What is up, ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the WAN Show.
We've got a fantastic show for you guys lined up today.
Gamers Nexus has been making big news this week, calling out Newegg's scammy return policies.
So we're going to be definitely weighing in on that.
In other news, Sony acquires Bungie for 3.6 billion.
What?
Oh good, oh great.
Facebook loses 252 billion in value shares, magic money, and yeah you stole my other topic
so I'm looking for another one.
Oh yeah!
I stole your topic, I think you mean I privateered your topic.
You pirated my topic.
So New York Times purchased Wordle because everyone has to buy every game.
Every company has to buy a game.
We should buy a game.
Okay PewDiePie, here's my offer.
Okay YouTuber simulator, I'm offering you two ABCs of gaming plushies from lttstore.com
and this lock of my hair.
If you accept the offer, if you accept the offer PewDiePie, right now, live on stream,
I will go get scissors, I will chop off this lock of hair, okay, and I will mail it to
you.
I want YouTuber simulator.
This is how business should be done.
Let's roll that intro.
The
show is brought to you today by Grid Studio, Graphix, and Squarespace.
All right, let's jump right into our first topic.
This has been quite the saga.
According to Gamers Nexus, Newegg has been running what amounts to a scam.
So what exactly is it?
And I am expecting to be able to contribute at least a little bit of my experience actually
having worked on the retail side of things.
But let's go on and let's kind of walk through what happened here.
According to Gamers Nexus, the problem is that customers are being denied refunds for
ineligible products, specifically motherboards.
The problem with this is that the motherboards are often new in box.
Jake just showed up.
Jake, what can I do for you?
You can show it, right?
Yeah, I think I can show it.
It's not on.
Sure.
Here's hoping.
I'm pretty sure it's fine.
I'm pretty sure I'm allowed to show, wait, are we allowed to show it not on?
I mean, we did a post, didn't we?
I think so.
Right?
Okay.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
We can tease that we have it.
Okay.
I think so.
Do not turn it on.
I won't turn it on.
I won't turn it on.
Have you held it yet?
No.
Okay.
We're going to talk about.
You're not allowed to talk about it.
We're going to talk.
No, I, he can talk about whatever he wants.
He doesn't know anything.
I know nothing.
You can't talk about the feel or anything.
Oh yeah.
You can't talk about the feel or anything.
All we're allowed to tease.
No expression.
No expression.
All we're allowed to tease is that we've got one.
So don't react to it in any way.
Laughing is not a unique reaction for me.
Everyone knows this.
Oh, I'm so excited.
Not being able to say anything feels so like functionally wrong.
I know.
I know.
I know.
I know.
The thing is that this is a final unit.
So while I have actually commented on things like ergonomics and we've even pointed a thermal
camera at it when we did our early hands-on sneak peek, that was on pre-production hardware.
This is the actual one that will be delivered to actual consumers.
Have you placed a pre-order yet?
Yeah.
Yeah.
Okay.
All right.
Do you remember I told you, you were like not stoked, but I did it during WAN show.
Right?
Yes.
Cause I want to get early in and I'm like you.
Right.
Yeah.
That's a, that, that's fair.
I'd love to ask you if you have any regrets, but I can't because you can't get.
I have things to say, but I can't.
I have things to say, he says, all right, well, uh, there'll definitely, there'll definitely
be opportunities to say things.
I've got a lot of content planned for the steam deck.
When, uh, are you allowed to say when you can say things?
No, I usually, when the NDA is expired is covered by the NDA, right?
One of the things that I am planning to do, and I'm actually really excited about this
one is I am going to switch to the steam deck as my only computer for a month.
Whoa.
Why not?
I mean, you literally just did the Linux challenge, so I think you can answer that question.
Why not?
Because of the problems in the.
But it's the steam deck theoretically, theoretically, and this is something I haven't tested.
I haven't, I haven't touched yet because.
You're telling me to run, no, I mean, I would do it.
Yeah.
So why not?
It's a quad core Zen 2 processor, right?
RDNA 2 graphics.
These are all things that are, that are publicly known.
It's got up to a 512 gig SST.
What about it?
USB type C. So you can plug into an external dock.
No, I think it's a great idea.
What about it is not daily driver capable.
I think it's a good idea.
So I'm, I'm going to do it.
I'm going to run it for a month and I'm going to report on my findings because valve has
already got games on their validated list that I had trouble with when I was left to
my own devices.
So if valve says, Hey, it's going to do it.
You probably can't comment on this, but they, they said the entire steam library.
They said that very early on and I pressed X to doubt.
And right now what I can say is that steam's validated game or valves validated game list
is not the entire steam library and that doesn't surprise me at all.
That's what I can say right now.
Okay.
Yup.
Yeah.
I mean, you remember me calling BS on that right out of the gate, right?
Yeah.
So that's, that's actually insane.
Like, Oh yeah, it's impossible.
There's, there's unless, and I know they're working on it and they've actually made huge
grounds and there's still that website, you can look at it and it has been getting slightly
better, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
But the anti-cheat problem is like a thing and that's just, I don't know, they'd have
to convince a lot of old games to do updates, to be compatible with this, which is a very
hard thing to convince developers to do.
Yes, that's fair.
Let me go back to this old game that we haven't made any money from in a long time and like
spend dev time on it.
That seems like good business.
All right.
Good business, apparently consumers who buy motherboards on new egg are being denied refunds
for what are claims to be ineligible products.
Except that this doesn't make any sense because apparently the motherboards are often new
in box.
So new egg makes the claim that the CPU sockets have customer caused damage to the CPU pins.
And they're saying that that's their reason for withholding funds from people seeking
an RMA gamers nexus stumbled into this situation by returning a $500 motherboard that was purchased,
but no longer required, which they actually mentioned in their refund request new egg
responded that customer caused damage had been done to the CPU pins and denied gamers
nexus is RMA.
I got to say when we've done things like secret shopper in the past, we've actually jumped
through a lot of hoops, even going as far as to use the credit cards of relatives of
employees when placing orders to ensure that no one catches that it's us.
And apparently you didn't even need to gamers nexus can just contact customer support for
new egg, get some rube who has no idea who they are, who denies them an RMA for some
BS reason because, and we know that this is BS gamers nexus never opened the motherboard.
It was a brand new inbox motherboard now for the uninitiated LGA sockets are very fragile.
They have these little tiny pins in them.
Have you ever bent them?
Uh, yeah.
Yep.
Me too.
Uh, they are extremely easy to accidentally bend.
And once you bend them, you're, I mean, here, I can bleep you.
Let's try and time it ready once, once, once you bend them, you're, I hope we got it pretty
much.
We tried.
You can sometimes perform delicate surgery, pick them up.
Sometimes if you just squish them down, you can lift them back up again, but it's a little
sketchy and everyone's a little spooked about that socket from there, from there on.
Oh, absolutely.
Yeah.
You're always concerned.
You never want to swap that CPO once you get it working.
And typically a brand new board comes with a hard plastic shield over those delicate
pins to protect them during shipping.
But in spite of this, many retailers actually require a visual inspection of the socket
at the point of sale, just as a way of covering their own butts because, and I can tell you
this from experience, how often it happens that customers claim they didn't touch it
or claim that it was unopened when actually they did touch it and actually it was not
unopened.
And people are going to do that for sure.
Is a lot more than you'd think, because I think for a lot of people, the rationalization
is as simple as I simply cannot afford another motherboard.
And a lot of people cannot, that's, that's just reality.
This was literally everything I had.
I need to do something.
I feel like this wasn't my fault that the universe conspired against people like whatever,
whatever hoops they jump over to, to rational, to rationalize it, he's not going to let this
go.
I'm trying to move on today.
I told him before the show started, I was like, look, we're not going to have, I'm not
going to have any hot takes today.
I'm keeping it ice cold.
Like like in an LTT water bottle.
Like in this water bottle, lttstore.com.
No hot takes today.
He keeps drawing me back in.
So it is extremely common.
Um, for customers to do that.
Oh, okay.
Sorry.
Okay.
Point of clarification.
A gamer's nexus is a motherboard was brand new to him, but it was open box.
Okay.
So they did actually buy a refurbished motherboard in the first place, but they had not opened
it.
It didn't matter.
Yeah.
Which doesn't, which doesn't matter for the purposes of our conversation here.
For gamers nexus, they had never touched the motherboard.
They never even opened the box.
Yes, it was opened at some point.
So anyway, coming back to the, coming back to customers claiming that they didn't touch
stuff, the amount of times that we have seen obvious physical damage in the form of everything
from shorts that no, we're not from a capacitor being soldered on backwards like AMD, AMD,
like a Seuss's recent fiasco or like water damage, right?
Really bad stuff is a lot more than you'd think.
And I think that most people out there, most people, most of you in the chat are probably
by and large imagining that people who would try to pull that kind of scam are few and
far between.
But from my experience, it's absolutely not true.
It's not true.
There's a lot of people out there.
Like I'd, I'd worked in retail and had people try and pull them out, pull one over on me
all the time.
But because I'm pretty sad, potentially, is that potentially an exposure problem?
Cause like I remember when, when I worked at geek squad, I used to think, and I mean,
they weren't exactly doing great, but I used to think that HP laptops were just the worst
thing ever because it was like the only thing that we would ever get coming in with problems
was HP laptops.
And then I was talking to one of my mentors in geek squad and he was like, well, have
you looked at like the sales numbers that were pushed into the store for laptops?
Like, well, no.
And then you pointed out that it's like 80 something percent HP laptops at that time.
So he's like, what do you think is going to come back?
I was like, okay.
They weren't great, obviously, but it still was skewed by that whole stuff.
Do you think it's potentially an exposure problem?
You were noticing these issues largely?
Like what percentage of RMA things do you think were actual user problems that they
were covering up?
Oh, absolutely.
Most of them were legitimate problems.
But what I'm trying to say is that if you see a hundred threads on Reddit of people
claiming that something like that something was physically damaged out of a, out of a
new box, a not insignificant percentage of them are lying.
I mean, you see, you see a lot of that kind of stuff across the board.
Divided says your experience is also outdated.
You're right.
In the last 12 years, people have gotten so much better and more honest.
That's absolutely a thing that happened.
We've definitely seen that globally.
We've seen a really positive trend.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I mean, you see this across the board, right?
You see this with cheaters and video games.
You see this with, with everything.
So okay.
Now, now let's talk about the other possibility here.
Okay.
Because gamers next has purchased an open box motherboard.
It is entirely possible that it was actually a missed bent pin or missed socket damage
from the previous customer.
You know what else is possible?
It's possible that this particular motherboard, there could have been nothing wrong with it
at all.
I haven't actually gotten word from new egg about that particular possibility.
And I've actually got an additional possibility for you.
There's a lot of people in chat that are like, so Linus has blamed the customer.
No, that's not what I said.
I said that it's absolutely a possibility.
So don't take on what I'm saying is don't take one side automatically at all, because
there are a lot of different possible outcomes.
Now, for the motherboard itself, the odds that the retailer damaged the socket are extremely
low.
Yeah.
Like, like minisculely low, because even at NCIX, where we did put our own label on motherboards
up until like 2007 or something like that, even though they obviously have serial numbers,
I was like, why are we doing this?
Why do we put our own serial number on every product?
They were like, because that's the way we've always done it.
I'm like, okay, sure.
I guess so.
2006, 2008.
I don't remember, but sometime around there, they actually put their own labels on everything.
I remember that.
So even though NCIX did that, they actually had a way of doing it that they wouldn't even
open up the tape over the ESD bag on the motherboard.
They would slit the bag, slide in using a knife, slide in the thing, press it down and
pull the knife out and apply it that way.
So there is no reason for a retailer to open up the box of a product other than the one
that they might open to take pictures and you'd notice if the socket was bent.
In fact, even that one would just be sold as open box.
Probably.
But that's another, that's another thing, okay?
Motherboards don't come shrink wrapped.
Okay.
Because something I've been thinking of this whole time is wouldn't they, they said they
didn't open it.
Wouldn't it just be shrink wrapped?
But yeah.
No.
That's something that I have wondered about for many years.
Really?
This is a $500 board though.
A lot of high end boards, don't they have a sticker over the...
Not necessarily.
Motherboard manufacturers for whatever reason, and I've never, I've never actually asked,
but I've always been curious.
