Happy Friday everyone, and welcome to the WAN Show.
I learned something this week, maybe not this week,
but recently, that short bit at the beginning
where I'm looking at the camera,
that's called a millennial pause.
Why?
It's really stupid, we'll talk about it later.
We've got a lot of great stuff to talk to you guys
about this week.
The wiggle that killed Tarkov,
the video we talked about last week,
and kind of leaked, has blown up,
and in the process, shattered the Tarkov community.
I would say that it has broken it in half,
but actually, it's in about a million pieces.
So we're gonna talk about that.
What else we got this week?
The Olympics of Esports,
featuring games that you've never heard of.
You're picking that as a main topic?
Yeah, yeah, yep.
I actually love this topic, and I'm very excited for it.
Oh my gosh.
This is probably my favorite topic of the whole show.
And you only picked one topic,
so I don't think you get to talk this week.
I picked two, I had the millennial pause.
That's a topic?
I gotta reverse-y that and throw it right back at you.
What else?
I don't know.
You can buy a car that can repossess itself.
I don't know.
Whatever, dude.
What, so you're just-
And don't listen to anything.
They watch four hours.
When show dystopia edition.
Yeah, whatever.
Let's go.
The show is brought to you today by Thoram,
The Ridge, and Zoho One.
All right.
Let's do the Tarkov topic.
Last week, yes.
Last week, Luke, accidentally on purpose,
leaked the upcoming video from GOAT.
You did it on purpose.
You did it.
Well, I didn't even know.
How can I leak what I don't know?
Luke, accidentally on purpose,
leaked the concept of a video from creator GOAT,
big Tarkov creator, who cheated in the game
in order to expose cheating.
The summary is that GOAT basically went,
I feel like a lot of people are cheating,
but because there's no playback, there's no kill cam,
nothing like that, no match replay,
I have no way of proving this.
So the way to do it could be to cheat myself
and see if I can identify other cheaters that way.
When he got immersed into the cheater community,
he found that there was an old way
of identifying friendlies that's not really in use
in the game anymore by regular players,
but is still in use by cheaters where one goes like that
and the other goes like that to indicate,
hey, brah, we're on the same side.
Now, the thing that made it so obvious
that it was always cheaters using this wiggle
was that people would be doing it
from clear across the map with trees and buildings
and mountains in between them
and would be looking right at each other
because some of the cheats would actually tell you
if someone had their crosshair on you, is that right?
Yeah, so there's a bunch of different ones.
The one that he used in the video
was one of the easiest ones that you can get
and it's been undetected for years.
So that's the reason why he went that route.
So it wasn't super sophisticated,
but you could see exactly where people were aiming
and you could see people through walls.
You could see what they had in their inventory.
You could see everything.
He also figured out after the video
that people that have the more advanced cheats,
it's all on a separate monitor.
So it's a separate computer, so it's even less detectable.
So they don't see the wireframe through the wall.
So it's not really a wall hack in that way,
but they have the radar on a side monitor.
So they do a different form of wiggle,
which he wasn't even doing in the video.
So there's probably a higher percentage of hackers,
because they can see where people are aiming.
It draws a line out from everyone's character.
They sweep, so they look left and right.
So they sweep their aimer line over you.
They do kind of like a map wiggle
instead of a leaning wiggle.
So there's probably even more than he thought.
The problem with all of this
is that the game is so realism-focused
and cheating changes the dynamic so much
that essentially this video,
GOAT has single-handedly destroyed the community-
Just dropped an absolute bomb.
For this game.
I mean, I haven't been paying close attention to it.
I've seen a little bit of the fallout,
but can you kind of catch me up here
on what's been going on?
Yeah, so first off,
I hadn't seen the video before it got released.
Right.
And he did an interview with me,
which I thought he might use maybe 30 seconds
to two minutes of.
He used the whole thing.
Oh, wow, okay.
The second half of the video is just him and I talking.
So really, you even bringing this up in the first place
was pure self-promotion.
Apparently, yeah.
Typical.
I think that was probably the wrong move.
And he has said a bunch of times,
if he knew it was gonna blow up this much,
he would have spent more time working on the video, et cetera.
But-
Yeah, it's got like one and a half million views now.
Yeah, it's massive.
For a Tarkov video, that's unheard of.
But that does mean that he's gonna have some followups
to try to keep pushing on this topic.
And he's like had a bunch of people reach out,
including people from the Valorant anti-cheat Vanguard
that have talked to him because an interesting thing
that we brought up on the last show
is that you can't have Valorant installed
and cheat in Tarkov
because Valorant's Vanguard anti-cheat will detect it
and stop you, which is hilarious.
So people from there have reached out
and he's gonna have some followup videos,
which should be really good.
But the immediate aftermath of us like leaking it
and then him launching that video was just-
Us leaking.
Yeah, it was actually you.
Was absolute insanity.
First off, people were spam posting it
on the Escape from Tarkov Reddit,
but that Reddit doesn't allow like cheater POV videos,
which kind of makes sense.
So they were mass deleting all the posts,
but people were like, this is very topical.
This isn't like someone advertising cheats.
This post should be allowed.
So there was this gigantic war.
There's a way on Reddit.
I think it's not technically on Reddit.
It's an external website,
but you can see what posts have been deleted by moderators.
And if you went on there-
I didn't know that actually.
I'm not a big Reddit user.
I didn't know either.
I think it's an external site.
Someone linked it to me.
Wonderful community though.
Not toxic at all.
Just walls and walls and walls and walls and walls
of deleted posts because all these people
are trying to force it in
and the moderators are trying to force it back.
And it was just this crazy war.
Eventually, the way that people found kind of a loophole
to make sure that the post could go up there
was they took the clip from the WAN show
of us talking about it
because we didn't have any of the footage.
We were just talking about the video.
So we weren't showing cheats.
Yeah.
I see.
So they posted that.
And then the moderators saw that
and realized they couldn't really remove it.
So they just blocked all comments on the post.
So they locked the post, but let it sit there.
So our WAN show clip was top of that Reddit
for like quite a while.
And then eventually the war just never stopped.
People kept posting this video.
So eventually they like unblocked the first one
that came in and then pinned it.
But I think they still locked the comments on it.
And they had to make like an official announcement
about it and everything.
I have never personally seen a subreddit that on fire ever.
Really?
I think it was in the r slash Linus Tech Tips one.
Yes, actually, even considering stuff that happens in there.
I've never seen a subreddit that on fire.
It was crazy.
And then immediately after it starts getting spammed
on Reddit, people start spamming Tarkov creators
that are currently streaming the game, the video,
trying to get them to watch it.
Right.
So these people had no primer.
They had no warning of like what it was.
Just their whole community is like, watch this thing.
Go, go, go, go.
And then they have to start reacting to it live.
And that was brutal because like a lot of these people,
especially if they're Tarkov creators,
they know there's a lot of cheating in the game.
Yeah.
But they haven't seen it from a cheater's perspective
and they don't know quite necessarily how bad it is.
They might have a pretty accurate assumption
of how bad it is.
