solutions for how we,
enforce the consumer's right to repair.
Well, that's where there's room for discussion
but the actual right to repair,
to own devices that you pay for, that's not negotiable.
And if you disagree, then you're just wrong, unfortunately.
And you need to educate yourself
because the people who do disagree
will put up all kinds of just frankly ridiculous arguments
like, well, what if I don't want to,
what if I want Apple to repair?
Then by all means, go do it.
The right for someone else to repair a device themselves
does not infringe upon your right
to pay someone too much money for them to do it
or even a reasonable amount of money for them to do it.
I mean, everyone has different priorities.
Not everybody wants to tinker with their stupid phone.
I get it.
But just because you don't means you need to sit down,
shut your mouth and let everyone else do their thing.
That's all, very simple.
All right.
Okay, up next, we have Kyler.
Over the years, we've seen tech
have the infamous planned obsolescence.
What tech equipment would you say has no excuse
to be going bad in only a handful of years?
I'm really tired of phones,
just like turning into complete suck.
I mean, I'm pretty sure that my dad,
when I was growing up,
had had his rotary phone for like 20 years.
I mean, it was like yellowed enough,
like the plastics were-
But it still worked.
But yeah, but everything's still worked.
I mean, yeah, I hate the disposability of these things.
I think about this when I get rid of certain things actually
because if there's like a new shiny thing on the market
that I want and I'm replacing something that I have,
yes, everyone's gonna call me cheap.
I think about like the amount of issues
that I might have with it, with the new thing,
as it gets into its obsolescent period,
its planned obsolescent period.
And I'm like, the thing that I have right now works.
Do I wanna just keep that?
Maybe.
Depends, depends on the thing.
Depends on how impacted it is.
Phones, it gets a little bit too painful.
You kinda gotta move on.
Batteries aren't replaceable.
Your battery running out of total capacity
gets really, really frustrating.
Certain apps aren't gonna work as well.
You run out of software updates, stuff like that.
You kinda gotta do it at a certain degree.
I've been running on this one for a while.
It's still fine right now,
but it'll run out of its reasonable phones.
I'm gonna go with earphones.
Audio devices are something that for decades
we've been able to count on to be pretty decent
10 years after you bought them,
as long as you invested in a good one,
like a good quality one.
Whereas now you buy a pair of earphones
with the expectation that in three to five years
it will be actually e-waste.
Do you think that's why the headphone jack went away?
To make earphones a consumable?
I like to not wear my tinfoil hat
so loud and proud is all that.
But I mean, I don't know.
Sometimes I can't tell the difference between 4D chess
and just design first.
Like I just, I don't know.
I don't know, but I don't know.
Maybe.
I mean, maybe buds,
but like the kinds of headphones we're wearing now,
some of those do last for decades.
I think they're still doing pretty well.
Oh yeah, these do, which is like,
yeah, but that's the precedent for it, right?
Like I expect, I mean, these are not great.
Maybe not these ones.
Yeah, not these ones.
These are just affordable.
My 595s, I'm on,
I don't even know how many times I've replaced the ear pads,
but I just keep replacing the ear pads.
They're fantastic headphones.
I hope I never have to stop using them.
I'm on year 15 with mine
and I haven't even replaced the ear pads.
They're like still going strong.
Oh, yeah.
Oh, okay.
Next.
They're leather, yeah, whatever.
Yeah, that's fine.
I thought you had 595s.
No, no.
You just said mine and I was like, that's gross.
Sorry, oh good God.
Okay, next we've got Alex.
Have you ever thought about getting into fragrances?
Yes.
I want to re-experience that new PC smell.
I want a magic blue smoke fragrance.
Oh God, no.
That gives me so much anxiety.
If you could just dab a little bit of magic blue smoke
on the wrist, man, just, ah.
Tech Red goes up.
And new electronics.
I'd love a new electronics fragrance.
I don't want to smell any of these things.
Burnt plastic.
Yes, oh, burnt plastic, ah, I love it.
Gross.
Okay.
Okay, last of the curated.
This is from Antoine.
Sorry, one second.
What would be funny is if for April Fool's events
for LTT Store, is if you guys actually made joke products,
but you actually made them
and actually shipped them to people.
Luke, why do you enable him?