I mean, less plastic's good.
I'm not against that.
But motherboard manufacturers do not generally shrink wrap even their very high end products.
And it seems to me that if they really wanted to put this to rest forever, sealing the product
would probably be a pretty good way to do it.
Yeah.
But here's the issue.
I have seen bent pins and sockets.
Geomaster 337 on Floatplane Chat said, but Gamers Nexus didn't open the box it was shipped
in.
Okay.
That's a whole separate conversation.
That's okay.
We're not even talking about the Gamers Nexus scenario in particular.
I'm talking about in general, because here's the problem.
I have had this experience.
I have had the experience of opening up a brand new board and because I'm me, it didn't
even go to a retailer.
It came straight from the manufacturer and I was the first person to open it and I've
seen bent pins.
So what I'm saying right now is that let's take every account of this happening with
a grain of salt, understanding that there are multiple possibilities here.
A possibility is that the customer is lying.
Another possibility is that because motherboards do not come in sealed packages, the retailer
could easily be, let's say for example, throwing together a quick test bench in order to something,
putting it really nicely back into the box and selling it as new.
That's a possibility.
Possibility number three, it could have just actually been bent straight from the factory.
So there are three possible avenues for actual damage to the CPU socket.
Now in the case of Steve's, what I suspect is most likely, because this was an open box
board in the first place, is that whoever R made it in the first place, whether that
damage came from the factory or whether they caused it, they managed to get one in under
the radar.
Whoever was the tech at Newegg who inspected it or maybe didn't even bother, I don't know.
Whoever was the tech who inspected it didn't catch the bent pin.
It can be a little bit tricky to see them sometimes, you can get it just right.
And it ended up back on the shelf and it was sent to Steve.
Now because Steve didn't actually open the box, he actually wouldn't know if there was
any thermal compound on the socket or if it had any bent pins or if there was any other
kind of physical damage to it because he never looked at it.
And then Newegg is basically going, well, it's impossible that there was anything wrong
with it before we sent it, which by the way, as I already outlined for you guys, is not
impossible.
Doing a typical computer retailer thing, which is going, not my problem and pushing it back
to the customer.
Do I think that Newegg is actually running some kind of concerted scam where they are
trying to take people's RMA motherboards back and keep their money?
I sincerely doubt it.
I feel like that's the kind of thing that would be whistle blown at some point.
Do you think they could be pushing those people to be abnormally strict though?
I think...
So not like a concerted scam of like, hey, RMA specialist people, just refuse all of
them.
Tell them all they have socket damage.
Maybe weighing really heavily on employee reviews or something on like, oh, you accepted
too many motherboards with sketchy pins and being really, really, really hard on them.
Well, the right amount of motherboards to accept with sketchy pins from a Newegg point
of view where apparently you're making the assumption that it can't happen would be zero.
And here's another problem is that the retailer is often the first line of defense against
the customer when a lot of the time it's actually not their policy.
So here's something that you guys might not realize is that Asus, Gigabyte and MSI, they
also, ASRock for that matter, they also live in a magical fantasy land where it is entirely
possible impossible for a motherboard to leave their factory with bent pins in it.
So if you try to RMA as a retailer, if you try to RMA a motherboard with socket damage,
they will refuse it and you will be out the entire value of that motherboard.
So the question now to ask is, okay, where should this burden lie?
Should it lie with Newegg knowing that, and I know this for a fact, people damage things
and lie about it.
Should it lie with Newegg?
Should it lie with the manufacturer?
Should it lie with the consumer?
The honest answers to all three of those questions are no.
Because there is so much uncertainty.
Who should have to eat it every single time?
Because I can tell you guys, the retailer does not make the kind of margin that you
might imagine that they do.
I know a lot of motherboards get individually validated.
I don't know if that's true about everything, a $500 board might.
Part of individual validation is potentially screwing it up.
Yeah, but I wonder how expensive documenting that validation would be.
Because if you could have like photo evidence of your socket as it's leaving, and if someone's
like, oh, this was screwed up at the manufacturer, and they can be like, nope, picture.
That would kind of exclude one of those.
And then if, I think especially for open box products, if Newegg would document the status
of the product as it's being repackaged, that would probably help their stance as well.
So the problem is that Newegg's whole situation with Gamers Nexus was a comedy of errors.
So it's a lot more than just this debate over pins, which I did want to talk about.
Because there are sides of it that I feel like people might not have considered.
The issue, though, is that he never opened the board.
Newegg claimed there was thermal compound in the socket, despite the motherboard never
having been opened by him.
And making problems even worse, they actually asked to have the board sent back to them.
Newegg claimed they sent it back, and then so far, to my knowledge, has not actually
provided a tracking number.
So making this even more complicated, since the release of their video exposing the situation,
Gamers Nexus has apparently been flooded with similar accounts from viewers who have tried
to return their gear.
And a number of their followers are now pledging to boycott Newegg.
Louis Rossman has apparently weighed in, asking what even happened to Newegg, who actually
used to be known for their good service, apparently.
I'm not American, so I never really shopped there, because by the time they opened up
in Canada, I was working at a competitor, so I wasn't gonna shop there.
I would just walk into the warehouse and buy something if I really needed to.
But the response seems to be that they were purchased by Liaison Interactive, a Chinese
tech company in 2016.
All right.
Who do you boycott them with?
I mean, man, there used to be so many more options, man.
Fries, right?
Fries used to be cool.
Fries, there used to be Tiger Direct, there used to be ZipZoomFly.
Is M-Wave still around?
I feel like that's been a hot minute.
You've got Micro Center.
Does Micro Center still exist?
Oh, yeah.
They're not in Canada, right?
Yeah.
Oh, not in Canada, no.
But we're talking Americans.
They exist in the States, yeah.
Tiger Direct, LMAO.
Yeah.
Do you know how many people are talking about Micro Center in the Twitch chat, in the Flipplane
chat?
I did a sponsored event where, I'm not gonna say who, but a company flew me out to go do
a thing, and we were building computers, and the parts showed up late, and we were unboxing
all the parts.
I don't know who this was.
Or not unboxing, but taking all the parts out.
And then we realized that there was a component missing, and we had to go to a Micro Center
to go pick up said component.
Yeah.
It was a cool place.
Yeah.
It was a really, really big store.
And I know that's just some Canadian dude in America going like, whoa.
But it was huge.
It was crazy.
And I heard that Fry's Electronics was significantly bigger, which is cool.
I'm used to going to NCX when I was growing up.
It's this little tiny little sliver on the wall, where you basically go up to an order
desk and just get your stuff.
There's extremely limited browsing, if basically any.
The Langley location had two shelf things, and it was usually filled with just cases
that I assumed they couldn't fit in the back, because it covered most of the floor.
So yeah, I don't know.
It was kind of a cool experience.
Man, honestly, this just makes me feel like LTT stores should just be a computer store.
Seriously.
The margins are just so thin, though.
You know what?
So here's a crazy concept.
What if we just, what if our margins just weren't that thin?
What if we just took an extra 2% and then just had not customer service?
Like there's a novel idea, but I don't know.
I don't know.
I mean, you look at how price driven IT purchasers are, right?
Like in what other space does a site like PC part picker even exist?
In the makeup space, is there a PC part picker?
No.
Is there a facepaintpicker.com?
Oh my goodness.
You should make that.
You can actually go- There would actually probably be good money
in that.
Your lip, eye, facial compound, whatever you like, you put in your whole regimen and it
tells you the cheapest site to go buy it.
Like honestly, I don't think there is airline tickets.
Okay.
That's a good one from Navs.
A big, big money idea is like a face painting thing where once you were done like creating
your person, there would be like a, if you buy this shopping list of products, you can
achieve this look.
And it just add to cart.
That would actually probably be- Oh, it would do great.
But there's just, it's just, I've never seen anything quite like the way that IT enthusiasts
are driven by price.
Like I remember having this conversation with Asus one time when they came out showing us
their whole lineup of upcoming motherboards for, I mean, it must've been Z68 or something
like that at this point.
Z77.
I don't know.
It was like, it was way, way back a thousand years ago.
And I was looking at it going, this is madness.
I mean, these are the only two SKUs that sell anyway.
The Deluxe, the Pro, actually three SKUs.
You got the Deluxe, the Pro and the LX or LE or whatever, whatever the like the basic
one is.
And then you got your MATX.
Nothing else actually moves in any appreciable volume, at least from our perspective.
So why don't you just take those two?
And this was pre RGB, right?
And I was like, why don't you just take those two, ship them in three different colors,
do a blue one, a red one, and like an all black one.
And like, honestly, I think that would be, that would be more to customer's taste.
Because remember I was coming at it from like an enthusiast system standpoint, right?
So I'm, I'm looking at it going, you guys have no idea.
Do you?
How many people choose a gigabyte motherboard for the blue color scheme compared to your
product?
Like, actually I think Jesus was blue at that point as well, but maybe it was MSI and some
other color.
But I was just sitting here going, you have no idea how many people choose a motherboard
based on the color.
Do you, you could just say you could have the same number of SKUs and just have a few
different colors of the ones people actually buy.
And I think you'd be better off.
We're like, no Linus, you have no idea.
The $3 difference between these two allows us to capture like this, some, some percentage
additional sales because someone else will have one will undercut us by $2 and people
will flock to it.
I'm like, really?
Okay, fine, sure.
I guess that's, I guess that's apparently how it works.
People are talking about Amazon as an alternative to Newegg.
But Amazon has their own set of issues, guys.
Like let's not pretend that Amazon is some kind of saint that's going to rescue us from
big bad Newegg.
Good customer service, yes.
Good everything else.
It gets a little bit more challenging with Amazon.
DFI.
Yeah.
Bring back DFI.
Heck yeah.
Love it.
Oh, that's a, that's an, that's an old memory.
Yeah.
No kidding.
Right?
Oh, I love it.
What was that graphics card brand that had lifetime warranties?
Uh, oh, was it Gainword?
Did Gainword have a lifetime warranty at some, oh, BFG.
BFG.
Yeah.
Good old BFG.
Oh, awesome.
They were doomed to fail.
It was awesome.
Alden Komi says, Hey Linus, wouldn't the 2% extra margin basically be the warranties that
Dell and others peddle?
I mean, yeah, you could think about it that way.
That is an important realization that you just had Aidan Komal.
There is no free lunch.
It's true though.
Yeah.
It's true though.
A lot of people don't consider it.
That same buddy I told you about that, uh, I said mentor at, at geek squad or whatever.
He had that tattooed on his arm.
Just the, just the acronym.
There's no such thing as a free lunch.
It's very true.
It's so true.
And I think that there's just this expectation, like a lot of the times we fall victim to
the monsters we've created.
Why is it that, you know, you're, why is it that, you know, service at this chain restaurant
is so bad because you went there, you went to that chain restaurant instead of supporting
a local entrepreneur that actually cares that that's why, and because the server doesn't
get paid enough, you going there.
So other people saw that this place is being attended.
So they're like, ah, it's probably not that bad.
So then they might go there, et cetera.
So we, we all, we all contribute to these problems that we then, that we then suffer
from and you know, things like, like I said, not being willing to pay another dollar or
another $2 more or whatever the case may be means that yeah, at some point customer service
is going to suffer and the it industry is notoriously low margin.
There are a couple of big fish that are making the vast majority of the money in the it industry
and their names are Intel, AMD, only lately though, um, Microsoft, uh, who else is actually
making money?
Nvidia actually makes money, let's see, is there anyone else that's, I mean, I know that
the guys like an Asus are making money, but it's only due to their just astronomical scale.
And when you're someone like an EVGA, you know, you are, you are trying to find, you're
always trying to find new higher margin businesses to expand into because I know for a fact they're
not making money on selling GPU's, uh, Apple, Apple absolutely makes money.
Uh, Apple I left out because I don't really consider Apple an it product company.
They're a consumer electronics company and I, the reason I draw that line is because
they don't sell any components.
If that kind of makes sense to you guys, everything that Apple sells is already based on the user
experience rather than the speeds and feeds of the component that they are shipping to
you.
And so they're a little bit, uh, they're, they're a tier, they're a tier above.
There's a lot of people in chat just listing companies that develop software or websites.
That's not the point.
We're talking about IT hardware and especially enthusiast computer hardware.
Yep.