Yes.
But they've never actually like seen it.
Right.
So some of the reactions were pretty brutal.
A bunch of creators were like very negative
about the video existing at all and very anti goat
at the very beginning.
Yeah.
And then the community reaction to that was really negative.
So then the communities like really aggro
against all these creators.
And then some of the creators start kind of flipping back.
Now here's something I did see.
My understanding is that there's some kind of tier
of participation within the Tarkov community
where people get perks directly from battle state games
that are, and I mean, you'll have to correct me
if my understanding is not right here
because I'm not super into Tarkov.
I've only played it a handful of times with like him and Joe.
But my understanding is that on a fairly regular basis,
they get like a lot of ammo and equipment.
Like they get these packs or these drops
that are quite valuable and that while they aren't a bribe,
could potentially put them in a position
where they want to retain their community liaison
in order to continue getting perks.
So there might be an incentive in the community
to kind of sweep under the rug anything
that paints battle state games in a negative light.
Is that a fair understanding of the situation?
So this is only something
that I've actually even heard about recently
because I've never, I just like play Tarkov with Joe.
So you've never really engaged in the community in that way.
Like I'd never, I don't really use Reddit that often.
I would never really go on the subreddit.
Like I don't really care.
I just played the game, right?
But very recently before this broke,
I heard about that system.
And I do know that some creators
have some like very weird levels of insight
into what's going on at BSG
to the point where there was a post somewhat recently
where they were talking about how certain creators
were like influencing the like dev pipeline directly
and like meeting with developers directly, which is like-
Fine, actually.
Actually quite cool.
But it needs to be transparent as well.
Yeah.
And in some ways it is totally.
Like some of them will say like,
oh, I'm a Tar, I don't know what they're called.
Cause again, I have never really cared.
But they're like, oh, I'm a whatever.
Sherpas.
Sherpas.
Okay, so Sherpas is slightly different.
As far as my understanding goes,
Sherpas are supposed to be people
who like help other people learn Tarkov.
So that's where some of the direct items came from.
I don't know if the other people-
That's what I think I was talking about.
So I don't know if the Sherpas, maybe they do.
I don't know a lot about this.
Emissary and Sherpa is what?
Emissary is the other one.
W22Brown is saying in Floatplane Chat.
So Emissary is where they have like direct contact with BSG.
Got it, okay.
Sherpas, I don't know what level of contact
they have with BSG, but they help new players.
What we know is that Battle State Games
is in communication with some members of the community
and that it's not always clear who is or isn't getting
influence over the development process
and who is or isn't getting perks.
Or to what degree.
Right.
But there's an incentive, certainly,
for some members of the community
to downplay the impact of this cheating
and keep the gravy train rolling.
Maybe even if they're not in contact with BSG
and maybe even if they don't receive these-
It's kind of like the way that Apple engages
with the press, right?
They don't explicitly say,
look, you're not allowed to talk about Hackintosh.
You're not allowed to criticize this
and don't talk about this.
But everybody knows and everybody plays the game.
You get cut off.
Or you, well, it's less that you get cut off
and more that you will never get the call
in the first place.
Apple's engagement, in many cases,
has nothing to do with how many views you're likely to get.
I mean, we'll get more views on an iPhone video
than 90% of the people they cede an iPhone to.
It's nothing to do with that.
But we're not stylish enough.
Well, I, in particular, am not cool enough
to be the kind of press outlet
that Apple would want to engage with,
even if I was super positive about the products,
because I have been at times.
But I'm also a loose cannon.
They know that they can't rely on me to be nice about it.
You might talk about their products
while walking in the rain.
Yeah, yeah, I just might.
So I could see it being very much that way,
where there's an unspoken,
here's what's okay to talk about,
here's what's okay to emphasize,
and these are all no-nos.
So, and like, I don't necessarily know
that that stuff is happening,
but it makes sense that it might be with some of them.
There's also other stuff where like,
for some creators of any kind, realistically,
if you are tied to like one thing,
like if you are a Tarkov creator and that's it,
if you are a X creator, if you are a Y creator,
if you're tied to one thing and that thing is under attack,
even subconsciously, with no direct contact,
with no direct benefit, that could risk your job.
Look at what happened to Ninja
when Fortnite became less culturally relevant.
Just like, it's like one-to-one.
And I'm sure they had communication,
but even if they didn't,
if there was a complete gap between Ninja and Fortnite,
Fortnite going down is going to bother Ninja,
whether he knows or not.
And it doesn't matter, the name of the person doesn't matter
and the subject doesn't matter.
If tech becomes less relevant, it's bad for us.
Yeah, and even if ultimately we survive
and we kind of go, okay,
we're going all in on channel super fun.
Yikes.
That's still a lot of work.
That's still a lot of stress.
That's still something that would be terrifying
compared to, oh, I'll just,
let's do a laser disc retrospective.
Okay, yeah, let's go tech, tech, tech, tech, tech.
We should do a laser disc retrospective.
Anyway.
So that's why the creator's almost getting ambushed
with this while they were live,
with no ability to watch beforehand
and collect their thoughts and figure it out,
I think is part of the reason
why the initial reaction was so strong,
because it might be subconscious, right?
Yeah.
They're just like, this sucks.
This sucks for a lot of reasons.
Yeah, and I'm angry.
And I'm angry and-
And they should be.
And that comes across as hate for the video
or hate for goat, when realistically,
they're just incredibly frustrated and also live
and maybe it wasn't channeled properly.
So now that people have kind of cooled off a little bit,
they've had some time to think about it more and stuff,
the community is much more-
Floatplane chat has given us some interesting stuff here.
Harry 009 says,
Axel did a poll about the video and 41% of respondents
said they were planning to leave Tarkov as a result.
Here's one thing I will say to that though,
is if that degree of rampant cheating
is making it so you don't want to play Tarkov,
I got some bad news for you.
For like almost any shooter.
Yeah, because just about any game,
probably not any better.
Multiplayer, yeah.
I think that in Tarkov, cheating tilts the scales,
maybe more than some other games.
Like if I'm playing like a team-based shooter,
really good tactics,
you could probably take down one cheater,
depending on the degree to which they are cheating.
Like an aimbot is not enough,
in something like an Overwatch.
But what does this-
On the other end of the spectrum,
a ability to see through walls without any aimbot
or anything in Tarkov is way more than enough.
Yeah, that's true.
Where it's like not enough in Overwatch.
Yes.
And like in Team Fortress 2,
so what, they can see through walls?
Yeah, it's like you basically know
where everyone's gonna be anyway.
Yeah, unless they can see invisible scouts
or unless they have an aimbot,
but then usually you can tell if they have an aimbot.
Spies, sorry, yeah, yeah.
Usually you can tell if someone has an aimbot
and then you just leave the server, whatever.
Like it's totally different levels of impact.
So that's true.
But I, okay, let me kind of pitch this question to you.
What does this revelation mean
for the future of gaming in general, okay?
Multiplayer, is it fair for me to say
that it's less fun than it was years ago?