Because it's awesome.
Sometimes he'll follow through with stuff
that I think is hilarious and it's great.
I'm not telling you to not.
Because I was thinking the other day about,
I haven't heard about Cards Against Humanity
in a long time, but they used to do stuff like that.
They would basically like troll their customers,
but they would be transparent about it.
They'd be like, you're buying this thing.
And people would be like, no way.
There's no way they'd ship that to me.
And then they actually do it.
I just, I like that.
I mean, dbrand does that sort of thing too.
Yeah, yeah.
Like it's not unheard of.
It is definitely actually a thing.
It's a lot of work developing a product
that's actually good.
I don't like manufacturing garbage.
Like I don't like manufactured waste.
So I have tended away from anything that's just LOL.
That's what I will say about that.
That's fair.
Yeah, that is fair.
Okay, last of the curated from Antoine.
I've been watching the weekly news analysis,
open parentheses, LOL, close parentheses,
show religiously for about six to seven years now.
How do you guys deal with crazy people who know you as I do
without having met you?
I think we're just kind of used to it.
Yeah, it's not that bad.
Yeah, I mean, it's like-
There's been times where it was bad,
but they're usually very contained and you get over it.
Yeah, it's overall pretty cool.
Like it's-
It's always a nice, I always liked the status flex.
Like back when I was in dating phases,
if you're out on a date with someone
and someone comes up to you and like,
oh, hey, whatever, it's great.
I would always like,
I would notice someone looking at me and be like,
that person knows who I am.
And I'd be like, come on.
But is it effective?
Yeah.
Not as effective as chicken apparently.
Hey, they're both effective.
Okay, hit them with both of them.
Okay, we don't hit anyone with chicken.
That's not okay, Dan.
We get salmonella.
No, chickenella.
I said chicken, not salmon.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I'm so bad at this, I'm sorry.
Okay.
Last curated?
Oh no, that was it.
That was the curated.
Then we're on to the potentials.
We're on to the potentials now.
Do you want me to read the potentials
and you can keep working on incoming?
Should we just go for it?
Yeah.
This Freaks asks,
Linus, can you sell things that are already waste?
For example, the high school I went to
demolished a couple of years ago.
They were selling bricks to alumni.
Yeah, that's something we actually do want to do more of
is turning e-waste into like decorative items.
We've been, man, it's been like over a year,
which is sort of embarrassing, but we've wanted to do.
You could do the explodey boxes.
Yeah, we could.
Those are a lot of work.
We're trying to figure out things
that are relatively scalable
because unless you're actually repurposing, you know,
many pounds of electronics, are you doing anything?
I don't know.
And I mean, it's all just delaying the inevitable.
And I understand that,
but we're looking for things that are reasonably scalable.
So one of the ideas we had is like acrylic
or like resin coasters with CPU's embedded in them.
So that's something we've been trying to perfect
for over a year, not full time, obviously.
Just been on the table.
It's a project that's been kind of handed off first from,
I think, who was the first person to touch it?
I think Kyle might've done something with it
and then Tynan was on it.
And then I think one of the new engineers
who might still be on probation was on it.
Jacob might've looked at it at some point when he was here.
The point is a lot of people have kind of chipped away at it
but we haven't figured out exactly how to make sure
the bottom doesn't end up concave.
We haven't figured out how to make sure that whatever,
like the acrylic that we machine out the spot for
is exactly the same tone and fades in exactly the same way
as the resin that we put in it,
getting all the bubbles out of the resin.
There's actually a lot involved
in just the stupidest bull sometimes, you know?
Like it seems easy.
Yeah, I just put a CPU in resin,
but what if the CPU goes too deep into the resin
and it pokes through the top?
Well, that doesn't look very nice.
Well, okay, you could put a thing in there
to keep it from going in too deep.
How did they used to do the old school key chains?
I don't know.
Was that a resin or was that like a plastic case?
I'm not sure.
I don't remember.
That's a good question.
So we'll figure it out.
It just takes time.
So you guys are on it now for the potentials?
Oh, yeah, sure.
Unless you want me to just start going through them.
Okay, I can do potentials.
Samuel says, hopefully this jacket is worth $250.
My question is, do you guys have any thoughts
on hydrogen fuel cell?