Um, cause once you get into, you mentioned it, once you get into enterprise stuff, margins
start to kind of, Oh yeah, totally different.
Definitely.
Come back.
Totally different story.
Totally different story.
IBM.
Come on.
What?
What?
What?
I have.
Okay.
Come on guys.
Yeah.
IBM is a technology company.
Yes.
But I wouldn't call them, I wouldn't call them like an it company in the sense that
we're talking about.
When we say it industry where we're talking about like the computer hardware industry
and maybe that's just one of those things where I'm used to using that lingo because
within the it industry, that's how we refer to ourselves.
So we would talk about things like risk, a receiver or a television as consumer electronics
because they're sort of a pre-packaged thing.
And we would talk about software as like software and services industry.
Um, so there, that's the, the clarification that I should give you guys.
That's why I'm using that terminology the way that I do knock to a, yep, yep.
The heart pathology or whatever your name is like fans and cases.
Yep.
That's a company that makes money hand over fist.
As far as I can tell.
They're smart.
They are super smart peripherals have always kind of survived with better margin peripherals
seem like they're getting pretty tough, man.
Probably you see how much you see how much a G five Oh two proteus or G five Oh two hero
goes for now.
It's like 45 bucks.
Yeah.
It's for hero sensor.
Like the tooling costs so much on a device like that space.
And so many new companies coming in because everyone flocked to it going, Oh, well there's
margin here.
It's kind of like what happened with power supplies.
There used to be great margin in power supplies and then everyone in their dog came in, dumped
all over it.
Oh, we're a fan company.
We made power supplies now.
Yeah, exactly.
That happened like crazy.
We put a power supply around our fan.
You're welcome.
Good job.
Hey, fun fact.
Uh, speaking of power supply companies, did you know that Antec still exists?
No.
Yeah.
I thought we did a show on them not existing.
No, no, no.
They totally still exist.
Check this out.
So I was thinking of doing an Antec build like an all Antec PC, right?
How cool would that be?
I haven't even heard this name.
They even have DF as a, as a product line name still.
Does it still stand for dark fleet?
I have no idea.
The original dark fleet was awful.
Awful.
Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa.
A cash for 51 you need to sit down and tech are a PSU company cases surely.
Are you serious right now?
No, no, no, no, no, no.
You need, you need, you need to sit down.
Okay.
Antec is the O G power supply company along with Enermax, pretty much everyone I knew
had an Antec power supply at least at one point.
For enthusiasts, for gamers, Antec was the shit.
Yeah.
Okay.
Back in the day.
Oh yeah.
Apparently they're huge in Bangladesh.
Still.
It's sitting.
Yeah.
For real.
Yeah, man.
My first enthusiast build and tech land boy with built in blue led lit 350 watt power
supply.
Love it.
One of my, one of my good buddies, uh, used to have a land boy air and just the dust machine
dude.
That was a unique, that was a unique case.
Yeah.
Okay.
It was a, an unusual case.
It definitely was.
This is cool.
I really thought they didn't, are they still like in North America?
I don't know.
As far as I, as far as I can tell, yes, I haven't actually tried to buy any of their
stuff, but it kind of seems like it.
And they're, they're doing a lot of sort of normal looking stuff.
They're also doing some weird stuff.
They've got this reverse fan, which was what actually brought them back on my radar.
So it's a fan that blows air away from the hub instead of the other way.
Why don't you just, why you need this?
I have no idea.
You can mount it the other way.
Okay.
No, I get it.
I actually get it now for aesthetics.
So you don't have to see the label.
Okay.
It's a very champagne problem for sure, but okay.
I get it.
At least.
I understand.
Okay.
What are we supposed to be talking about right now?
Australia, Bangladesh, Belgium, Canada.
Yeah.
Where's US?
So.
USA.
Yeah.
Back to Newegg's scammy return system.
I guess.
Yeah.
What, what I want to know is I want to hear from you guys, if you've had the same experience,
I want you guys to know that there's probably a mixture of blame to go around.
It certainly doesn't all lie on Newegg.
However, in the case of what happened with Steve, it looks like it's pretty clear that
this was either Newegg screwing up or Newegg ripping him off.
And it's very hard for me to tell exactly which one, either way, they picked the wrong
guy to screw with.
Yeah, I would absolutely be creeping like major, major tech media outlets and seeing
who works there and making sure that they're all just on the do fly list.
Yeah.
I was like, I didn't even really want to say it because like, I don't want to give them
ideas, but yeah, I would, if I worked there, like why would you not?
I would absolutely do that.
And like, yes, your, your company should have standards that are high enough that it shouldn't
matter.
Absolutely.
But I would make sure that if Steven Burke buys something from lttstore.com and sends
in a support ticket, he is getting the white glove service.
I will personally, Steven Burke, I will personally reply to your support ticket.
Oh crap.
I probably won't.
Yeah.
Now you have to tell the customer support people that.
Yeah.
No, I forgot.
You know what?
I take it back.
I take it back.
I will not personally reply to your support ticket.
You guys should have a reverse policy where like if Steven Burke buys something on lttstore,
you like screw him over.
I know, right?
We should just ship him a bag of sand at his cost.
Oh man.
This is how companies usually treat you.
So it's probably fine.
Yeah, exactly.
You're used to it.
You're used to it, Steve.
Give him the new egg special.
Yeah.
I love it.
All right.
Um, what else are we supposed to talk about today?
Oh yeah.
Sony to acquire bungee for 3.6 billion.
How ironic is this?
Very, very funny.
Very interesting.
I mean, I'm a little, I'm a little rough around the edges on the history here.
Okay.
But was it not bungee that put the Xbox on the map at all?
Wasn't the Xbox kind of just a black box until like, come on, man.
And I can try to go find the quote right now, but, um, the, the head of Xbox, if I remember
correctly, fairly recently in an interview was talked to about bungee and he talked about
how like he feels that modern Xbox, like the company, not the console would be able to
retain bungee.
And he was like, yeah, like we didn't, like maybe, I don't know how he worded it and I'm
not reading the article in front of me, but it's something on the lines of like, we didn't
necessarily deserve them at the time.
Like we weren't doing the right things weren't facilitating properly, all this kind of stuff.
But I think we would now we are now all that kind of stuff.
I would not be surprised if there was conversation going on there.
And then they went to Sony, which is really interesting.
It's just crazy.
So 3.6 billion when like, I'm pretty sure it's just destiny right now.
They do say like, uh, bungee, of course, the studio behind the original halo, which is
still owned by Microsoft and the following franchise is marathon pre halo FPS.
That's like, I really don't see them doing anything with marathon myth oni and destiny.
So destiny.
So destiny.
Okay.
So only as an oni of the dark forest forest.
It's worth mentioning that while other titles from acquired studios have remained cross
platform for contractual reason, bungees future contractual reasons, bungees future plan titles
are still slated to come out on other platforms.
In addition, bungee says that they will be retaining creative freedom.
Although I mean, yeah, I don't know.
I don't, I don't, I don't know how you, I don't know how you can say that with complete
certainty.
When I sold Linus media group and the buyer said, you will retain creative freedom.
Maybe there's a way to write a contract that actually guarantees it, but I also feel like
the buyer would be crazy.
Some type of loophole there.
There's something they can do.
They'd be crazy not to have a clause in the contract that says, well, if you screw it
up, then we're coming in and they could probably also just fire you.
Yeah.
We'll oust you.
Yeah.
Um, cause like you look at Oculus and they just fired them, right?
They just fired like everybody from the original team only is, uh, is not what I thought.
It's not only in the dark forest, it's just called Oni and it was released in 2001.
So as far as I can tell, all these, uh, all these things are just done except for destiny.
Destiny is big.
Destiny's a big game.
It's been very successful.
Every time they release an expansion, whatever, it sells really well.
People in that community seem pretty happy for the most part.
So like it's a big thing for Sony to get, but 3.6 billion bang, bang.
It's um, yeah, consolidation bad.
I don't think we need to go over that way too much more.
Um, yeah, there's, uh, there's some, some speculation that Sony is after IP there, uh,
game engine technology.
There's some speculation that Sony might want to move into more of a publishing role.
Um, maybe it's a cloud gaming move.
Um, Sony does cite bungees experience with multi-platform development and live game services
as a primary motivator for the purchase, which they're honestly, they're, they're multi-platform
live game service is, has been just killing it for a long time.
So that's very legit.
Uh, people in chatter also saying new IP is coming.
So yeah, that probably makes sense as well.
That's pretty, that's pretty fair.
It's I would, I also think, and I'm sure everyone is aware of this, that buying bungee is a
bit of a blow to Microsoft.
Oh, oh, I, I think it's pretty clear that there's a message being sent here.
And I wouldn't be surprised if a little bit of that price tag was like, Hey, come on,
you are a, you are buying bungee away from Microsoft, even if they don't own it.
Um, cause they were kind of dangling out there on their own for a little while.
Right.
And uh, being attached to something that is not Microsoft now is, is a statement, even
though they weren't owned by Microsoft.
Microsoft can still just buy Sony.
Oh my God.
Well, I don't see that.
I don't see that ever happening.
That's not going to be allowed.
Yeah.
The, the Japanese government is just not gonna let that be a thing.
I just think the American government would either, like, I don't think anyone's going
to be cool with that.
Yeah.
I don't think that's happening guys.
What is happening though?
Sponsors spots.
Sponsors spots.
Absolutely.
This is brought to you today by grid studio, uh, grid studios, art frames show off the
art hidden inside technology.
Ooh.
Okay.
You, you talk about the next bit.
I got to grab something.
Uh, okay.
Like the next sponsor spot.
Oh, okay.
Uh, apparently over a billion of the money for bungee was to, no, no, no, no, no.
For grid studio.
Okay.
Hold on.
The idea of knowing every part from your favorite phone or console is carefully extracted, laid
out.
That's actually really cool.
This is actually super cool and labeled in clear view.
Oh, they sent an iPhone four.
This was my first smartphone.
Oh, that's cool.
Not really counting my Blackberry.
That is so cool.
I mean, it's a lot better than being in a landfill, at least it delays it.
Oh, that's, that is super cute.
Cool.
They put a little like Mac face in there and you've got a Game Boy Pocket.
Yeah.
Nice.
Yeah.
My grandma bought my brother and I Game Boy Pockets when we were really young.
They have over 30 different frames available from the Sega game gear to the iPhone 10.
And these, so these look absolutely amazing.
The presentation is so nice.
I like how they're like labeled out and everything too, because like you probably know if it's
your thing, but if you're hanging this on the wall.
You're very likely going to get a question about it because it's a very interesting piece
to have hanging on the wall.
Yeah, that's so cool.
And it's, yeah, I don't know.
That's pretty sweet.
It's no NFT or anything, but it looks all right.
It says Positronic.
Oh my goodness.
Come on.
Probably cheaper than NFT.
I also like how they put like a graphic of Tetris inside the Game Boy screen.
Yeah, that's super cool.
So you can kind of see what it would do and it's in black and white, which makes sense.
I love it.
That's sweet.
That's awesome.
And so you can get your grid studio frame at lmg.gg slash grid studio.
We're going to have that linked down below.
The show is also brought to you by Graphis.
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Finally, the show is brought to you by Squarespace, not circle space, not rhombus space, Squarespace.
I hope those other things are not something terrible.
We use Squarespace, no joke.
We use it, linusmediagroup.com as well as, oh, it almost hurts me to say it, ltxexpo.com.
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Okay.
It says LTT in my talking points.
It says when up there, so I don't know which one is right, but one of them is, you'll figure
it out.
You'll I believe in you.
This is smart.
You know, it's not smart Facebook.
You know, it's sad.
What?
I wore this in mourning today.
Oh, LTX 2019 shirt.
Thanks for that.
Yeah.
Anyways.
Yeah.
Facebook 252 billion dollars gone.
Uh, as far as Wikipedia is concerned, the GDP of Finland.
Um, wow.
And to be clear, we're not talking actual dollars.
We're talking valuation value.
Um, yeah, brutal.
Apparently average usage of Facebook dipped for the first time ever leading to that.
That Instagram may not be far behind, uh, met as CFO, Dave Warner blames part winner.
I don't know.
Sure.
Uh, blames part of the decrease on fewer COVID-19 lockdowns.
Darn.