It feels like it.
I don't know if that's because of the type of-
Are you getting old?
Yeah.
Is gaming changing?
Sure.
Or is it that rampant cheating is not fun?
Because cheating was a thing when we were growing up.
Sure.
It was way harder.
Yeah.
Like now, I believe Goat said five minutes.
He Googled it and then within five minutes he had it running.
Yeah, because you can just pay for it.
You can basically hire a service
that will get you up and running.
And they have like weekend sales and all that.
It's a full fledged business.
It's not like weird sketchy forums anymore.
Okay, so multiplayer, okay, single player.
I mean, probably the only notable,
okay, I'm trying to think,
notable single player experiences
that have come out for PC in the last little while.
Okay, we've got your Stray,
we've got It Which Must Not Be Named.
Yeah.
We've got-
Other It Which Must Not Be Named.
There's two of them.
Sure, yeah, the other one.
Single player has outside of major blockbuster releases
or your odd kind of low budget or indie breakout
has just been ravaged by unprofitability because-
How many years ago was Fallout 4?
Yeah.
It's been 12 years since the last Elder Scrolls game.
And it's not like, it's one of those things
where we can point at it and say,
well, it's because of the proliferation of mobile gaming,
for example, or like gacha or like pay to win strategies
from game developers.
But a big part of that,
I think a lot of game developers are more passionate
about creating better, more enriching gaming experiences.
And I think it's pretty obvious
that with single player games,
where there is absolutely no online verification
and no incentive to pay for it,
if you can just play the exact same experience
by yourself for nothing,
I think it's pretty clear
that they're more prone to piracy.
Yeah.
So what's going to be left?
I don't know.
When the dust settles-
Like there's definitely some other games, but it's-
Oh yeah, that was last year though.
Come on.
It's been a bit.
And I don't mean, okay.
I don't mean last year,
like it was 64 days ago or whatever.
I mean, that was a long time ago now.
I think it was beginning of last year.
Wasn't it genuinely almost a year ago?
I think it was February.
I think so, yeah.
Yeah, yeah.
Angry Birds.
Angry Birds will be the last game standing.
Yeah, it's rough.
I think my, when this first happened,
so on the last show I brought up wanting a replay system
and I still want a replay system, but-
Like in Tarkov, coming back to Tarkov.
Yeah.
I mean, it helps.
Yes, so that's-
But with Tarkov,
the consequences of dying are so much higher
that if anything,
I would think a replay system would push more people
to quit the game,
which is probably why they haven't done it.
In Team Fortress 2-
Oh, because you see the cheaters or what?
Yeah, if you see someone who's cheating
and obviously their mouse cursor whipped over to you
and they fricking headshot you
as you barely come around a corner,
obviously you're mad, but it's like,
I'm gonna switch class, I'm gonna sneak up on them.
Ah, gotcha!
There's like certain things that you could do.
You could lose $100,
like real world dollars worth of gear in one instance.
And it's not like you could get it back.
And considering the amount of real money trading
going on in Tarkov,
that might actually be very true.
Exactly, that's what I'm talking about.
I have no idea what the values are,
but so there's some ideas behind the replay system
and how you could get the gear back.
One of them is if you replay
and watch a cheater kill you and you report them,
and then that cheater gets banned,
your gear from that raid could get returned to you.
Okay.
So there's some ideas
to make it a little bit more amicable.
My thing that I've more landed on now
is I just think people need to care a lot more
about anti-cheat and it needs to be more important.
And the approach that companies take to it
need to be more like multi-pronged.
And I think that's the main reason why I want
a replay system is so that like we can help.
Like I like the idea of the community being able to have,
because right now in Tarkov,
and I think I brought this up last week,
say you're approaching a building
and you hear someone inside and then you just randomly die.
You might think like, oh, that guy's cheating.
He shot me through the wall or whatever.
Maybe it was someone on a hill,
fought 400 meters away that just shot you.
You have no idea.
So if you can watch a replay system,
it might get rid of a bunch of junk reports
of people that aren't cheating.
So that whatever developer,
whether it's BSG or some other game-
Can really focus on the real problems.
Focus on the real stuff.
So I don't think it's going to solve the problem.
I don't think it's some magic bullet.
And I do think it would help in Tarkov rather than invest.
I think it actually,
obviously you want to invest a little bit in actual,
background process, anti-cheat or whatever else.
But because so much of the value of an account
is tied up in the items that that account holds,
I could actually see,
banning players as being extremely effective
to reduce cheating.
If you have the tools like replays
that will allow the community to root these people out.
I think it would help.
Losing hundreds of dollars.
And if they can figure out a system
where they serialize essentially,
guns and other equipment
so that they can see the path that it's following
and basically just go like,
yeah, look, we're going to get merciless here.
Social credit system.
If you are trading with cheaters regularly,
you will be banned.
So they've actually started doing that.
Yeah, apparently they said in an AMA,
they're working on a replay system as well.
Oh, that's cool.
Yeah.
Okay, so we'll get to things they've said
in AMAs in a second.
That's fair.
But, what was I just going to say?
Oh, right.
They have started banning.
And this has actually happened
to a bunch of content creators
because there's this thing called viewer kits.
So you enter a raid with nothing on you.
So you enter a game with nothing on you
and you join in with a viewer
and the viewer dumps a bunch of stuff for you,
but you don't know what it's going to be.
And then you pick it all up
and then usually you kill them
and then you have to survive the rest of the raid
with whatever kit they gave you.
And usually it's pretty meme-y.
Sure.
They'll give you one bullet
and 30 flash bangs or something
and you have to try to figure it out.
But sometimes they'll be like really baller kits,
but you don't know, right?
It's coming in random from a viewer.
Sometimes the people giving you stuff
are people who have cheated
or engaged in real money trading or RMT stuff in the past.
And BSG has started banning certain creators
that have had that interaction happen
because they're trying to ban people
that play with cheaters or people that interact
with other RMT type systems and stuff.
And that has gotten really muddy
because some of the creators are like,
well, this whole viewer kit thing was allowed for like years
and dropping things for each other has been fine forever.
So like now this is bannable.
Right.
But then it's,
we're asking them to work on getting rid of cheaters.
And this is one of the ways to do it.
I've even said on Wayanshow,
like people should start,
games just start banning people that play with cheaters.
Yeah.
But then it's an issue with Tarkov
because Tarkov has those open lobbies.
You've seen them.
And you can just invite random people.
Right.
Yeah.
So like if you can invite random people,
they can't have that as a mechanic in the game anymore.
If you're going to ban people that play with cheaters.
Well it's okay to play with them.
Just don't take any equipment from them.
So that's,
but then that needs to be communicated and like,
And that's going to be tough.
And it's adding,
I mean,
if there's any community that could probably work around
and do the research to figure out this kind of arcane
bull.
Probably fair enough.
Yeah.
But like, it's just,
I mean,
Tarkov is the gaming equivalent of having like
the most tedious job ever,
as far as I can tell.
And we don't even,
we just do everything for him and he still thinks that.
It's brutal.