I would love to see hydrogen fuel cell succeed.
From what I can tell, it's far less impactful
in terms of mining rare earth metals
than what we're doing right now.
With that said, Tesla did show off some very promising slides
at their last tech day to do with reducing the,
I believe it was nickel and cobalt,
contents of their batteries.
So, you know, who knows?
If batteries get less reliant on heavy metals,
if batteries get more recyclable,
like if we could take a dead lithium battery
and get back, you know, 80, 90 plus percent of the lithium
and turn it back into a working battery,
I'd love to see that.
But otherwise, I mean, hydrogen fuel cell,
aside from just being kind of stalled right now
in terms of at least what I'm seeing as a general consumer,
it's not an industry that I follow super closely.
So I'd love for it to work there.
That's what I'll say about it.
I just, there's so much momentum for electric charging now
and so little momentum for hydrogen fuel cell
fueling stations.
I just, I don't have a lot of hope.
Yeah.
Yep.
Oh, right.
I'm supposed to be doing this.
Linus, seeing as you seemed to enjoy playing
Horizon Call of the Mountain on PSVR too,
do you think you might give Horizon Zero Dawn another try?
I finished Horizon Zero Dawn.
Yeah, I can.
Yeah, I loved Horizon Zero Dawn.
Yeah, it's a great game.
Yeah, it's a really good game.
If you haven't played it, it's awesome.
I played through it on the Steam Deck.
The only issue I had was related to running it
on the Steam Deck and it being in its very early days
and some sort of weird crashing and bugginess
and stuff like that.
It was a really great game.
Really enjoyed it.
Currently watching March 3rd WAN show, Hi Future Me.
Oh, you're behind.
I see.
Linus and Luke and Dan, what has been your favorite date
with your respective SOs?
Why and do you think they would pick the same?
If you guys aren't ready, I can go first.
I have something in mind, but okay.
Probably the most fun date that Yvonne and I went on,
at least in the last five years,
was we did something called a discovery flight
at a flight school at the local airfield.
It was shockingly affordable.
Did you guys ever do it?
No.
Do it.
Way to spoil that.
It's not like Emma watches the WAN show.
Yeah, she does.
Oh.
You know what?
No, I'm not accepting any responsibility for this.
I told him like a year ago.
There.
Yeah, cause it was my idea.
Cause I asked you to go.
Was it?
Yeah.
Oh.
And then you just did it without me.
Okay, I guess we're airing some dirty laundry today.
Well, it was a really good idea.
Thanks.
So it's shockingly affordable.
It was like $130 or something like that.
We're up for, it was like two hours or something all told.
I guess technically I didn't ask
if you want to do the discovery flight.
Oh, okay.
I asked if you wanted to like do the whole thing.
Oh yeah.
And I'm still down.
But anyway, it was like $160.
It was shockingly affordable.
Both Yvonne and I got to operate the aircraft
with a certified instructor in the plane with us.
You both have a yoke.
It's like actually pretty cool.
Yeah, it was an absolute blast.
And it was probably the best like bang for the buck
sort of premium date experience that I've ever had
in terms of like memorability and an actual
like fun factor.
Way better value than going to the movies.
Like maybe less time, but awesome, awesome, awesome.
Ton of fun.
I don't know, but there was one that I remembered
that was, I doubt she would pick the same one,
but I do know that she remembers this event rather fondly.
We were supposed to go up to a particular lake.
I don't remember the name of it.
Harrison Lake, I think was the one.
It's just been a few years.
I don't remember which one it was.
And we were supposed to go to a particular spot on it.
And I was, I don't know if I was using my car's GPS
or Google maps or whatever one it was.
It just didn't send us to the right spot at all.
And I had never been there before.
So we ended up on like some logging road,
like halfway up the lake until looking to my left,
I noticed through the trees that we were clearly
on the side of the lake.
And we were supposed to be approaching like the bottom
of the lake and stopping right there.
So I knew we were way off of where we were supposed to be.
And that's, we had to turn around and go all the way back.
We ended up being super late to the event
that we were trying to go to.
And then afterwards we stayed at this Airbnb out there
back when Airbnb was cool, which was like nowhere close
to the town that we were visiting.