You should really, uh, crank on that a little more, uh, which historically generated a boom
in online activity.
I mean, he's not wrong, but like, why would you say that?
Exactly.
I'm like, why sounds like you're the CFO of Metta.
Um, yeah, kind of doesn't it also blamed the rising internet costs in India and rising
interest in TikTok, which analysts say is hurting Instagram's growth to combat TikTok.
Instagram has been investing billions of dollars and lots of development time into the development
of more video related features, which they say is they're like fastest growing thing
on Instagram.
Uh, reels fastest growing format format by far, uh, but it's not popular yet to attract
similar ad sales to traditional Facebook services.
Yeah.
So um, as a result of these challenges, including lower than expected revenue, meta book has
lost 252 billion.
That's with nine zeros on the end and they aren't alone.
Twitter, snap and Pinterest all closed lower on Thursday.
However, Shopify has been struggling to a lot of tech stocks have been struck.
This is interesting.
Metta books.
Wipeout here is the biggest crash in a single day in stock market history, 26.3% of the
company's value evaporated.
And this isn't the first time they're stock crashed in 2018.
They also lost 19% of their value over slowing user growth.
Yeah.
Like a lot of the speculated value of that company is based on projected eventual growth.
Yes.
So if, if they stop growing, then everyone goes, whoa, whoa, whoa.
And if they even stopped growing like crazy, because so much of it is just based on speculation
that they can only go to the moon, which is not true.
Stocks only go up.
Oh man.
That's how it works.
Um, yeah, brutal.
So our discussion question here is, is Facebook dying or is this just more of a, more of a
snap back to a more realistic valuation after I think Facebook that we're talking about
right now is, is the greater Facebook services or whatever you want to call them that includes
Instagram.
Yeah.
I think Facebook website.
Fine.
Let's call them meta.
Sure.
Meta book.
I like meta book better.
Yeah.
Meta book because that maybe doesn't include VR stuff.
I don't know.
No, it does.
Cause it's like the meta quest.
Yeah.
Which is horrible.
Yeah, I know.
Right.
You had such a good brand.
Why would you just burn it?
Yeah.
I don't know.
I don't want to go into meta.
That is just stupid.
Yep.
Can we just like, can we just trash on this whole metaverse thing for a little bit here?
Sure.
Tell me something.
Why do people think it's going to be one thing?
This has been the most confusing thing for me the entire time.
Why, why, why, why does anyone think it's me wife one thing and why does every company
individually think they are going to have sole ownership of the one thing that exists
that has made no sense to me the entire time?
Here's what I want to know.
Why does anyone think this is new?
That too.
Have I ever talked on the wen show about the palace, the palace, the palace, the palace
was a chat room that I used to use back in the late nineties, early two thousands.
Not many people are going to remember that as far as I can tell was the metaverse.
Okay.
Because this is what it looked like.
So rudimentary by today's standards, you would go into, you would go into rooms.
So you can see here, you could see how many people were in a room and you would have avatars,
which were actually not a single image.
So you could actually, you could mix and match them.
You could have like a top, middle and bottom and like skater boy avatars were super popular
at the time.
I'm sure they were.
Cause it was the late nineties and like skater girl avatars, people traded avatars.
They had an actual, like there was some, there was some commerce around, there was some commerce
around avatars where you could pay people to make them for you because the skill of
actually creating these avatars at that time was not something that was common.
Cool.
Right.
Supporting artists directly.
Why not?
Let's see if I can find some of those.
Just like this seems to be more modern.
It's actually apparently been resurrected.
So I'm trying to find some original stuff.
This is, this looks OG cause your default was this weird smiley face.
Yeah.
Let me see if I can find any screenshots that actually look like they're from way back
then.
But basically you would join a palace and a palace would contain multiple rooms.
So a corn's a South park had one, like it was actually kind of mainstream within certain
circles and then different rooms could have different themes.
And the way that the chat worked was you could whisper to people.
So okay, you'd see people right next to each other like these two, they're probably whispering.
So nobody else can see what they're typing.
But you could also communicate openly kind of like this and you would just have a speech
bubble that would come up like this is as far as I can tell pretty much the metaverse,
but like 2d metaverse, correct me if I'm wrong, help me out here.
There's also like, if we want to move past this a little bit as well, there was a second
life.
Here we go.
Here we go.
This is it.
This is palace avatars circa 1999 in a nutshell.
This was basically everything.
Looks like they've got gene code genes too.
Everyone and their dog was rocking this.
There was a bunch of these, right?
It wasn't just the palace rooms.
Well, Habbo Hotel came later.
I would say Habbo Hotel was kind of the spiritual successor to the palace.
Oh, I'm not saying there's a bunch that were before this, but there was a lot of different
like chat room things where you could get different avatars and whatnot.
And then second life is like legitimately it, right?
Like there was, you could set up businesses there.
You could build buildings, you could do all the normal things you do in normal life land.
And it was mostly filled with weird people by the end, but that's okay.
No comment.
There was a...
I can tell you the palace definitely had some weird people on it.
Anytime you have an anonymized internet chat room thing, it's just going to happen.
There's a lot of ASL going around.
Let me say that.
And I don't mean American Sign Language.
Yeah, that's what I'm talking about.
I have no idea who I chatted with all those years ago.
I mean, I was smart enough to never meet up with anyone in person, but...
I know people that were not.
Okay, I shouldn't use the term smart.
I was savvy enough, educated enough, cautious enough, because smart people can make big
mistakes.
Oh yeah.
Want me to tell you about a big mistake I made once?
Or do you want to do...
Are you in the middle of a story?
Go ahead.
No, I mean, not particularly.
All I was saying is I know people personally that made the mistake of meeting up with people
in real life that they only knew online, especially back then, because these days it's a little
bit easier.
You can see with stuff like Facebook and webcam conversations, you can see people more directly.
But back then, you had no idea, usually.
Even now, it's very dangerous and you should be very careful.
But anyways, yeah, Second Life is legitimately it and is still totally around.
VR Chat, a lot of people have positioned.
People have mentioned this in chat and I've seen it previously as well.
VR Chat has been positioned as what this thing is.
Yeah, I think right now it's extremely buzz-worthy.
And I think there's some...
Internet of things.
I think there's some savvy business people and tech people that are going to get themselves
in positions in companies based around work on the metaverse in order to make very large
amounts of money, produce probably nothing, and then move on to the next thing.
That's...
Yeah, sorry.
Story of when you made a mistake or something?
You want to hear about the day I turned into a cynical, jaded misanthrope?
Oh my.
Yeah.
Yes.
So I generally believed in the fundamental goodness of people and I was a pretty trusting
person until I had a very, very bad experience that really came down to my own naivety.
Okay.
When I was in high school, I had someone approach me on the street saying that they were in
a bind.
They had a check that they needed to cash for whatever reason.
Their bank wouldn't do it.
They would endorse it to me if I could give them at least most of the cash that it was
for.
It was like 100 and some dollars or something like that.
So it was a non-trivial amount of money.
And somehow I let them sweet talk me into cashing a check for them, essentially.
I even knew that it was sketchy.
So I was like, okay, well, I'm going to take a picture with you so that I know who you
are and I can report this if you're scanning me here.
And they took the picture with me and everything.
But I got talked into going to an ATM, withdrawing cash, handing it to someone, having them endorse
this check, putting it in.
And not only was I obviously out the money because yeah, it didn't go through, but I
got charged for trying to cash a bad check.
And that was when I realized, I was like, oh, someone can seem totally nice, totally
chill, swear on their mother's grave that they are not out to hurt you and stab you
right in the face.
And I was like, oh, okay, well, this is really good to know.
Yeah, that's rough.
Yeah, yeah.
And it was just one of those things.
I was young, I was naive.
I didn't know better.
And I guess what I'm saying is I understand how people can make mistakes.
I'm really tech savvy.
I've spent my entire life on the internet.
So I saw some-
A lot of times too, you need the experience to not make a similar or related mistake in
the future.
You kind of have to screw up.
Well, everyone, I feel like, I shouldn't say everyone because maybe some people just can
get wisdom by just knowing from someone else or whatever.
Speaking of getting wisdom, I just realized we should probably tell people what's happening,
which merch message is right now.
Oh.
Because we didn't tell them about the replies thing.
Oh, yeah.
They've been going on this whole show.
Oh, yeah, cool.
Well, hopefully people noticed that when they send in merch messages, a lot of the time
the reply comes up right with your merch message.
Yeah.
I would hope people would notice that, but-
It looks very similar to a merch message though.
So anytime you see the LTT with RGB lights behind it, that's a reply to the very thing
you saw right before it.
So we have a producer now, which is fantastic.
Yeah.
And sometimes it might be us.
So far, I think it's pretty much just been the producer, but they have the ability to
respond to you because sometimes we've gotten feedback that a lot of times we're answering
the same question that we've been answering for the last-
Over and over and over again.
So we're trying to address some of those questions with text now so that it doesn't eat into
the showtime.
Itzki Blue asks, what do you gain from doing a scam like that?
You gained my money.
Money, yeah.
Because I gave the guy cash.
Because remember, Linus would get a small portion of it, which realistically you probably
got a fee for trying to cash a false check.
And he had a whole story about how he really needed it and his bank was closed and what
bank did I bank at?
Are they still open?
And it was like, it was like, it was a whole thing.
It was, I just, yeah, I, yeah, I made a mistake.
Right.
Right.
And where I was going with that was that recently we did a video where I basically condemned
people piling onto folks that fall for online scams because we need people to have the confidence
to come forward and talk about it because that's a big part of how you educate people.
Like you can't, you can't just say, you can't just keep it hush, hush.
Every time you condemn someone for falling for that, you're, you're making sure the scammers
win again some other time.
Exactly.
You're part of the problem at that point.
So we just need to, we need to say, okay, you know, Hey, here's what we could do better
next time, but try not to shame people about it is what I'm, what I'm trying to say.
Feel free to shame me.
My feelings won't be hurt, but in, in general, you don't, not everyone's used to just being
a public figure and being constantly shamed for their horrible hot takes.
Right.
Yep.
That's true.
Private privateering, my privateering, my, my feelings, actually now's a, now's a good
time for you to make it up to me.
You can head to lttstore.com where we just launched two adorable plushies.
We've got the controller plushie.
We've got the computer plushie.
These are based on the same characters from the ABCs of gaming board book that Sarah and
I worked on together.
I guess, Oh man, I guess it was over a year ago and we have a special promo to run with
it.
If you pick up a plushie with code ABC plush, you can get an ABCs of gaming book for only
five bucks.
So it's a combo deal where you are saving.
I think that works out to a $10 saving savings.
If you pick up the plushie and the book, I don't know how long that's running, but not
for very long, probably because that's a pretty aggressive promo.
So thank you for that, Nick.
Sure.
Why not?
Oh, Oh, this is cool.
Apparently the first newsletter of the year went out today.
Ah, shoot.
I'm not logged into the account that is on the newsletter.
Was it automatically published to a blog yet?
No.
Oh crap.
We're working on that.
We are working on that.
I mean, it probably would have been there.
Conrad wanted to push it and I was like, no, oh crap.
Wait till Monday.
Uh, okay.
I'm going to try and get logged into that account in the meantime, do you want to do
another topic?
Sure.
Or were we in the middle of something?
Had I just, I don't remember to be completely honest, uh, Facebook losing money.
Do we finish that topic?
Yeah, I kind of feel like it.
Uh, there was a question at the end saying, is this a good thing?
I mean, meta book is popular, is a popular punching bag, but should they really crash
and burn?
Um, a wise take was yes.
CW's take was yes.
That's Anthony.
That's Colin.
AS's take was yes.
That's our new guy.
Okay.
What do you think?
The, the team is, the team is unanimous.
Um, it's a complicated question because like Facebook losing value, uh, publicly traded
companies.
So that means people with stocks lose value.
Yeah.
It means real people actually like lost money today.
I don't, a decent amount of the ownership of Facebook is probably in the hands of people
that I'm not very concerned about.
That's fair as well, but Facebook also has a lot of retail investors.
There is probably a lot of, uh, yeah, non one percent or two percenters that have ownership
there as well.
And I'm never rooting for that.
No.
Uh, I mean even the one percent, I think we need to stop vilifying the one percent quite
as much because it's the, it's the, okay, here, hold on a second.