It's brutal.
Like even just the inventory management.
Okay.
So you got,
look at this.
Okay.
So you got some med pack or something that takes up
four inventory squares and you've got some bullet
or something that's sitting in one of otherwise
four blank inventory squares.
If I take that med pack and I just drop it there,
it doesn't just grab the bullet and put it in my hand
and leave the med pack so that I can rearrange.
It just won't put it down.
And I'm sitting here going literal actual fucking Diablo one
had that quality of life mechanic,
where if you dropped a large item onto a space that only
has one item occupying it,
it'll just put the other one in your hand.
Diablo one,
1996.
Yeah.
Pretty rough.
So, okay.
So Nikita or the,
I believe COO and like main outward communicator.
Sure.
From BSG, the developer behind Tarkov.
Yeah.
Has started communicating a lot since this happened.
The first reach out was six days ago in a Reddit thread
called hackers, cheaters,
and other related scum of the earth.
And he posts a bunch of stuff,
which all sounds really good,
except people noticed immediately that he had made
basically the exact same post, not only two years ago,
but also three years ago.
And they were like borderline identical.
Like they're so similar.
And people pointed out on your screen right now,
or I can show the,
so this is the comment that I saw.
Yeah. You can show my screen.
This is the comment that I saw from listen,
L I S N who posts out the two years ago
and three years ago threads.
And this is the thread from Nikita or train fender.
I don't know that,
that talks about the things that they're going to do for
anti cheating.
Here's the three years ago post,
which is like extremely, extremely similar.
And here's the, oh, this is part two that he posted.
Part two is actually significantly more interesting.
And he has communicated in like an AMA
and a bunch of other types of stuff in ways that,
that seem pretty good if they actually do this stuff.
And it hasn't been enough time for them to really actually
do anything, right?
Cause like it takes time to develop stuff.
So I'm not sitting here imagining that they would actually
be able to act on a lot of this that quickly.
They've tried doing some stuff, very reactionary,
but it's mostly changing like properties and parameters
and different items,
like things that wouldn't take that long.
Cause it hasn't been that long.
But yeah, reaction to his first post was super negative,
but then he's kept communicating since then and refined on
things and then it's gotten more positive and the
community's just going all over the place.
Yeah.
Pyro pinky points out that battle state gates games needs
cheaters to help fund development.
Dr. Lupo apparently has a great clip on why it's happening
and will keep happening.
I mean, it's a, it's a very similar, if I,
if I had to guess, I haven't actually watched it yet.
I haven't even read the comments under it.
If I had to guess,
I'd say it's very similar to the way that valve, you know,
is really doesn't like, you know, cash,
cash sales of skins and everything else,
but functionally does nothing to actually stop people from
gambling on them and spending money on them.
So because without cash, it's, it's, it's like anything,
without a cash value, it doesn't have a value.
There is no actual intrinsic value to any digital item.
It has to have a cash value.
So as soon as you completely shut down people's ability to
trade these items through some kind of marketplace,
you destroy the value.
Now, I don't know if Dr. Lupo makes some other different
points about it, but that's,
that's a very sort of basic overview of why it is in a game
developer's best interest for people to exchange real world
money for skins and in-game items.
There's there's no other like financial trading through
Tarkov though.
There's there's an argument that has been made that these
cheaters get banned a lot.
I believe Nikita made some posts saying that they,
they banned over like 4,000 cheaters just over the week.
Yeah, but is that okay in a weekend, I guess that's a lot.
Some things to consider there is they may have made their
parameters a little bit more aggressive in response to the
video. So it may have cast a wider net and that may have
been a one-time increase. I don't really know.
I haven't read all of his posts and all that kind of stuff.
Again, I'm not even playing right now.
So like my amount of care is not the absolute highest.
Sure.
But.
So it really is just about you getting more exposure for
yourself in his video.
No one, as far as I can tell, no one even watched that part.
It should not have been in there.
Oh my goodness. I didn't even know it was in there.
Anyways.
Okay. So there is technically financial reward for them.
If the cheaters keep buying accounts,
that is technically true.
Now there's some questions as to whether people are buying
them at full value, because I don't know if it's still a
thing, but I know for a while you could, you could buy them.
You could like VPN into a different country and buy it in
that local currency. And it was way, way, way cheaper.
But still at the volume that people are buying these
accounts. So it's going to be a pretty substantial amount.
So the argument then is that they want to ban cheaters to
continue to get more account purchases,
but they don't want to bend them too well because they want
them to be able to make more money than they're spending on
accounts with battle state.
Because if they're, if they're cheating in order to RMT,
they need to make enough money to pay for the account and
make it worth their time.
So this is an argument that has been made.
That would be some very impressive 4D chess.
If they were able to balance that perfectly.
I mean, look at, it doesn't even need to be perfect though.
I don't, I don't know.
I, I could see it.
I don't think it's 4D chess.
I could see it being an incentive to not want to invest way
too much more.
Yeah. I don't think it's a matter of 4D chess.
Like min-maxing their investment into anti-cheat.
I think it's more about minimizing their investment into
anti-cheat.
Just focusing on others.
Yeah.
So the threshold is not set by whether these guys can stay
profitable. That's a happy accident.
The threshold is set by just account sales and a real
player attrition where people are not playing the game
anymore, which,
which would hurt the value of the real money trading.
Yeah. So, right.
So it's, there's no different, it's a different like formula,
but we end up with the same result,
I guess is what I'm trying to say,
which is that they are not investing enough into anti-cheat.
I personally don't believe they're investing enough into
anti-cheat.
I don't think there's any way to prove or to state that
that's the reason why, if that makes sense.
Like we, we have no idea. Maybe it is.
Maybe it's not.
I think it's a very dangerous game to play.
If that is the game that they're playing.
Yeah.
What I suspect is they just don't find working on
anti-cheat very interesting because as far as my
understanding goes,
working on anti-cheat is insanely difficult.
Right.
And it's not very publicly rewarding unless something like
this is going on.
Sure.
So if something like this is going on, work on anti-cheat,
post your numbers and people are going to praise you and
come back to the game.
But if something like this is not going on,
if nobody's angry about cheaters,
Then nobody's talking about anti-cheat.
And working on anti-cheat doesn't bring you any
benefit to your game.
Right. So I could see, I could see, yeah,
I could see it being more based on that.
Sure.
Because if, if there isn't,
and there's a lot of problems with Tarkov.
So if people aren't screaming about cheaters right now,
well, you have like one of the biggest desync problems of
any shooter game.
Right.
Should probably work on that.
You have tons of other issues that like demand work.
There's lots, Tarkov is so wide scope.
That you could watch like any Tarkov creator,
talk to anyone who plays the game,
go on any forum that talks about anything and see
suggestions in every possible direction that are great.
The, the, the potential backlog for this game is insane.
Right.
Like you, you talk about how complicated some of the
systems are.
They don't have to be that complicated to have the same
depth.
Right.
Like gearing up before a raid is always super annoying.
What if you had like...
You guys seem to enjoy it.