But I picked it because it was like this really sick,
like old school farmstead as an Airbnb.
Wow, that's cool.
And it was like, it was this really cool event.
Taking my Acura onto a logging road
was an event in its own right.
That was the day that I was like,
basically had to be like, all right,
I'm not as worried about keeping this car pristine anymore.
So like cruising down a gravel logging road
with the rocks flying all over the place.
And I was like, okay, but yeah, it was cool
because I have always liked going through things
like that with people.
I've always felt that as a bond strengthener.
When you're able to go through some like,
this kind of sucks.
We have no idea where the heck we are.
We're like up in the mountains.
We're not supposed to be up in the mountains.
We gotta figure out where we're going.
We gotta do this thing.
And then we're doing some weird thing afterwards
and you make it through and everyone has a good time
and it's fun.
That's always like a bond strengthening thing for me.
I always liked those times.
So that was, that was a good one.
Super cool.
Oh, right.
I'm supposed to do this.
Gosh, darn it.
Sorry. I'm going through and I'm trying to,
I'm trying to reply to them right now and stuff too.
So I'm trying to, I'm trying to help Dan.
There's only one in incoming.
Michael asks, given survivor bias,
do you have any estimate on how many people have failed
where you have succeeded in your business space?
Oh, literally tens of thousands.
Do you have any anonymous anecdotes
on what mistakes not to make?
I think the biggest mistake,
the biggest mistakes you can make are
not being true to yourself
and not listening to your audience.
And on the surface, those might seem contradictory
because how can you be true to yourself
and listen to your audience?
And how can you listen to your audience
while being true to yourself?
But they actually work together
because if you stay true to yourself,
you should build an audience
that will actually encourage you
to stay on a path that is true to yourself
while also being to their interests.
That's how you build a community of like-minded people.
And that's what I think we've done really well.
And you also shouldn't,
you shouldn't be 100% rigid in every single thing ever.
So your audience might have good ideas
and it might have good feedback.
And that doesn't mean you have to listen to all of it,
but you should listen to some of it
so you can grow and improve.
Yeah, I agree with that.
Jason says, getting the WAN desk pad for a new setup,
two systems in the DK05F, six setup.
I was wondering if you could say anything more
on yours and Alex's experience building in it
that didn't get into the video.
That's a better question for Alex.
You might wanna like tweet at him or something
because I don't think I did much on that video.
Sometimes I am deeply involved
and other times I am quite a bit less involved
in the actual building of the system.
I think Jake might've had a hand in that one as well.
Yeah, that thing is super cool,
but also not necessarily the most practical,
which I'm sure you are well enough aware.
Gavin says, hey, Luke, after the issues with Tarkov,
have you picked up any other games to play in its place?
I sort of answered this earlier as well, but like, no.
I think it's a different person asking.
Okay, what would it be?
Like what's your alternative?
So they're saying they play Hunt Showdown.
I've looked into Hunt Showdown.
I'm not that into it.
What's the difference?
I think it's a similar type of game
in a few different ways, but it's like, man,
the last time I played it was many years ago.
If I remember correctly, it has like a horror base as well.
And there's like giant spiders and zombies and stuff
that you're fighting off at the same time.
And it's just not really my vibe.
It has some similarities, but it's a very different game.
The community that likes that game is really into it.
So if you want to try it, don't let me dissuade you.
It's just not for me personally.
I've tried a few other games in the space too.
I've tried Arma.
I've tried a bunch of other things.
None of it really hits.
I don't know.
I guess if it doesn't have that same depth
to the sim-ness of it.
And you could argue that Arma does
in a bunch of different ways, but then...
So you are gonna like this?
I find Arma to be very clunky.
I'm not a huge fan of the controls and stuff.
Right.
I don't know.
It's just Tarkov just needs to figure it out.
That's basically it.
Dartangan M.
I understand how unlikely this is,
but I wanted to know if Linus thinks LMG
might ever be in a position to hire truck drivers.
Sincerely, a truck driver named Zeus.
Zeus.
Love it, by the way. Sick name.
I don't know.
I mean, if LCIX ever takes off
and we become like a giant tech retailer or something,
obviously we'd need truck drivers for that.
But there's a future where it could happen.
Yeah, but I kind of doubt it.