Hold on a second.
Are you saying we should widen it?
Widen it?
Well, you can't widen it cause it's one percent.
No, your scope.
Like should you go beyond one?
No, no, no, no, no.
Okay.
So hold on.
One percent top.
Oh, where is it?
One percent top earners in Canada.
Okay.
So the one percent in Canada is, hold on, is this household income?
Much lower.
Canada's lower population than California.
Yeah, but, but it's a dollar value.
But this is, this is Facebook ownership, so you'd have to include Americans.
Okay, sure.
Okay.
Top one percent earners in US.
Okay.
So what is that?
The top one percent represents about 1.3 million households who roughly make more than $500,000
a year.
Okay.
That's higher than it is in Canada.
Okay.
That seems like a bit of a problem.
Cause in Canada-
I'm not very worried if people who make over 500 grand a year see a loss.
In Canada, we're talking 320,000 Canadian.
So that's a, that's like under a quarter million US a year.
So you're talking like potentially like a neurosurgeon or something like that.
You're not talking someone who's just making money through flexing their money.
These are people that conceivably are actually working-
It depends.
Day to day.
Not all of them, but I'm saying, what I'm trying to say is I don't think-
Neurosurgeon person who has to pay off their immense student debt and might have Facebook
shares.
Yeah.
I don't wish that stuff goes down.
I think a huge percentage of people that are in that section that are not neurosurgeons
and maybe inherited a bunch of wealth or whatever else.
Well, that's not earnings though.
So you, okay.
Cause there's two, there's two different ways of measuring the 1%.
Would that mean they don't show up under the 1%?
Oh, okay.
Yeah.
Right.
Cause you can either measure it by income and there are actual working people that make
a quarter million dollars a year because they just happen to be like really, really good
at something specialized.
I have no problem with that whatsoever.
Yeah.
But once you get into the point-
We're not saying whether or not we have a problem with it.
We're saying if we feel bad because Facebook stock, this is a weird conversation.
We're saying if we feel bad because they lost money or value or whatever because Facebook
stock went down.
Sure.
I guess what I'm trying to say is I feel bad because not every investor in Facebook is
some kind of cartoon villain.
Yeah.
There's retail investors-
I'm 100% certain that there are people that are invested in Facebook that are grinding
super hard in very, very low paid jobs and have been saving everything they possibly
can to try to get into the stock market because that's what a lot of people tell you to do.
And they're trying to dig themselves out of whatever they can by doing that type of stuff.
And they might be invested in Facebook and they might've just lost a lot of potential
money and that could be very damaging and very unfortunate.
I think that is probably few and far between.
And to be clear, I'm not saying that someone in the top 1% in Canada is somehow a pauper.
I'm not saying that they're living in poverty.
I'm saying that compared to the 0.1%, which averaged apparently $1.7 million in 2018,
they are relatively speaking, probably actually spending a significant amount of that money,
putting it back into circulation because hoarding is the problem.
If the top 0.1%, if the top earners were actually spending all of it, because that's something
that gets talked about a lot.
People who want to defend the wealthy, they'll say, well, you know, they trickle down economics.
They create jobs.
They only create jobs if they spend the money on jobs.
That's the only way.
If they're buying more art, if they're using more services, if they're, if they're going
out and it's a lot of money, tipping thousand dollars or whatever, if they're actually spending
it, then it's not really a problem that they're earning an insane amount of money, but you
can't control what people do with their money.
But at a certain point you reach, you reach a level where you can't really spend that
kind of money.
Like it's not, it's not practical and it just becomes this like penis measuring contest.
So I guess what I'm saying is that compared to the 1% who conceivably are actually spending
that kind of money on a yearly basis, living definitely that good life.
Like I'm not, I'm not saying I feel bad for them necessarily, but I'm also not saying
that I don't think they're villains.
I think that the 0.1%, especially if they're not spending it are a much, much bigger problem
because I think speaking from personal experience, I think spending one and a half million dollars
a year would be extremely difficult, like extremely difficult.
Tell me how to do it on something other than Vancouver real estate, because I knew that
was coming.
You don't have enough money if it's Vancouver real estate.
Yeah, fair enough.
You need more.
Come on, pump it up.
That's your down payment boys.
Yeah.
Yeah, no, I, I, I, my brain doesn't really go there, but what I'm sure, I'm sure it's
true.
Beast could find a way.
Well, but that's it.
He's spending it on his business.
He's employing people.
That's fine.
Oh, to be clear, I spend a lot more than a million half dollars a year on employing people.
Our payroll here, I would not be surprised, and this is going to be really scary.
I would not be surprised if in 2023 2024, by the time we hit that timeframe, if our
payroll cracks eight figures.
I would not be surprised.
I'm like really getting close to finalizing some of my positions.
And even though the rest are not, I think I'm just going to have to pull triggers on
some of them because like, I don't want to drag people along for, for so long.
And yup.
Yup.
That's all I have to say.
Developers are expensive.
We're, we're hiring more people in that realm.
We're hiring more engineers.
We're hiring more stuff like that.
That's all very expensive roles, very expensive roles.
This is interesting guys.
This is a terrible, terrible take.
It has begun openly complaining about paying people.
Did I complain?
No, he's not.
You did not complain.
I said, I do.
I said that spending a million and a half dollars is really easy when you employ a gigantic
team of people.
But that's not what I asked.
I asked you to try to spend it personally in your community and stuff like that.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I don't know.
I mean, you could go to a movie every day and you wouldn't even get close.
Like you couldn't.
Okay.
What does that work out to here?
Hold on.
Let's do the math.
Let's do the math.
This is, this is fun.
A million and a half dollars.
Okay.
Divided by 365 is $4,109 a day.
Okay.
So you're only, you can only be awake for, let's say 16 hours a day, right?
So let's say you sleep.
Okay.
So divided by 16 means that you are making $256 an hour.
Not for being at work.
Just for existing.
For being conscious.
Yeah.
You're making $256 an hour.
Okay.
Divided by 60, you're making $4 and 2 cents a minute.
So what that means is that like you said, are we counting things like, like rent and
stuff?
No.
Right.
Going to a movie.
Which is, hold on, hold on.
Going to a movie, which takes about two hours, right?
Two and a half hours.
Yeah, sure.
So what's that work out to about a hundred and let's say 160 minutes.
Okay.
You buy some popcorn.
160.
You would have to spend $684 on that movie experience in order to come out with less
money than you walked in with.
Hopefully that's that popcorn's got some of that like gold filigree on top of it or something.
So no.
Luke, tell me how to spend money faster.
What did I divide by?
A hundred and six.
Okay.
Hold on.
Tell me how to spend money faster than $4 a minute.
I think this is, it just naturally, okay.
You could, if you can walk your trigger, right?
You got to go to the paint ball field.
You buy paint at the field.
Okay.
Supermarked up paint.
You go like this.
Okay.
You are spending money faster than you're making.
Giving me, give me one other activity.
Really buff fingers.
Like even stuff you can't let up.
Even extreme activities, right?
Like skydiving.
Well, you could scuba diving.
You can only do them so often.
You cannot conceivably spend even a flight.
Okay.
You go to a tropical location.
You're flying for 10 hours.
Okay.
What's 10 hours workout to 600 minutes.
Okay.
So times 600 there, $2,500.
You literally made more sitting on the plane than it costs you to fly to Mexico.
I think a lot of people solve this problem if you want to call it that by buying property,
but then that property just goes up in value.
That's not spending money.
No, I know.
That's what I'm saying.
But that's what I think what a lot of people do.
What's that movie called?
Brewster's Millions, I think it's called.
There's this bad movie from the eighties where this guy gets an inheritance, but the rich
benefactor has this, these strings attached where in order to get the big inheritance,
they have to spend the small inheritance without retaining any meaningful assets at the end
of it.
And I think the idea is that they like have to get it out of their system or something
like that.
And I'm giving away the plot.
It's kind of a crap movie anyway, so it doesn't really matter, but spoiler alert, he ends
up running for office and then trying to lose because if he wins, then he would have actually
gained something.
That's a terrible plan.
Whatever.
That's why the movie sucks.
They should have just come up with, they should have just made a movie of some guy who shoots
paintballs constantly, golden-plated paintballs.
You know what?
Twitch chat apparently likes the movie.
I enjoyed it, but I watched it when I was a literal child, and I've heard it's like
a bad movie.
So just take all of this for the ignorant rambling that it is.
NFTs!
Easy, just buy NFTs.
People would argue that those are investments.
People would argue that those are investments.
No, come on, hit me.
I don't know.
This isn't me.
You can't.
You actually cannot.
You could live that jet-set life and not be able to spend that kind of money.
It would be a job for me to do that.
Cocaine, says the spanky.
I don't know how much cocaine costs, but I would hazard a guess that you actually could
not consume enough cocaine to overcome that kind of income.
Would you consume $4,000 worth of cocaine in a day?
I legitimately have no idea what cocaine costs.
No clue.
Okay, yeah.
Floatplane chat, hookers and blow, okay, all right, okay.
My understanding is that ladies of the evening actually are quite expensive, but I literally
cannot speak to that from personal experience.
Yeah, I don't know.
It would be...
To be clear, not shaming sex work is work.
I just want to make that very, very clear.
I just...
It really should cost a lot.
I'm married.
Yeah.
So...
And I'm not, okay, I'm not kink shaming.
If you and your married partner are into it, hey, cool, man, how do I get myself out of
this corner here?
You personally are in a monogamous relationship.
Yes.
Got it.
Got him.
But yeah, I don't know.
For me, this would actually be like a difficult job, Luke.
For our carve-outs.
Yeah.
Yeah, this would be a very difficult job.
Not that.
That, you know, no problems there.
But spending that much money that fast would be...
People are like throw banging parties.
Fair enough.
But you're not going to throw a party every day of the week.
Some people try, I think, don't they?
Wasn't that like a, wasn't, isn't like socialite culture basically that?
Yeah, I mean, I guess so.
I just...
Yacht parties?
Yeah.
Buy a yacht.
Buying a yacht.
Yes.
That's a popular one.
Is that an investment?
You see this...
Buying supercars is like sort of an investment.
Yeah.
Especially if they're limited edition, that can apparently be a really good investment.
So is buying a yacht an investment?
Does that have that same thing going on?
I'm not, I think yachts depreciate.
I have no idea.
I honestly don't know.
You see Bezos is having them like tear down a historic bridge to like float his yacht
out to the ocean or something like that.
Ridiculous.
We don't actually know for sure that it's Bezos, but it's rumoured to be Bezos.
They should just say no.
Just lock his yacht.
Just leave it there.
Good luck.
Hope you like floating in the river.
Oh man.
Yeah.
Invest in meta.
That's an investment.
Yeah.
Yeah.
It's an investment.
I'm talking actually spending it.
It would be hard.
It would be legitimately hard.
To be fair, the scenario where they have to actually spend to that amount just doesn't
really exist because what's going to be coming out of that money is your, your mortgage or
your rent or whatever.
I don't think you have a mortgage if you're paying, if you're making a million and a half
dollars a year.
I mean, you could, what if your house is $30 million?
Okay.
That ah, see, this is where you and I, I feel like have trouble with these kinds of conversations
because um, I have always, and I know you have always been, um, uh, live within my means
kind of person when, when Yvonne and I.
Oh no.
So I agree.
If I was making that much, I would not have a mortgage, but, but I'm sure people do is
all I'm saying.
Yeah.
I mean, I know there are houses that cost that kind of money.
It's just, I, no matter, I would have to have $30 million in the bank to actually maybe
not 30 million because I'm thinking back to when Yvonne and I bought our house, we were
approved for a mortgage and it was either double or triple or something like that.
What we ultimately spent on our home and that was back 11 years ago or 12 years ago almost
now.
And we didn't do it because we were just totally uncomfortable with that level of debt.
So I guess what it would work out to now, because we did 20% down is I would have to
have 6 million down and I would have to expect to have, I would have to expect to be able
to pay it off within about five to seven years, five to eight years, I think was our goal.
I think we had wanted, we had set the stretch goal of like, uh, five, assuming that everything
went amazing and I like crushed it.
And actually I don't even think that was, no, I don't even think that was a dream yet
at the point that we were actually buying it.
I think that came later when we were like, we should start a company and stuff like that.