It's sort of sick to watch.
I feel like I'm like watching your like,
private enjoyment time, you know,
the way you guys will sit and tinker with your different
bullets and your different magazines.
There's definitely a perverse pleasure there.
Okay, sure.
But if you hate it and then like put it on a mannequin so
that if you die with your buddies,
you just like grab the mannequin stuff and it just all
automatically goes on your character.
So you can jump back in the game,
but you could spend time setting up your stuff when you're
not actively playing with your friends.
Definitely do enjoy.
Yeah.
Then that would be great.
That's a feature that has been recommended.
I think that would be awesome.
It would also take development time.
Development time is expensive and development time has
massive opportunity costs because they could work on other
stuff.
So like,
I think anti-cheat is just an unattractive thing to work on
when people aren't mad about it.
That I think is probably more real than them like gaining
money from the sales to cheaters.
But I don't know.
So, so yeah, it blew up and you know, great work,
great work goat on the video.
If you guys haven't checked it out,
definitely worth a watch.
It's a bit of a longer one in no small part because there's
so much of Luke talking in it, but yeah,
definitely worth checking out.
Here's his channel and you can, you can really see the,
the impact of this, the virality of this video,
34,000 feet, 1.4 million, 550,000 from four days ago.
Oh, hey, look, it's us.
Hey, nice.
Anywho, why don't we move on to our next topic today,
which is the millennial pause.
I am getting very tired of articles that just kind of talk
about the differences between boomers and millennials or
Gen Z is, is working differently in the workplace.
And here's the things that are special about gens.
I'm just kind of, I'm sitting here going like,
it just kind of hurts my brain because you're a millennial.
I think we all, I think we all learned, you know,
very, very young that generalizing,
just putting people into,
into buckets like this is, is not constructive.
I think that you can definitely have conversations about,
you know,
what the impact was of a particular generation
and of the lifestyle that they led in general.
I mean, I think you can, you can look at the, the,
the wealth, the, the, the, the, the,
the numerous are just the,
the sheer scale of the baby boomer generation and the amount
of wealth that it captured and continues to hold the power
that it captured and continues to hold.
And you can kind of go like, yeah,
they were extremely influential, but to kind of go, you know,
okay, boomer essentially.
And to, and to be dismissive of boomers,
like I've met boomers that are anywhere from completely
technically illiterate to being the people who literally
invented the computer technology that you and I all enjoy
today.
The internet.
Yeah, right.
Like that, that, that basically all boomers, right?
Just by,
and all of this development was happening and how,
how old that generation was. And in the same way, you know,
I'll run into zoomers that are anywhere from computer whiz
kids to kind of me going,
did they have the internet when you grew up?
Couldn't you have just Googled this? I don't know.
Yeah.
Why are we having this conversation? Anyway, one of,
one of the dumb,
I guess I made the mistake of clicking on too many of these
because I am interested particularly in sort of office and,
and workplace accommodation and yeah, yeah, exactly.
Like, you know,
management techniques and that sort of thing.
And a lot of them are really focused right now.
Yeah, see Conrad said in chat, I'm a zoomer.
I have to, I have to deal with him.
Yeah.
So I got to click on these articles.
On gen Z entering the workplace and all the ways that gen Z
is different and whether it's your, your,
your quiet quitting or your, you know, whatever,
whatever else, right?
Like whatever workplace trends are, are happening.
And really, as far as I can tell,
trends are less about what's actually happening broadly and
more about what's happening loudly on Twitter or on Tik TOK.
Yeah.
But that's, that's a whole separate conversation.
Anyway,
I guess I've clicked on too many of these articles and I got
one that I came across that just felt like the stupidest
thing ever.
And I'm about to out myself as a dumb out of touch
millennial,
but I learned recently what the millennial pause is called.
It is, are you familiar with the millennial pause?
So other than you saying it before the show, no,
I've never heard of this.
Okay.
The millennial pause is a short pause before you start
speaking when you're recording a video.
So if you were say recording a selfie for Tik TOK,
you would go, okay, hold on.
Let me just open up my camera here.
No, well, I got to turn on my selfie camera. Sorry.
I'm a dumb millennial.
So my default camera position is the rear camera,
like some kind of chump.
Okay. So I would basically go like this.
The thing about Luke's shameless self promotion in that
Tarkov video is that he has every opportunity to promote
himself. I mean, he's on this podcast every week.
It's one of the biggest tech podcasts in the world.
So I just don't know why he can't be honest with me about
the reason that he's talking about this goat creator and
this Tarkov thing is just what he wants more followers for
his YouTube channel.
I pretty much promised that channel is never going to take
off no matter how hard he works on it.
So if he needs more money, why doesn't he just ask for it?
It's pathetic. And end. Okay.
My only affiliation in that channel was this, by the way.
All right. So yeah, the pause at the beginning of it.
Okay. Hold on, hold on. Okay. Stop.
So we go back to the beginning.
That pause, that half a second. Oh, sorry.
I'll show the people. I'll show the people. Okay.
The millennial not showing.
That pause where I blink and inhale,
that's the millennial pause.
And the article goes on to explain that with zoomers,
they will just be talking already when the video starts.
So I was going to say for like a live stream,
would we just be mid conversation when it starts?
So that's what I'm talking about.
I'm looking at this going, I don't know.
I don't know that this is a generational difference as much
as it might just be a tech savvy difference,
because I know that until the tally light is on,
my camera's not recording. Yeah.
But then ain't nobody got time for me to blink and inhale,
I guess.
So what do I make of this?
Kind of what I was wondering is like,
do they just edit their videos better or?
No, apparently it is some combination of not caring
and knowing the exact timing of when your device will start
recording so that you are just talking the instant it starts
recording.
So for us,
we would just have to not care because we actually can't
know the exact time.
Yeah. Well, I mean, I use so many different kinds of count.
Like as a, as a creator, I know,
cause this is a live sync thing.
You don't know until that initializes.
Oh, I don't even mean wan show.
I'm just talking in general, just like any video.
I promise you as, as a content creator,
I will never not millennial pause because it's what,
what I'm going to do another take because something wasn't
recording properly.
Jayden said in flow,
plain chat millennials lean more YouTube zoomers lead more
Tik TOK, different time expectations and constraints.
That was my understanding too.
And then I read an article recently that showed that while
they do watch a lot more Tik TOK,
they actually watch more YouTube than they do Tik TOK.
I don't know if that's real.
It was surprising to me.
It might not be legit.
I think it was a survey more than like an actual data based
thing. So maybe it's not legit.
I don't know,
but I just want to throw it out there because it was very
surprising to me.
Yeah. So Huxar and float plane chat says it's that
millennials don't trust that the recording has started till
they see it has started, which.
So they just trust immediately upon pressing the button that
it started.
Which I guess makes sense because we would have grown up
with far less reliable technology.
Like I, okay.
A perfect example of this is that my note nine,
my old phone had a little stylist,
a little Bluetooth stylist that had a little button on it
that I could use as a remote shutter.