I don't know if we're ever gonna,
I don't know if we're ever gonna make it to that future.
We would probably use another service
that they happen to hire truck drivers, I feel like.
I don't know.
Yeah, maybe.
Maybe.
Anonymous asks, what made you choose the Taycan
over one of the E-hybrid models from Porsche?
You've strongly advocated for hybrids in the past.
I'm looking at getting a used Cayenne E-hybrid.
I'm curious on your thoughts.
I'm gonna be honest with you.
I hate going to the gas station.
It's one of those things
that just makes me irrationally annoyed
when I have to stop and get gas.
I like going straight from where I am to where I want to be.
And I don't like stopping.
I'm just like a, I'm like a go, go, go kind of person.
And I wanna never go to the gas station again.
And so the Taycan is really great for that.
I also don't want an SUV.
I don't enjoy the SUV driving experience.
With that said, I've never driven a Cayenne.
Maybe it's like not very SUV like, maybe it's awesome.
But I like being low to the ground.
I've always preferred to be low to the ground.
I'm really happy with it so far.
I have absolutely no regrets whatsoever,
no matter how stupid
some of my badminton buddies think I am.
One of them has like an i8, I think it is.
Whatever that BMW hybrid one is.
Well, that's the like supercar thing.
Yeah, yeah, it looks sick.
Very, very striking looking car
with like the doors like this, not like this.
Oh man.
Oh, right.
I'm supposed to keep doing things.
I'm sending that one to Tynan.
Okay, cool.
For Linus, have there been any discussions
about offering blank tees to creators
that go to put their designs on?
I mean, absolutely.
It's something Creator Warehouse would love to get into.
It's kind of where the name like came from
in the first place.
There's a reason we didn't just call it
Linus Tech Tips Merch Company.
But it's-
Thank goodness.
There's a lot of logistics to figure out.
You know, you have to build those relationships.
You have to build trust with creators.
We had one fairly prominent creator recently
that we were even working on some custom products for,
but just kind of stopped replying to emails.
I'd love to know what the problem was
because we actually went as far as getting samples in
and trying to book a time with this person
to show them to them
so that they could tell us if they were good
and then we could, you know, do a size run.
And like, we were working on some full custom projects
and just kind of disappeared.
And since then, this person has launched a merch lineup
through another company and it's kind of like,
okay, well, it would have been nice
to not read about that in the news maybe,
but you know, hey, good luck on the launch.
And then I just never heard back.
And so I'm kind of wondering
if maybe some messages got lost or something
because that's sort of the only real thing I can think of.
But yeah, stuff happens, right?
Like life happens, business happens,
and I'm not taking it personally or anything.
The point of telling the story was just that
it can be very challenging.
So yeah, we'd love to,
but one of the issues I think with our model
is that you kind of have to bet big on things.
Even for blank t-shirts,
no printing company that has decent quality
is gonna print 30 shirts for you.
Like that's stupid.
That's not even worth them setting up the screen printing.
So unless you're gonna print hundreds of shirts,
I don't even know if we can help you, right?
And if you're gonna print hundreds of shirts
and you don't sell them, then I don't know.
We'd have to have some kind of system
for passing through storage costs or something.
I don't know.
There'd be a lot of things to figure it out.
Yeah.
I do know that there is a company out there
that I was planning on talking to you about next week
and we're not gonna fully talk about now,
but they do merch stuff and they have
been inspired by the work of merch messages.
Oh, really?
I would refrain from saying copied, but.
Oh, really?
Yeah.
Oh, that's hilarious.
Yep.
I mean, hey, it's nice to be an innovator, right?
Yeah.
Good job, Conrad.
Okay.
Edris says, the 3DS and Wii U e-shop
are closing and access to games there is ending.
I've been buying games I wasn't able to get
since I still enjoy my 3DS.
Were there any games that you enjoyed on them?
I never had a Wii U and I never had a 3DS.
You borrowed my 2DS, because I was cheap,
to play Bravely Default.
Yes, I did.
Yeah.
I forgot about that.
Yeah.
Okay.
Well, I played Bravely Default and that was okay.
There are better retro RPG inspired games now.
And Bravely Default 2, I finished it,
but I kind of forced myself to do it.