So I'm trying to, I'm trying to think back to the timeline.
Your house.
Yeah.
You had, I think 10 years, I think 10 years was mortgage shredding goal with a stretch
target of beating it.
And we were not willing to take on a mortgage payment that we couldn't comfortably pay double
every month.
So our mortgage was actually, um, half of the payments that we made.
And then we made sure that we had an agreement with the bank where we could pay twice as
much because that second, that first payment is almost all interest.
And that second payment is all principle the way that our, the way that our mortgage worked
anyway.
Um, where was I going with this?
Right.
So even if I made like that, that kind of money, I would have to have, I'm not $30 million
house.
I don't see the point.
How many people would have to live in it to make any sense?
Like basically small hotels.
Like they're, they're insane.
Yeah.
I don't know.
But then you, you hear about these, like, uh, and I know this isn't necessarily the
scenario we're talking about, but we're so off topic right now.
It's not funny.
So who cares?
Uh, but you, you constantly hear about sports stars that just make huge money, many million
dollar a year contracts, like just big, big, big money.
And then they're out, they're retired for like two, three years and they're broke.
Yup.
So like, I don't know.
I think one of the things is when, when you start making that type of money, people will
try to float into your life that will find ways for you to spend it.
Um, that's fair.
So yeah, I don't know.
People are saying, no, no, they're talking about theoretical $30 million homes.
Oh, ladies and gentlemen, we are not talking theoretical homes.
We are talking, we live in Vancouver, ladies and gentlemen, literally the least affordable
city on earth.
Ladies and gentlemen, here it is.
1233, nine nine zero.
Got a few more zeros after that.
1233 Tecumseh Avenue.
Oh yeah.
Nice looking place.
Nice looking place.
And I ain't talking, I ain't talking some estate here, ladies and gentlemen.
This is probably on like a half acre.
Hold on a second.
What is it?
Yeah.
Half acre lot.
You nailed it.
Oh Lordy.
It's only a 1200, wait, what is this?
Is this a 1200 square foot house?
Hold on.
I've lost track.
Is that a lot?
Oh, that's a lot.
Yeah.
Yeah.
That's a lot.
Sorry.
There's an extra zero in here.
Cause my current place is a 2200 and I thought this was less.
I thought it was, I thought it was 1200 it is 12,000 square feet.
Yeah.
I totally, I totally derped there.
Oh shoot.
I just unplugged my headphones for monitoring, I need that.
So when I follow a plane chat saying California and Vegas have those 30 million plus dollar
homes.
Yeah.
New York.
Like there's, they're definitely around the world.
They're just.
Vancouver overall.
I think we're still in the lead though for most unaffordable city on earth.
Probably.
Luckily we don't technically live in Vancouver.
That's a, that's always a nice little thing.
Obviously we feel it out here brutally, but it's not quite as bad as it is in Vancouver
proper.
Wait a second.
I know that like there's some Australian Sydney, Oh, we're number two, we're number two behind
Hong Kong.
What is that article from?
This is from December, 2021.
This is, this is recent with that said Hong Kong, there's apparently an Exodus going on
there right now because of, because of the crackdowns and everything else.
So maybe the situation will change there and we can be back on top.
Yay.
Yeah.
We're the best at being the worst.
Sweet.
Yeah.
Um, crazy though.
Right?
Yeah.
I don't remember where we were going with this, but by multiple houses, that's a big
one.
And renovations.
I can speak from experience.
Renovations can be a really, really good way to spend an insane amount of money that you
will never get a return on.
Oh yeah.
Um, the builder, the builder we were talking to was telling us, actually, I think it was
the ones who did the, uh, the boiler system were telling us about a place that they did.
Uh, I believe it was up in Whistler for an athlete that apparently had on tap beer, like
plumbed into the house.
So not just like in a bar, but like there were beer taps like everywhere.
Like if you can dream it, there are boutique home builders that can build it for you.
Yeah.
Like what?
My uncle has done some just absolutely incredible builds, um, and like they, they pride themselves
on really high quality and all this kind of stuff and like I can appreciate the craftsmanship,
but some of the costs of the houses and stuff that they build, they're just like, what the
even who, how did they even possibly make this much money?
Like I just, oh man, I don't know.
Yeah.
Flipped a mattress says, how the F do you keep it cold?
Well, remember I did say that the company that was talking about this was the one that
did the boiler system for our, uh, for our house.
It's just in floor heat.
There's no beer taps.
Okay.
Um, so that I'm sure they have experience with heating and cooling and all that kind
of stuff.
Isn't that crazy though?
That is absolutely nuts.
Oh, I love it.
I love it.
Um, apparently one of the, uh, one of the tech giant executives also has a place up
there that has snow melts across like hundreds, I think they said thousands of square feet
of outside area.
So it just has these like banks of boilers that just sit and burn fuel to keep snow off
of the patio and off of the driveway for the like three days a year that they actually
go there.
Like just, just mind bending stuff, guys mind bending.
Although they spent money, at least they spent, at least they spent it on something.
Yeah.
At least those trades got work and we're doing stuff.
That's fair enough.
Yep.
Oh no.
Jayden's gone full eat the rich.
Fair enough.
But like I've said to David on many occasions here, please don't eat me.
I like to feel like I'm, I haven't gone full filthy capitalist where I actually like work
every day for my money.
Okay.
Can, can we, can, can you get behind that?
Are you going to eat me?
All right.
No, I'm good.
Jeff bell.
You're going to eat me after all the scraps that I let fall off my table for you.
I got, I always call him bell.
I totally called him Jeff.
Oh man.
You're screwed man.
That was terrible.
Yeah.
I don't, I don't blame you.
I mean, I had your last name, right?
Geez.
Jeff.
Oh, on that horrible note messages.
Thanks for your painstakingly spent all this time.
Thanks for your hard work, Jake, going through all the merch messages and curating them for
us.
Why don't we, why don't we do some of them so you can actually go home at some point
here?
Oh man.
Oh no.
Oh no.
The chat's full of eat the rich.
Oh no.
Come on guys.
Come on.
No, for real.
I'm making new investments into the company.
We're hiring way more people.
I swear to you.
I'm spending.
It's true.
Labs.
Think of labs.
Think of LTT labs.
Think of all the new people.
We're hiring for LTT store.
Oh man.
Yummy Linus burger.
All right.
Let's uh, let's do some rich messages here.
Please spend money.
I swear it supports so many people.
Oh, all right.
Curated ones.
I know running a permanent open air test bench setup is not commonly recommended, but I've
been doing it for five years.
These are coming in so fast that it completely shifted off my screen.
I've been doing it five years now without issues.
I think besides dust and dander, what problems would I look out for?
Airflow?
No, your airflow will be as good as anything.
The only, the only way you could have bad airflow is if you didn't really have any fans
at all.
And that, that heat pocket is allowed to just kind of sit there stagnant in the room or
anything going on.
Yeah, that's so if you're trying to run a passive computer, you might want to don't
assume that an open bench means that magically you get magic airflow through it or something
like that.
You might still need a one slow fan, just circulating air in the room.
That was something that we saw with the HP Omen 45 L was that depending on where we put
our temp sensors in the room, it actually heats up a pocket near it and that's normal.
So that's the only thing that I would be aware of and making sure that you blow it off once
in a while.
That's, that's it.
It's probably more not recommended because like stuff might fall into a fan or you might
spill a drink on it more easily or whatever.
Yeah, but if you put a grill on it, something like that.
It's not a problem.
I've ran bench systems for a long time.
All right.
Nicholas says, Hey Linus and Luke, I just built my second PC and I plan to use it as
a server slash home theater PC.
I installed Debian and virtualized windows for VR gaming.
I don't know if I'd recommend that for the best like low latency experience, but if you're
happy with it, then I'm happy for you.
Yeah.
I planned on setting up next cloud for file storage, but what other software improves
daily life that you host on your own hardware?
I mean, Plex is really the heaviest one for me.
I was going to say Plex.
Yeah.
Plex is awesome, but it sounds like you're already using it as a server slash home theater.
So I'm assuming you thought of Plex.
One of the other things that we'll be running on mine at the new place is home assistant.
So it's, so that's, that's, whoa, I just lost my headphones.
That's home automation stuff.
Yes.
Yeah.
That's the direction I was going to go.
And it ties in all the disparate ecosystems that don't otherwise talk to each other.
It's super cool.
Those I'd say are, are the pretty big ones for me.
Erin A, what is your opinion on the eight gig RX five 80?
Does it still hold up in today's games or should I look into a 30 60 when they're available?
Well, if you've got one, you are the only one who can answer that question because I
feel like being compelled to upgrade by the availability of some new widget is a mistake.
That's that's meaningless.
Yeah.
The only times I usually look towards upgrading my hardware is if there's a, if there's an
issue with the performance that I'm getting, whether a game that I currently play has updated
and has become more difficult to run.
Exactly.
And I'm planning to play a new game and I can't have it run at an acceptable frame rate.
No, I don't have a disadvantage or yeah, I don't expect everything to run at like a at
maximum like one 44 Hertz refreshing ultra settings all the time.
And like as, as I keep the same computer as, as new games come out, maybe I'll lower my
like average settings per game for a little while, but then eventually it'll become at
a level where it's unsatisfactory.
It's nice having a brand new Reagan running everything at high, but it's not necessary.
We did a video about that a while ago, about how ultra settings really don't look very
different when you are engaged in the game.
Sure.
If you pixel peep, if you pixel peep, you can find it.
You can.
Yeah, you can find it, but you have to be real with yourself about whether or not it
even matters.
A hundred percent.
And a lot of times it doesn't really, I really, really like games where when you're changing
settings, there's a little example and it shows like what it will, how, how it will
look different based on that setting change.
And that, yeah, I've seen so few like that though.
Oh, it's extremely rare, but it's really nice when they do it.
Luke D, I'm currently saving to build a new computer in about a year or so.
How do you personally design your systems airflow?
There's a lot of overwhelming and conflicting information, maybe a job for labs.
This is absolutely something we'll investigate with labs, but there's two main principles.
One is that you want a little bit more air coming in than going out.
You want to maintain positive pressure inside your system and you want those intakes to
be filtered, which remember will affect how much air is drawn through them.
So you might need three fans coming in, two fans going out and the other is making sure
that you are actually delivering fresh air to the areas that need it.
So we showed recently in a video how if we had a big Chungus GPU and a fan blowing across
it like this, but it kind of blocked off the bottom part of the case and there was no way
for the, the fans for the heat sink of the GPU to get the air that's going constantly
being recirculated back into it out of the case, you could end up with a problem.
So I would, I would just recommend making sure that for every heat generating component,
which is predominantly your CPU and your GPU, you have a clear path for the air to take
in with the fresh out with the less fresh.
Anonymous says, let's hear a random fact that you know about each other.
Love the content, keep it up.
I know that Luke lived for the better part of two years on nothing but sous vide chicken
breast.
Yeah.
Sous vide chicken breast, rice and broccoli.
That was the, that was the meal.
Yeah.
What do you got?
I know you really like pickles.
That was the first thing that came to mind.
I don't know, I don't know.
We both went food.
Yeah.
Interesting.
Interesting.
I think, uh, yeah, it's six 50.
We're both late for dinner.
It makes sense.
Yeah.
That, that actually speaks a lot of sense.
Um, oh, and I see what's happening.
I'm pushing them back up to the, okay.
Yeah.
I need to hit archive.
Um, and news.
The auto says first time LTT store buyer also watching on float plane for the first time.
Any chance for motorcycle content in the near future?
I want to leave that to the folks that are just experts at it.
I love my bike and I ride my bike, but I don't have track experience.
I don't, I don't know about all the different, you know, kinds of suspension you can get
and tuning and all that kind of stuff.
So I feel like with motorcycles, I just don't have as much to contribute, at least until
they get a little bit more computer on two wheelsie, which will happen.
You know, like I feel like I could review a heads up display for example, but I also
feel like in that space, a lot of the features that might be built into a product like that
might be very race oriented features.
So it's hard for me to say.
There's a lot of comments about the chicken rice and broccoli things.
Someone said, I remember Luke from a really old China super fun video really just ate
an entire head of broccoli.
Yeah.
I don't know.
Um, don't take diet advice from random tech people on the internet.
Yeah, that would be not best.
Uh, don't take any of that as suggestion, please.