And one of the things I liked about it most was that it meant
that I could hold my phone with my rear camera facing me.
So I could take much higher quality selfies because I didn't
have to be able to reach around and get at the shutter
button or even hold it awkwardly.
So I, you know, had, could reach the volume button.
I could just hold it in a way that was comfortable, you know,
put the arm around the misses and, and, you know, click,
click, click, click, click, click, click.
But because I don't trust technology, I'd be like,
don't move.
Yeah.
Did it actually take? Yeah.
No, it didn't because fricking 10% of the time,
it just doesn't. Right.
So get it ready again.
Like, I don't know.
Guys, help me out here.
Apparently there's.
Am I out of touch or is it the children?
No, it's the children who are wrong, right?
Like I'm trying to figure this out.
There's a Wikipedia article for millennial pause.
Hit me.
The millennial pause is barely perceptible.
Is a barely perceptible pause that is present at the start
of some recorded videos.
Sure.
Yeah. It's basically what we've already said.
Yeah.
You don't do the millennial pause in your YouTube videos
cause you have editors to cut it out.
Yeah, absolutely.
So it's just that Zoomers take an extra 30 seconds to cut
the pause. Like, is that what we're talking about?
Yeah, this is funny.
This is a funny float plane chat.
This is great.
Ben Mitchell says,
I didn't even know what this was until you said it.
And I now realize I've been doing it on apps like Snapchat.
So apparently it's cringe.
Millennial pause, millennial pause is cringe.
So you just got trusted.
Yeah. Your, your, your age is showing grandpa.
All right. I didn't know.
If you look at professional live productions,
you can see the ways they accommodate this.
Yeah, actually that's, that's really true.
They don't have a pause cause they'll do five, four.
So that you just start immediately.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Yeah. That's fair.
One of the reasons we can't do that on WAN Show is that our
dashboard, like our restreamer,
you probably noticed that we stream WAN Show on more than
one platform.
So that means because you can only have, to my knowledge,
one end point in OBS, is that right?
Okay.
So because you can only stream to one destination,
we have to go through an intermediary server.
We have to have an extra hop before we actually go live on
those platforms.
So we go to our intermediary and then it splits out with all
the different streams and all the different bit rates that
are supported by the various platforms.
We are usually live for a while before we go live on
YouTube.
And the reason for that is that it's like the ultimate
millennial pause, you know,
we'll be live for 20 minutes figuring out if there's any
technical issues that we need to solve, kind of going, okay,
yeah, we're going to need to play audio from my laptop.
Let's make sure that's working.
Okay. Yeah. Everything good to go.
All the titles are right.
Like we'll do all of our,
our pre-checking while we're kind of live and testing audio
levels and making sure that there's no glitchiness.
And when we press YouTube and we,
and we spool up the restreamer to go to YouTube,
there is a different delay that, what does it depend on?
I actually have no idea because I've seen everything from as
long as I kid you not about 15 seconds all the way to you.
Remember that one time, a couple months ago,
it was immediately live. And I was caught totally unaware.
If you, if you look back at that WAN show,
I don't remember exactly how quickly I adapted to it,
but if I seem panicked at the beginning of that show is
because whoa, how did it go already?
I was expecting to sit there,
refreshing the page anywhere from half a dozen to a dozen
times to see that indicator go.
I've never bothered to look into like what's happening.
It'd be kind of neat to have it be consistent,
but it's a pretty low priority in terms of development,
I think. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's okay.
So yeah, the, the pre-show is kind of our,
our millennial pause.
And then at the beginning of the video,
because I have to wait for a refresh cycle of that page to
know if the check is green, I just.
So this is why I was saying,
I think the only solution would be for us to just not care.
Cause we would have to be mid conversation.
And then you notice that it's live and then we go.
Yeah. That would be the only solution.
I don't think it's a problem that needs a solution though.
Yeah. Yeah. I can just be millennial pauses.
I think. Are you technically a millennial?
I think so.
It would be like barely though. Right?
What's the, what's the cut off? Who cares?
Well, that's the thing, right? Is it's all arbitrary.
Yeah.
I think though that in this case it does it, but 20, 26.
So you gotta be 26.
So then yeah, you're definitely a millennial.
I identify as a millennial at the very least.
I've always like anytime I see anything that's like
millennials have ruined plastic bags.
I don't know.
I'll be like, yep.
That's probably me.
I don't know.
I always just any article that talks about millennials.
I just assume it's my group.
I think I'm a pretty bog standard millennial.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Millennials are apparently killing drinking is one of one
of the new ones.
Oh yeah. That's us.
Millennial stereotypes.
Okay. Let's, let's have some fun.
Millennials are lazy.
I mean, wouldn't you be,
if you didn't have to do everything manually,
just because you walked to school, you know,
uphill both ways doesn't mean I should do it.
Yeah. It's supposed to be better, right?
Isn't that the whole idea?
It's supposed to be better.
Yeah. Things are supposed to improve.
Yeah. Like now it's only uphill one way.
That's good.
My mom did this thing where she got rid of her microwave
because it was like it, it was making something dependence
on, you know, it was like too convenient and blah, blah,
something I'm sitting here, I'm sitting here going like,
you're going to have a microwave again
in less than six months.
I guarantee it.
Sure enough.
I was a hundred percent right about that.
Oh yeah.
Of course they have a microwave now.
And anytime I bring it up,
it's like the subject is very quickly changed again,
which I really enjoy because I was, I don't know.
I sometimes I can be a very direct communicator.
I was extremely direct about that when I was like,
that's really stupid.
So you're just going to take forever to heat things up for,
for what?
I mean, do we,
are we even going to talk about the fact that you're like
burning fossil fuels in order to heat things up on your gas
stove?
Probably not properly ventilated, whatever it might be,
but probably not.
Yeah. Microwave is just plain good.
Yeah. Okay. Millennials are technology obsessed.
Yeah. That's why it's just better.
The internet happened like while we were growing up,
that was a big deal.
Well, we're uniquely positioned to see the before and the
after, right?
Like when I was in grade two, I still remember this stuff.
Like, you know how you can have like little snippets,
right? Is Valley speak like Valley girl speak in here?
No, it's not.
But like, you know how you can like have these little
snippets of memory or like, like little flashes, you know,
like you don't really remember it, but it's like,
I know I did this report on Boa constrictors.
Why do I know that it was in grade two and,
and I can almost see my terrible illustration on,
on the cover of my duetang, you know? Right.
And I still remember the layout of my elementary school
library. And I still remember where the encyclopedias were.
Yeah. And the other reference books,
we did book reports from books,
like on nonfiction topics. Right.
And by the time I was in grade.
It's like,
if someone else had the encyclopedia that you needed,
because there would be like the encyclopedia would be a
whole shelf because it would be all alphabetized.
And if they had the letter or whatever you needed,
you just have to wait.
Or my school had several encyclopedias,
only one relatively current.
So you could see if you could find any information in the
older one.
Yeah. Yeah.
Other than that, you were pretty much boned.
Then I was in grade four, five, six,
when Encarta, you know,
an encyclopedia on CD-ROM became a thing that you could
have. Yeah.