The deal for that was, he was like,
yeah, it's gonna take me a while, so be aware of that,
but I'm gonna buy Bravely Default.
And if you're down, I'll borrow your 2DS
and then you can just have the game when I'm done.
And I was like, yeah, sure.
And then when you gave it back, you were like,
I don't know if I'd bother to play it.
So I still have the Bravely Default cartridge
and have still never actually played it.
Cause I was just like, yeah.
You should play Final Fantasy Tactics.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Or you could play my all time favorite, Final Fantasy 6.
Like he still hasn't played it.
Have you watched?
This would take significantly less time.
I haven't watched Pirates of Silicon Valley.
I haven't watched Pirates of Silicon Valley.
Like many hours less.
I know.
Okay.
If I watch Pirates of Silicon Valley,
you'll play Final Fantasy 6.
That is not an even trade.
I mean.
But.
Oh!
Speaking of.
But, sure.
Speaking of terrible deals.
Okay.
I still don't know if it's okay for the birds.
I am trying to figure it out.
It's a hard, it's not an easy answer to grab.
Okay.
He is getting a new computer and a NAS upgrade,
but all he has to do is have it be mineral oil cooled.
Or well, a new fluid.
Yeah.
A new, not mineral oil fluid.
Yeah.
My problem.
Submersion cooled.
Is I have two small birds and there are a lot
of different things like that,
that are extremely critically unsafe.
Like we'll kill them very quickly type of stuff.
There's a lot of different chemicals
that you have to stop using in your home.
If you get birds, you have to start cooking
with different things that you can't use non-stick pans
and all this kind of stuff
because it kills them really fast.
So I need to like, for sure, make sure that it's okay.
And most things don't have like a,
is this okay for birds or not section
on their like product information.
So it's not necessarily the easiest thing to figure out.
But I am working on it.
I'm working on it.
I think Dan's going to have to weigh in
on this next one from Aaron S.
Had to get a second pack of underwear
because now I feel uncomfortable in anything else.
Yeah.
Relatable.
Question.
I like to buy vinyl copies of my favorite albums.
Do either of you all own any music anymore?
Yes, of course.
I've got vinyl.
I'm of the generation where we kept highly curated MP3
folders to copy onto your MP3 player.
So that's kind of like my generation's vinyl,
but I really like vinyl.
I think it's fun.
I don't like it because it necessarily sounds better.
I'm not going to piss anybody off
by saying what I just did.
Oh crap.
A lot of people here at the office collect it too.
The covers are great.
The art is great.
I don't like buying music that I've heard before.
I will buy random single or limited run pressings
of stuff I've never heard that's only available on vinyl.
And most of it's bad, but it's awesome.
It's like a grab bag.
Kinder surprise.
Yeah, it's a kinder surprise of terrible, terrible music.
I have some vinyl, but most of my vinyl I have purchased
for like collection reasons.
Like I have the Bastion soundtrack.
A lot of them are gaming soundtracks.
I think it's stupid.
So there you go.
There's the entire spectrum.
The day that I have,
I don't think it's like cool.
And it's ironic because I totally have space
to store like records,
but I just can't think of anything less valuable
that I could possibly put in that space.
Not gonna lie.
I got them and I used to play them
because I used to do this thing where like
I would do house chores during one record
and then be like, all right, I did that amount of time.
Since I used to do that,
they have definitely never been played.
And they very likely like never will be again.
They're just so inconvenient at this point.
Don't tell anyone, but I kind of agree with Linus.
I have, like for what some people will spend
on their vinyl collection,
I have my entire house wired up
with wifi enabled smart speakers
so that I can stream anything from any device in my house.
My kids can into any room or any combination of rooms.
I'm sitting here going like,
that's how you do it.
Ironically, again, I actually own a turntable,
but only because YouTube sent it out
as like a like trendy YouTuber gift.
And I just, it's like branded after the channel
and YouTube and stuff.
And I'm like, yeah, now I just have this thing.
Well, at least you'll have something
to play the LTT Christmas album vinyl release on.
That will not exist.
Yeah.
Linus was always curious what your go-to badminton kit is.
What like rackets, shoes, strings, tension, everything.
Okay.
So compared to, hold on, archive.
Cool.