Let's keep going.
Uh, yes, Ben, we are working on a water bottle lid with a straw mechanism.
It's a matter of time.
Um, Grant, what do you think about 3d printed residential and commercial construction?
For example, extruded concrete sounds so cool.
Definitely a lot of logistical issues to solve because when you're talking construction like
this didn't even occur to me, but Intel, this video is not up yet.
There's a lot of potential issues.
I think, I think the tech is super, super cool and I think a lot of construction is
going to go in that direction eventually.
I think there's still a lot of hurdles to solve because right now, I'm like, okay, use
it for foundation or whatever.
I've seen examples where they essentially print the whole darn house like walls and
everything.
And that's sweet.
Wiring and stuff becomes really interesting.
Um, and they, they like pre-lay things for windows and all this kind of stuff, but it's,
there are unique complications with that construction style.
I'm sure there's people that know significantly more about it than me, but maybe look into
it.
And I'm sure there's a lot more like R and D that needs to happen with it.
Um, but automation is, is a big deal and it's going to come to every industry, including
that one.
Um, and I think that's one of the ways that it's going to come to construction.
Had an email from valve and I was like, we didn't do anything bad when we showed the
steam deck.
Did we?
No, it's all good.
That's good.
Telling me about some stuff.
I said nothing, trust me.
Um, Cornell says, do you think a new mainstream CPU manufacturer will even be possible?
Well Apple, I would have said no and then Apple did it.
I consider Apple sort of a manufacturer, yes, that they're made by TSMC or Samsung or whatever,
but they are, they top to bottom have not quite top to bottom.
Okay.
But they, they have, they have made it a new CPU essentially.
Um, and I would have said that couldn't be done, but then they did it.
And then you've got Amazon with their graviton or whatever they call it.
But that's not mainstream Apple, I would argue is mainstream man.
Hard to say I'm rooting for risk five, but there's just so much legacy X 86 code out
there that we still got to run.
But then Apple showed it might be possible to emulate in a, in a performant way.
I'm afraid to, I'm afraid to even try to look into my crystal ball on that one to be honest
with you.
Uh, Justin asks, have you seen the quarter with digital website and have you ever thought
to implement anything like their point system into float plane?
That way subscribers could choose what content or products are somebody gets allocated to.
So the reason that we haven't done anything like that is because I, um, I, I am a control
freak.
I like to maintain control of our editorial direction.
I like the writing team to come up with what we want to do.
And as much as we love to hear from you guys and we take comments and suggestions, I don't
want to be beholden to you guys.
It's also much different content.
Yeah.
I don't want people to feel ripped off because we didn't cover the product that they want
us to this like motherboard.
They really want us to review.
Well, to be fair, this isn't a suggestion box.
It's a voting thing.
Yeah.
So you would come up with the topics.
Yeah.
But what if one of, what if one of them was an a and the rest of them were kind of bees
and I was really hoping they voted for the a, like I just, yeah, it's tough.
I don't think we're going to be doing that anytime soon.
Uh, Evelyn, are you expecting the price of steam deck competitors to come down significantly
when the deck releases like the Ioneo for example?
No, I'm not.
No, no.
The steam deck is inexpensive because valve went really aggressive, hyper aggressive on
it.
That's the answer.
Man.
The people who are complaining about the steam deck price when it launched, I'm like, guys,
this is a laptop with a game controller built into it.
You and I both massively went in on how, how cheap it was actually.
Yes.
And I still backed that up very much so.
Joshua says, Hey Luke, I've heard you and Linus talk about how frugal you can be frugal,
such a nice soft word for it.
Is there any kind of technology or whatever that you like to splurge on?
Yeah.
I mean, I, I instantly bought this, the steam deck and VR.
I had, I had basically, I had, I think literally every single Oculus prototype you could acquire.
For me it's, yeah, it's just gaming, gaming PCs.
That's, that's kind of it.
I oh, oh, oh, headphones, headphones are a guilty pleasure.
When's the last time you bought a gaming PC?
Well, I'm talking about when I spent money.
Okay.
Yeah.
Okay.
I literally never purchased a cell phone, not once.
I got my first cell phone from my parents and then when it died, I inherited one from
my then girlfriend who had gotten a new one.
And then when I went to work at NCIX, they issued me a Blackberry.
Then my contract allowed for a, like a, I gave me an allowance for a new phone and NCIX
purchased me an iPhone four, which by the time I left NCIX was irrelevant and they didn't
care to have it back.
And then after that, HTC sent me a windows phone, which I then did an, I switched thing
too.
I took my SIM out of my iPhone.
I put it into my windows phone and we got into reviewing phones and the rest is history.
We now have a bin of phones, so I would not buy a phone today.
Yeah.
I have never purchased a cell phone.
I have never purchased a television.
So those are things that I'd certainly enjoy, but are not ones that I have allocated my
personal funding to.
But I did blow a bunch of money on a receiver and nice speakers.
I did blow a bunch of money on expensive headphones back in the day.
I would still do that.
I'm considering treating myself to a pair of Sennheiser IEMs.
I'm just, AirPods Pros are nice, but they just don't sound the same.
Yeah.
So my stuff, like back when I used to have to buy it, my computer was always good.
It was, I, it was never like crazy.
I never, I never went way too nuts, but it was, it was always good.
I almost always bought secondhand, even when I did splurge.
Yep.
I would, I would do things like the Intel retail edge stuff.
I would do things like, um, Hey, I'll build your computer for you, but I mean, we're going
to throw in like a couple extra fans and I'm going to take those, um, or whatever.
Thanks for the fans.
Yeah.
I would like build people's computers or whatever in order to gain some extra part.
Or if they had something cool in their previous one or something, I would take that or whatever.
Um, obviously they knew every time.
Yes.
Obviously.
Um, outside of that, um, experiences, I guess is, is my technology.
No, but they didn't ask for that.
Yeah, they did.
Is there any other kind of technology or whatever?
Oh, oh sure.
Sure.
Sure.
Okay.
Yeah.
Experiences is definitely a thing.
Um, one thing I really enjoyed doing in Taiwan was this like, it's called the river tracing.
Yeah.
Um, and I had to, I had to essentially hire a guide for the whole day to go with me.
And I hiked up a river, up a mountain, essentially in the river.
It was super cool.
Um, and when we were, when we went on the company trip to Mexico, I like did some of
my own excursion things in addition to the company ones.
Um, I love that type of stuff.
I'm super into that.
Yeah.
Thoughts on high-end portable audio players got to say, I'm not, uh, I don't get it.
For me, the phone is good enough and you sure.
Yeah, fine.
The, the, the, the, the deck sucks and whatever else.
But um, for me, we've, it's at that point of diminishing returns, um, especially for
the amount of attention that I'm giving it when I'm listening on my phone.
I mean, in my life, I don't have time to sit and listen to music almost always and doing
something else.
I'm playing a game or I'm writing a script or I like, I'm always doing something.
And so for the amount of attention that I'm giving it, it just doesn't make a difference
for me.
Uh, okay.
Hey Linus, after the vault recovery series is over, would you guys make a proper tutorial
on how to set up true NAS with Raid Z2 and multiple V devs for beginners who have multiple
hard drives lying around?
Uh, yeah, honestly, if you just have multiple hard drives lying around though, you may want
to consider Unraid instead.
The performance is not the same as true NAS, but it's way more flexible and for home use,
it makes a ton of sense.
Like even though Jake and I are super into true NAS and like higher end stuff at work,
both of us run Unraid at home cause it's just so much easier to expand your storage.
You just put in a drive.
You don't have to add a whole additional V dev of drives.
The consumers don't buy stuff like that or at least they don't want to, right?
Um, Matthew asks, uh, lovesack section couch with stealth tech review when no one on YouTube
has a review of this yet.
It's a modular sectional couch with built in speakers.
I think we actually reached out to them asking for a review unit and then, um, basically
we have a policy that we will not trade coverage for product.
You're welcome to send us a product, but we're not, we're not promising anything because
as soon as we trade coverage for product, there are, um, tax and conflict of interest
issues.
So we like to be upfront.
We're like, Hey, look, you're, we are interested is what we'll say.
We're interested in reviewing this and we would like to review it, but we don't promise
anything because, uh, I don't want to be stuck making a video about something that is like
bad but not bad in an entertaining way, like just bad but uninteresting, just boring.
Like I don't want to make boring videos.
Right.
So, um, we basically said no and then I forget if it ever came back up again, but I think
my intention was to just buy one, but we have not dealt with that.
So it's, it's on our radar, but we haven't gotten around to it yet.
Um, James Y asks, what type of metal are the screwdriver bits going to be?
Oh, uh, okay.
Do you want to do a couple of other super chats while I run and grab, we've actually
got packaging for the bit clips.
Yep.
Uh, I don't know about that one moving forward.
Storage server stuff.
I also probably want to respond to that.
I have no idea who this is.
Uh, I'll, I'll address it anyways.
Have you guys heard of Zam Zaluf?
I actually think I have, but I think it's not pronounced that way and I think I've heard
it.
Um, he's a 22 year old dude who manufactures actual semiconductor chips in his jaw, in
his garage, uh, using now vintage equipment.
His last chip has 1000 plus transistors.
Whoa, that's crazy.
Possibly cool video.
He seems like a pretty interesting guy.
I love the show.
That's cool.
That's sweet.
Uh, do, do, do, do, do you have feature products that would be a great benefit to people who
are blind?
Uh, the webcam with AI, for example, could the lab please test the accessibility of the
apps and product, um, you have to own before you find out they aren't, um, that could be,
and it's the, what the lab is going to do and how it's going to do it and all that kind
of stuff is still so nebulous and up in the air.
Um, I would make sure that you bring that up again.
I'm not telling you to make another merch message if there isn't something that you
want to buy.
Uh, but you could tweet us or if there is something you want to buy, yeah, do another
rich message.
Uh, I would bring that up again once the lab has people that have been hired for it.
Um, cause at this time no one has been hired for the lab.
There's nothing actually happening yet.
Um, people are going to be hired.
A lot of the hiring for the lab is in its final stages or getting close to it, but it's
not there yet.
So make sure you bring it up again later.
Oh, and there's no guarantee that if you haven't heard back that we won't reach out.
We just haven't finalized how many positions we're hiring.
Yeah.
Um, but a lot of the ones that we do know we're hiring are quite, uh, quite far in.
Yeah.
Is it this good input?
Oh, how'd that happen?
Whoops.
Uh, okay.
So I thought it said on the packaging, um, what they were made of, but it actually just
says, uh, blah, blah, blah, 20 millimeter in the screwdriver, it just comes in its own
little box.
And you put it in yourself because basically the labor cost of doing it that way was like
really high.
And we were like, this doesn't make any sense because we expect a lot of people to build
out their own bit load anyway.
So at launch, we're going to try and have all of these available, which are additional
bit, uh, like bit sets.
So we'll have ones that mirror the, uh, the shipping one, the one that it comes with in
case you just want more of them.
And then we'll have ones that are basically tuned for everything.
So we'll have a Phillips set, which has two Phillips zeros, four Phillips ones, four Phillips
twos and two Phillips threes.
Just in case you want to have extra Phillips is we'll have a metric hack set that'll have
everything from 1.5 all the way to six.
We'll have an Imperial hex set that goes from 0.05 to quarter inch.
We'll have a Torx slash security Torx set that is T three, T four, T five, T six, seven,
eight, nine, 10, 15, 20, 25, and 30.
And then we'll have the F you set, which we're calling the specialty set, which is basically
when manufacturers say F you and it'll have things like tri wing, pentalobe, um, super,
super tiny Phillips's.
So a Y zero, zero, zero, Y zero, zero, Y zero, Y one, Y two.
Actually that's not Phillips.
Is it?
It's something else.
I don't remember what that one is.
What is Y?
Oh no.
Oh, Y is tri, Y is a tri wing if I recall correctly.
Yep.
And then it also have that weird like spanner bit.
Um, so these will all be available for like pretty, pretty reasonable prices at launch,
but all it says is black phosphate finish.
Unfortunately, it's not actually on the package and I don't remember, but I told Kyle to get
the best one.
So hopefully it's the best one.
He went all engineering on the answer to me and he was like, um, actually there isn't
a best metal to make bits out of because there are trade-offs between malleability and like,
like, uh, rigidity and uh, like, uh, shatter proneness and this stuff like that.