Then you fast forward just a couple of years later.
And when was Wikipedia founded?
Well, you looked that up,
apparently claims that millennials are people born from
1981 to 1996.
Okay.
So then Wikipedia came along by the time I was in high
school, Wikipedia was a thing.
Was it perfectly trustworthy? Of course not.
Is it perfectly trustworthy today? Of course not.
But it's certainly,
it is certainly a better place to start than cracking open
a dusty tome. I will promise you that. Right.
And then, and then we lived through the,
the move from text to multimedia to video. Right.
So we've kind of video move was like,
kind of messy because people think of it now as these like
centralized things like there's, okay, there's YouTube,
there's, I guess, TikTok, there's Facebook with video,
there's Instagram with video, whatnot.
At the beginning of video on the internet,
it was just all these like random.
Sure. Yeah.
Like CNET with sure.
But even like, think about Justin TV before Twitch.
Yeah.
Like it was just a weird janky website that happened to
support live video. Like it was not,
it was not corporatized. It wasn't clean.
Well, it wasn't organized.
No, a lot of original video viewing grounds,
you would just download it.
You couldn't even watch it live.
It was just, you'd see all these thumbnails and you would
download the whole video.
Where did people even watch like pure ownage? You know?
Yeah. I think you had to download,
I think you had to download it.
And like the Numa Numa video.
Yeah. Yeah.
You just had to download that. I'm pretty sure.
Yep.
Like it was a very it's and people would share,
people would share stuff through just these like insane
email chain letters that you would just see,
like forwarded like a million times.
I never, that was.
I was not on that train.
That was an okay boomer thing for me for sure.
For sure. Okay.
Millennials are more socially responsible.
Well, the word more is important.
I think that,
I think that when it comes to mindless consumption,
I definitely noticed more of it with my, with my elders.
Yeah. So is the, is the more compared to.
Like, I love, I love my family.
Or Gen X.
But my boomer relatives,
the way that they just buy like the dumbest and just don't
understand why I don't want it.
I feel like that's a frustration that I share with a lot of
my peers.
Gen X is 1965 to 1980.
And I guess boomers before that.
Yeah. From 1945 to 1965.
In my experience from, yeah.
From my experience, boomers,
definitely a lot of mindless consumption.
Gen X, not so much.
Well, boomers had a lot.
Parents, not a lot of mindless consumption.
Yeah. Okay.
I mean, it also, I mean, but that's the thing is right.
These are generalizations and there's always going to be
individuals.
For sure. There's always going to be alternatives.
I know plenty of millennials that just mindlessly acquire.
Oh yeah.
Just acquire.
Yep.
The habits have changed.
I've watched certain friends of mine go through that
transition of like,
where do they get their source of happiness?
Okay. It's like sports or hanging out with their friends
every day or whatever in high school or whatever it is.
And then they get a job.
They stop hanging out with their friends.
They stop playing sports and now it's just like buying
things or like drinking alcohol or whatever.
Like the source of happiness shifts.
And for some people, it goes to retail.
Retail therapy. Yeah. I heard of that.
Millennials are job hoppers.
I mean, I can't say that's been a thing for me,
but I think in terms of generalizations,
that's probably a truer, a truer trend.
I know a lot of people that do.
But like,
let's look at the way that the landscape has changed in
terms of the workplace.
I mean, boomers enjoyed by far the best worker protections
of any generation.
As far as I can tell, we went from essentially, you know,
a free for all, right?
Like realistically there were, there were,
there were two enormous global conflicts in the,
in the 20 years leading up to like 25 years,
leading up to the baby boomer generation, scarcity was,
was a huge thing.
And you basically did whatever it took.
Forget, forget about, you know, protections.
There was, you know, also the great recession.
Yeah. Well, yeah.
Well, when did the, when did the new deal,
when did the new deal kick in?
Was that Roosevelt?
I can't remember.
So we're talking about this from a North American
perspective, obviously. Right.
But you look at the, at the,
at the trend towards like union employment in North America
and then away from it, as we're going into now,
just about the least union thing ever,
which is, would be the gig economy.
And gig economy has been sold as a positive thing,
but I, I patently reject it.
I mean, we had, we had a lot of conversations early on
about whether Linus Media Group would take on contractors,
for example, which is quite common in the,
in the production industry.
You would, you just hire contractors for your projects.
And then at the end of the project, you cut everyone loose.
And then you bring on a new set of contractors,
some repeating, some new for whatever your next project is.
And I was like, well, no,
we're never going to be structured that way.
We just need to make sure that our pipeline is consistent
enough that when we hire people, yeah,
when we hire people, we bring them on full time.
And they have the benefits of being employees.
But I would say that for many millennials,
it's probably not a choice to be a job hopper.
Like if you don't have, if you don't have the protections
and-
My brother used to drive truck for the, so in Vancouver,
there's like, some people refer to it as Hollywood North.
There's a lot of film done in Vancouver.
And my brother used to drive, he was a teamster.
So he'd drive trucks.
He would do whatever for the movies.
And he did very well for himself.
He did a really good job.
So it was fine, but it was a contract position.
There was a union,
but he was still a contractor under the union.
So he'd work a movie or a show and then it would end.
And then-
See you later.
Maybe he'd have another job wind up.
Maybe not.
Yeah.
Who knows?
Again, he did well, so people would request him.
So he did fine.
But like, it's a little sketchy, you know?
So yeah, I mean, I think, yeah,
you could probably make that generalization, but-
It's also-
I don't think it was a choice.
I think if we could just be lifers at one company
and have that actually work out fine,
then that would be great.
There's also been a trend of, yeah,
needing to hop for, for like-
Compensation increases.
Liveable income reasons.
Yeah, because you look at the way,
especially at the very low end,
the way that compensation has scaled
relative to living costs.
Yeah.
It's ridiculous.
So you got to hop trying to grab that.
It's also, Jaden pointed this out
and I think it's going to be off my screen.
So I don't think I'm gonna be able to quote it perfectly.
I'm sorry.
Oh no, it is.
He said, this is the age of the side gig.
So we went from one person being able to generate
comfortably healthy enough income for a family of four.
Yeah.
To two people needing each of them having full-time jobs
and side gigs to barely scrape by.
Like it, it's been pretty rough.
And then there's the next generalization,
our sense of entitlement.
I mean, I think that feeling like you're owed something
when you look at how things, you know, man.
How like impossible it is to buy real estate,
how impossible it is to own realistically anything.
Every time it trends,
like boomer senator or, you know, boomer, you know,
investment banker or whatever,
guesses how much houses cost and the values are like,
literally.
Yeah. Not, not, I mean, groceries, not so much.
Cause that's a question of inflation.
Whereas housing costs are not a function of inflation.
They're a function of the commodification.
The groceries one is you'll sometimes hear the question
asked of what cost of living is.
So they'll say like, oh,
you probably have to spend this much on your, on your rent,
this much on your food, whatever.
And the food number is always like, bro,
I would feed an average person for like a week,
not a month.