Compared to, how do I put this?
So the badminton community is either
kind of Northern European for the most part
or skews heavily Asian, especially Southeast Asian.
So the countries where badminton is huge,
places like Malaysia, Thailand, Japan, China, India,
like badminton is enormous in those areas.
And then Denmark of all places is like world-class.
Like they have the number one men's singles player
right now, Victor Axelson.
So anyway, my problem is that a lot of badminton equipment
tends to be designed more for an Asian audience.
So my shoes, for example, are-
Ah, yes.
I have to get the, whatever the wide version of the,
I think it's like the 65 something W shoe
or something like that.
Yeah, it's a something.
It's a Yonex SHB65W or something like that.
It's discontinued, but I still wear it
because I bought like six of them
because they discontinued their wide model for a while.
Yeah, I think it's this one.
They discontinued their wide model in one generation.
I was like, you guys don't have a wide shoe anymore.
This is ridiculous.
And then when they brought it back, I was like, okay,
well, I'm gonna stock up on them
so that I never have to worry about that again.
And I've actually gone through like four of them already.
So I'm down to two more.
And then I actually just switched rackets.
I just switched to the NanoFlare 700 4U.
The 5U is super cool, which it's like super, super light.
And I like that about it, but this one is not as-
NanoFlare 700, what a name.
Yeah, this is not as fragile.
Yeah, so there you go.
And I'm partial to Hangyu
tournament number one shuttlecocks.
There you go.
Yeah.
When deciding whether to make a new video
and especially a new video that is different
from existing series, do you have, oh.
Oh, sorry.
I left something out.
I use BG80 strings, but I might need to switch
cause they're really delicate and I keep breaking them
cause I miss it at the top of my racket a lot
cause I'm dumb and I use too much arm and not enough wrist.
There you go.
Basically more detail than most people need.
Do you trust your experience or instinct
when deciding to jump into like a new category,
a new type of video that you haven't made before?
It's gotta be both.
I mean, they're inseparable for me.
So much of my instinct is-
Sorry, no, no.
Compared to like having a scoring system.
A scoring system?
Yeah, systematic score.
I have no idea.
Yeah, no, it's experience and instinct.
Obviously, you know, we will discuss things.
I don't just make unilateral decisions, but we are,
man, when it comes to creativity,
you can't just score things.
Yeah.
Like you can rank them.
You could go, okay, here's three ideas.
Good, better, best, right?
Good, better, best.
But I don't think you can just quantify that stuff.
There also might be a worth in making a certain video
that is not super tangible.
Yeah, we make videos regularly
that we know are not necessarily going to perform the best
or be the lowest cost for the highest return
in terms of views or sponsorship dollars or whatever else.
But for us, it's also, it's a long game, right?
So we might invest a ton of time and money
in having labs test some products
that we know is gonna perform mediocre at best as a video.
When I could just react to crazy gaming setups
and sit in front of a camera for like 50 minutes
and bang out a video that'll do twice as many views.
But the reason we do that
is because you guys wouldn't care
about me reacting to computers
unless we were also a reliable,
valuable source of information about these products
that you might actually buy as opposed to the ones
that you just like looking at funny videos about.
Joseph asks, first time merch message.
I was just curious if there's any companies,
either tech or not, that you would like to see fail.
Is there anyone that you just think
the world would be better off without?
There's a lot.
Okay. There's tons.
Okay.
Amazon.
Really, fail.
Walmart.
Okay.
Name other things that are similar to that.
Gigantic big box stores.
Okay, hold on a second.
What about someone like a Google?
Would you rather see them fail?
No.
I think no.
And Amazon, when I'm saying Amazon,
I'm saying what I think most people,
maybe not in this audience,
but what I think most people would imagine
when they think of Amazon, which is like amazon.com.
Not necessarily some of the other things that they do.
Interesting. Okay, sure.
Like AWS.
I'm, I'm, I.
AWS is not in a monopolistic position at this time.
Yeah.
Yeah. Okay.
There are competitors.
There are competitors that are legit
and there are competitors that are thriving.
So it's like, okay, that's all right.
But I don't, amazon.com can, can die in a fire.
All right.
Yeah.
Man, I'm having a hard time.
Like.
Walmart can die in a fire.