And I'm just like, okay, that's, that's fair enough, but I want the best one for the, the,
what we're doing.
He's like, okay.
Uh, someone asked and I accidentally click archive, but I remember what it was.
Um, how's the, how's the house coming along?
You keep getting unplugged.
I know, right?
House is coming.
Good.
Not great.
Uh, we're hoping to be moved in soonish.
Uh, there's an update video coming, so it's actually shot and edited already, so it should
be coming really soon.
And uh, basically we, we caught them the day before they started putting up drywall.
So it's kind of a, it's a tour of behind the drywall, all the tech that we've built into
the house over the last few months.
I'm really, really excited to show you guys that it's my, it's my dream tech house.
There's just no other way to put it.
Will there ever be something on product pages that names the designer or designers, uh,
main planner or planners of a product?
I would love to see who has, who has had their hand in doing which products?
Interesting.
Um, that's not something that we had planned, but something that you can do if you want
to get insight into that is subscribe to the newsletter.
We actually had one that went out today.
Happy 2022 y'all, um, Nick put this together.
We had a busy start to the year.
That's why we haven't sent any out this year.
Uh, if you haven't seen the recent LTT videos featuring our new cable tester, they're recommended
but not required to boost your understanding of some of the concepts outlined in this update
because Kyle put together a sick, like absolutely awesome little lesson for you guys about how
crap USB-C cables are and why.
Check this out.
So this is the kind of, this is the kind of stuff that like a good engineer can do if
you actually give them time.
So he's going, he's disassembling the cables, finding, um, let's have a look here, but this
is probably a really long one.
He actually gave me the, this in person, uh, when we had our merge meeting on Tuesday morning,
shielded differential pair.
Yeah.
All of them failed our signal integrity testing.
Uh, here we go.
So this is really important.
Shielding is not wireless.
It's like putting on an ungrounded ESD band and expecting the static to be magically absorbed
because the cables that we got out, they have shielding.
You can see the shielding wrapped around these, uh, differential pairs here are in signal
pairs or whatever you want.
I think they're differential pairs.
Look, I'm not an engineer.
My lingo might not be quite right, but the, the shielding here, it's not grounded to anything.
Yeah.
So it's just, it's just sitting there, amazing, right?
So he shows what it looks like when one is actually grounded correctly, which is super
cool, uh, explains how there needs to be a third conductor in with the twisted pairs.
Uh, it's almost like following the spec actually makes a cable work.
Haha.
Woo.
Uh, could he make the bad cables work?
This is not something I would have necessarily told him to spend time on, but he did.
Um, so he tried to take the, the not properly shielded ones and ground the shield to see
if they'd get any better.
No, they still failed.
Um, so we're, we are hard at work on our cables.
I promise you that when we launched them, they will be awesome.
And if you guys want to know more about the behind the scenes of what's going on at create
a warehouse, you're definitely going to want to sign up for the newsletter because you
can expect more educational stuff like that.
It's not just about selling you stuff.
Yeah.
We're going to want to let you know when there's something new for you to buy because like
that's how we survive.
But uh, we also want to make sure that it's another content stream for us.
So uh, make sure, make sure you go, uh, iceberg says, Hey, there's still no archive available
for the newsletters, which for really cool ones like this, there really should be.
It's coming.
Oh, Tynan's in the float plane chat.
Hey, thanks Tynan.
It is S2 tool steel with a black phosphate coating.
Oh, it didn't even occur to me to message Tynan or Kyle cause it's like after hours,
but Hey, if Tynan's going to be in the chat answering questions might as well.
So Tynan is one of our other engineers in creator warehouse.
It's also super cool.
Also has improved at badminton a lot in the last year and I haven't, you've improved a
little.
Well, I haven't been there.
Well, not lately, but you still improved a little before you stopped coming.
Yeah.
I want to go back.
My shoulder has just been messed up for people that don't have contacts there.
Uh, da, da, da, da, da.
Are we going to test the steam deck running windows?
Uh, Oh, of course.
Okay.
Yep.
Yeah, of course.
And I just, yep.
Wasn't a hundred percent.
Sure.
Okay.
That's a general one.
I'm checking the incoming by the way, if you want to keep going through curated.
Yeah.
I was just having a look at some of the topics that we like didn't cover today.
Oh, uh, maybe we'll just push them to next week or something.
I got nowhere to be.
I don't know.
I was just, no, no, I don't, I don't want to, I don't want to cover them.
Let's do it.
When show till midnight.
No, no.
Um, also when the lab is up and running, will you be evaluating your own products to see
how they hold up and also publishing those results?
That's not the first time we've had that request.
I think I forgot to ask you about that.
Um, I don't see why not.
I would think we'd have to, but the thing is that they would be collaborating in the
early stages.
Like we would use the lab to internally validate things, I guess.
And you'd probably see that type of stuff in the newsletter and whatnot.
So like it might not be in the exact same way that other products are.
I mean, if it's something that we, if it's a tech product that we ultimately release,
then yeah.
Yeah.
It's not.
Right.
Like we obviously, it would be to our benefit to have our product in the database, right?
It's like almost more advertising at that point.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I'm super, I'm super down.
Tristan.
First time making one show.
All this talk and motherboards has me wondering what's your, Oh my goodness.
They're still coming in so fast.
What's your recommendation for motherboard brands?
I've had bad experiences with gigabyte and I want to move away from them in the next
build.
Frankly, I've had bad experiences with every single major brand.
All of them.
All of them.
So you, my, the best motherboard buying advice that I can give you is by the most popular
model, okay?
The most popular model that is somewhere in the neighborhood of like four and a half to
five stars because odds are that compared to really low end stuff, which never gets
any love and really high end stuff that they don't sell enough of to justify paying attention
to that mid range, mid to high end is where you get the real R and D effort put in and
where you are more likely to get better longterm support.
That's all I can really tell you because we've had experience with this too.
When you go on the ultra high end, uh, no one owns it, so you're going to be the only
one that runs into certain problems and there's no fixes for it.
And it's like what?
So we're going to piss off like 800 people and you know, when you're a company at that
kind of scale for almost any of them, really, yeah, I've seen it.
I've seen it.
Uh, there's a, there's a question here asking if we think we will ever sell our own mice
or keyboards.
Uh, absolutely.
That's something that we would want to explore.
I think that for us, the big question has to be, what are we contributing?
What are we adding?
Right?
Because let's take a mouse for example.
Are we going to be able to go toe to toe with Logitech for cost?
No, obviously not.
Are we going to be able to go up against razor for branding?
No.
Come on.
Right.
Are we going to go and sponsor e-sports teams like, like a hyper X?
No, no.
Right.
So we have to figure out what is our place and then we have to figure out if we can actually
build something that matches what we imagine our place to be.
So those are, those are big questions that you have to have the answers to before you
can undertake a project like that.
Uh, Sean says from New Zealand, I've recently built a storage server running on read to
consolidate a number of hard drives that have a lot of duplicate files.
Can you recommend any tools to help sort through duplicate files?
I've actually looked for this not that long ago.
I was trying to get rid of duplicate photos.
I wanted something like the old Canon zoom browser software, but modern and like just
to de-duplicate things.
And I didn't find anything good.
I found a couple of open source ones, but my library was so enormous that they just
weren't able to handle it in a reasonable amount of time and I got distracted cause
I had other things to do and I gave up.
So that's where I'm at on that.
Maybe maybe the chat, we'll have some ideas.
There's stuff out there, but I haven't used anything in forever.
I wouldn't know of a particular recommendation.
Dupe guru is recommended by full the mattress so careful.
Yeah.
Uh, it could be terrible though.
It could be adware for all I know.
So I'm not recommending anything.
Sorry.
Alexandra says, Alexander, uh, very excited about the lab.
Any plans covering the privacy aspect of different devices when analyzing them in the lab?
For example, when comparing phones, VR headsets, set top boxes, smartwatches, et cetera.
That's a difficult thing for us to tackle now.
It's something that we want to consider in the future.
Something we've talked about, for example, is the percentage of your TV home screen that
is taken up by ads.
It's like, it's a simple benchmark, right?
But it's, I think it's a meaningful one in regards to privacy stuff too.
There's maybe some stuff that the, the software engineer that works in labs department could
do to, uh, try to monitor things like home, uh, like various internet of things, devices
that are around your house.
Yeah.
What type of calls they're making out to the internet.
For sure.
Um, it could be something interesting to check for, uh, Paul's asks, uh, do you plan on doing
more videos on non-terrestrial ISPs, uh, similar to the Starlink video?
I know a lot of people are still without high speed internet or an internet connection in
general.
It's something we're very interested in, but it's something that is not always trivial
to get your hands on and then get rid of in a timely manner.
Like Starlink was super easy.
He just ordered it, set it up, said, Hey, we don't want it anymore and shipped it back.
They have like Starlink pro or whatever's coming.
It's way faster.
Oh really?
Oh, I haven't seen that yet.
I don't really know a lot of details, but, uh, Darren says it's my 22nd birthday today.
Hey, happy birthday, Darren.
Um, for Luke and Linus, I'm in penetration testing class and was wondering how LTT and
float plane handled testing their platforms.
Do you do internal testing only or do you hire out for verification?
What a good question.
Luke, what do we do?
Internal testing, internal hiring out for verification is a very good idea.
Um, it can also be extremely expensive.
Um, it's, it's not something that I would recommend against, but you do have to consider
your, your company size and the type of money that you can spend on that type of stuff.
Um, and the type of data and whatnot that you're dealing with, right?
Like if you're, if you're a law firm website that actually deals with important documents
through the platform for some reason, like, yeah, you should have internal and external,
uh, looking at, looking at your service, making sure it's really secure.
Um, but yeah, we, we just do internal at this time.
I'm not saying it'll be that way forever.
Um, and actually, luckily we have a very good and positive community, um, that has poked
around and sent us stuff to our like support channels and be like, Hey, this thing is maybe
not great for whatever reason.
And we, we look into that.
So we don't pay for external, um, but, but thanks bros, but thanks bros, bros and gals
and everything in between.
Yeah.
Uh, Bastian says I'm making a studio desk with a rack Mount PC.
Do you have any advice about rack Mount cases on the market?
Oh man, most of them are just terrible for a desktop PC.
That was why I ultimately built my own for my water cooled system.
Um, unfortunately I just haven't looked into it for a long time.
Um, and Bastian also asks, Luke, when you code, what kind of music helps you get in
the zone?
Mine is Warcraft two or jazz coffee shops, uh, jazz coffee shops is a pretty standard
one that I've used for a long time.
Uh, what you mentioned, Warcraft two, Kelvin.
Yeah.
Okay.
That's been one that I've used since I was like 14 Kelvin.
Ruben says I started watching when I was pretty green and it, I am now the endpoint architect
for a large healthcare provider.
Thanks for helping me stay inspired and entertained through the journey.
Love seeing LTT grow.
Hey, thanks so much.
Ruben.
Thank you.
And final merch message for the night car, right?
Will there ever be something on the product pages that names the design?
Oh, we already did that one.
Oh, we already talked about that.
Just didn't press archive.
Okay.
See you later.
Uh, Oh wait, here we go.
Anonymous says, can you post a list of all the tech in your new house and how much it
costs as a fellow one percenter?
I want to deck out my house as well, but I don't know where to begin.
So pay someone you're a one percenter.
So if you don't know you need it, you don't need it.
No, we want him to spend money.
We want the 0.1 percenters to spend money.
Okay.
I mean also, yeah, they should spend money too, but, but like I said, Oh man, see, that's
the thing I don't want to advocate for people just mindlessly consuming either.
Well, I'm not worried if one percenters do that.
Uh, okay.
Outside of that, I would strongly agree as per usual, but okay.
I mean, that's my take on it.
You don't have to share it.
That's fair.
Um, okay.
Thanks Tyler.
F snuck one, one last one in there.
All right.
I think we're calling it for today.
Thank you guys so much, so much for tuning into the land show today.
We actually had a ton of viewers today.
This is crazy.
You guys are, you guys are amazing.
We uh, we had a bit of a lull there in viewership and then it's like stormed back today.
You guys, you guys are awesome.
Uh, we'll see you again next week.
Same bad time, same bad channel.
Bye.