I don't need them to,
I don't need them to fail.
I just need them to not be as dominant.
And like, I'm, I'm generally just pro competition.
This is like the,
the conversation we're having earlier about fines.
My reason for wanting these ones to fail
is because of the damage that they've done to other groups.
Oh, I see.
So I want them to actually fail.
There are other things where it's like, okay,
you're winning a little bit too hard,
but you're not like horrifically abusing
your low level employees.
So, you know, maybe you could do not as well.
That would be great.
Right.
But I want those ones to fail personally.
Yeah.
Okay.
We've got just a couple more.
Jared asks, what do you think about Tesla's
not being very, very friendly in regards to owner repair?
Do you think electric vehicles are going to need to be worked
on by manufacturers and dealers?
I mean, we're generally pro right to repair
across the board and, and no,
I'm not a big fan of a lot of Tesla's way of doing business.
I mean, as, as a member of the media in particular,
and as someone who values open and honest communication,
Tesla crossed a huge red line for me
when they dissolved their PR department
and basically decided they were just not going to answer
questions about anything that was inconvenient for them.
That's not actually cool.
That's not being like a Chad or whatever.
That's, that's just deciding,
making a conscious decision to not be accountable.
Yeah. I don't,
I don't think that a lot of what Tesla does is,
is very cool.
I don't want them to fail.
I, you know, overall, I, I, I think they,
they are a force for good in the car market.
More competition is, is generally more better
from my point of view, but I'm not a fan.
I haven't seen the final mouse centerpiece keyboard
anonymous, final mouse centerpiece.
All right, fine.
We'll do this. We'll do this live.
Final mouse centerpiece.
Here we go.
A $350 keyboard.
Good gravy.
What?
Okay.
Yeah. Where's the key caps.
Am I missing something here?
Wait, that was, that's the whole thing.
Buy from final mouse.
Okay. Now hold on just a gosh darn minute here.
Get ready for the impossible.
It will be impossible to type on this because it has no key
cap. How do I, that's, this is it.
This is the whole page.
You have to click get ready for the impossible.
No, no, I can't scroll.
What is it called? Sorry.
Final mouse centerpiece keyboard.
Interactive display keyboard.
Okay. So here, hold on.
We found a video official reveal.
Oh my goodness. It's six minutes long.
Oh, I see.
It has an actual display under it.
Is it under it?
Yeah.
Or are the keys displays?
No, I think it's under it.
Cause you would see the switch hardware, wouldn't you?
You do. Yeah.
That's the switch hardware right there.
I mean, it's surprisingly see-through.
That's pretty cool.
Oh wow. They are, there are key caps.
They're just very clear.
Okay. That's pretty neat.
I don't think it's the kind of thing that I would spend real
actual dollar reduce on, but definitely cool.
I don't actually like that.
I'm sure someone's going to have like a,
a tour walkthrough that has like a really cool setup with
that. That's going to look super sick.
Yeah. I,
I dim my keyboard to the lowest level because I don't need
the glare, but I mean, yeah, I'm cool.
Okay. Finally, Linus and Luke,
how do you intend to differentiate a move?
Okay. How do you intend to differentiate LTT labs in regards
to testing when compared to other review sites,
such as ratings?
That's a great question.
The biggest way that we plan to differentiate is through
breadth and depth, right?
Like that's what it really comes down to is we want to test
more categories, particularly more IT categories.
I mean,
I don't think pretty much anyone like ratings is really
doing a great job of database like content for products like
power supplies.
I think that it's underserved.
And so we would, we would like to,
we'd like to step in there and I fully intend to continue
investing in the lab until we are providing the most
possible depth in our, in our coverage.
So how are we going to differentiate? I mean,
we're going to compete, we're going to compete hard, right?
Like we want, we want to, we want to be a leader.
We don't want to, we don't want to be a follower in the
space.
And I think that's it. Thank you very much for tuning in.
We will see you again next week. Same bad time,
same bad channel.
Bye.
How long was that show?
Three hours and 40 minutes.
Yeah, that it flew by.
What a world.
What a thing.
So brought to you by glass technologies,
Squarespace and Oh balls. What was the last one?
It was something good. I'm sure. Fresh books.
There we go.
That makes sense.