Like I have been, I, I am in a very,
I said, sorry, I sent Linus a picture.
I don't even think it was that long ago.
Cause I was buying this like package of chickens,
surprise, surprise.
And it's the exact same package of chicken from the exact
same store that I've been buying it from forever.
And I don't remember the year gap,
but I think it was like five or six years,
something like that.
And it was exactly double the price.
I that's crazy.
I am in a very privileged position where I don't have to
think too much about the cost of groceries.
And so for many years,
I didn't look that closely because I, you know,
especially before we had a bigger family,
it just wasn't that big of a deal.
As long as we weren't eating out too much, it was fine.
It didn't really have to think about it.
Right? Yeah.
Even I am noticing it's, it's, it's, it's, it's just,
it's mind blowing.
I saw a little, I saw a little pack of raspberries.
Yeah. They're out of season.
Sure.
I saw a little pack of raspberries about this big by this
tall, not even the deep one.
Okay. Pack of raspberries.
Yeah. The shallow, like tray.
It was over $10 at Nestor's market.
$10 dollars.
Yeah.
It was like 250 grams of raspberries.
I left save on with three grocery bags and it was like 160
bucks.
I was just like, oh man.
And like, yeah, they were fairly stacked full,
whatever, whatever.
But like, damn, I don't know.
The commodification of real estate does need to end.
And then the last stereotype millennials are praise hungry.
I mean.
Doesn't hurt.
Yeah. All right.
You know what? I'm okay.
I'm okay with being a millennial.
Yeah.
Give me my avocado toast.
It's actually pretty good.
I know. I never liked it.
You got to get tuna and cheese too though.
I like tuna and cheese on my avocado toast.
My, my partner made some for me and she had like red onions
on it along with the avocado and like all this other stuff.
Sounds expensive.
And I was, I was pretty sold.
It was actually like probably pretty expensive.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I went out for dinner.
That was really expensive.
Okay.
The biggest problem was it wasn't that good.
Like, look, I've got kids.
Okay.
I don't really, I don't really go out anywhere other than,
you know, stuff some food in your face
and feed your brood kind of places.
You know what I mean?
So we'll go, yeah, we'll hit the IHOP or whatever.
But we went to kind of a, like a mid scale place,
like a little bit nicer than IHOP, but not like, you know,
Gotham steak house or whatever, you know,
just not too crazy, but it's like a nice enough.
Yeah.
And still it's like a chain or whatever though.
And like, what was my entree?
Like $26 or something like that.
Yeah.
And it wasn't even big.
It was pasta.
It was pasta.
It's practically free.
Just fill the fucking plate.
It's like cheaping out on the rice.
Yeah. Mine was really expensive too.
It was like, I don't know.
I would, in that case,
I would have been more happy if I thought it was the better,
but it really wasn't that amazing.
Yeah.
I mean, we were talking about it while we were there too.
And it feels like the relative cost of groceries
versus restaurants.
I feel like groceries has gone up sharper
than restaurants have.
I don't know.
Because like, if I compared.
I just haven't eaten out enough.
So it's hard for me to know.
Well, cause I was thinking about when we went to dinner,
when I was at the grocery store
and I was comparing some of the costs of the things
that would have been included in my meal.
And I'm like, yeah, that was really expensive.
Also, they didn't really make a ton
considering someone had to cook all this
and it had to be served.
And we took up space in an establishment
and all this kind of stuff.
And there's not that many people in here.
So, you know, rent has gone.
Yep.
So like all of these different factors,
I was like, wow, I really, they didn't hose me here.
Like it just is really expensive.
Yeah.
I don't know.
What do we want to talk about next?
Olympics of esports?
Yeah.
Wait, did that phone with the game on it
ever make its way to us?
Dan, did you get it?
No.
Oh, WAN Show writer asked.
It was said there was a phone.
Wait, are you still here?
Oh, do you hang out during WAN Show now too,
but you just, you hide over there?
Oh, okay.
We'll introduce WAN Show writer
once the probation period is over,
but I'm assuming everything goes according to plan,
but I think it's time for us to talk about
the Olympics of esports.
Do you want to?
Not only that, the Olympics is getting esports.
The Olympics has declared their first ever
competitive esports competition.
And honestly, when I saw that title,
I was actually a little excited
because I was like, you know what?
It's taken them this long.
Except that the Olympics is a horrible,
horrible organization or the IIOC or whatever
is a horrible organization.
And you should have known immediately
as soon as they were involved,
that it was going to be terrible.
This is on you.
My naivete assumed that they were going to do
some like really informed things with this.
They freaking didn't at all.
The list of games to be included in this competition
lacks things that you might expect
like Counter-Strike or Dota or League of Legends
or Rocket League.
My initial reaction-
Wait, they don't have Rocket League?
Well, why would they, what?
They don't have Dota or League of Legends?
I have actually not looked into this.
Oh, no.
So they don't have actual competitive esports?
It's so insanely worse than you could possibly imagine.
Because I assumed it would be terrible
and therefore didn't look into it.
So you actually know more about this than I do.
My initial, because the way that I've always thought
they would do this is they would include things
that are not necessarily that relevant anymore.
Like maybe-
Wait.
Hold on.
Wait.
Hold on, we'll get there.
Hold on.
No, I can't.
Now you understand why this is a main topic.
Wait.
Yeah.
No.
Yeah.
No.
Okay, we'll skip my anecdotes.
We'll go right into it.
No, no, no.
Do your anecdotes.
I need to recover.
Okay.
So I have always imagined that they would do this
in a kind of weird way.
They would pick games
that aren't necessarily super popular anymore
because if you pick Dota or League-
StarCraft II.
They're going to rebalance it, right?
Sure.
And it's going to be a problem.
So pick like StarCraft I.
Oh, I see.
They're not patching that game anymore.
It's fixed.
Sure.
Right?
And there's a lot of skill involved,
very specific skill involved
that you could kind of measure
and people could actually be better at each other.
Maybe like, I don't know, maybe not CSGO
because CSGO is currently under development.
You know, like a pure skill shooter or something like that.
And like, there's problems with that.
Oh my goodness.
1v1 me Quake III, let's go.
Yeah, so like it would be interesting.
That's maybe a way to approach it, right?
Maybe they do go with the current generation stuff,
but then it becomes an issue.
Which one do you pick, Dota or League?
There's going to be a massive war about that.
And how do you balance this idea
that people are actively like,
it just becomes weird commercially.
What they decided to do
was the absolute worst possible option
out of everything that you could have possibly imagined.
I don't think that anyone could have guessed this.
What the fuck is Tic Tac Bo?
Well, it makes sense that you've never heard of it
because is there a list of all the things that they picked?
So there is somewhere, yeah.
Dan, do you want to jump on the Luke camera here maybe?
And I can play some Tic Tac Bo for the people
while we get this going.
I want to see the Olympics Esports page really quickly.
Enter the arena.
Yeah, here we go.
Olympic Esports.
Arena mode.
Okay, I'm joining arena mode.
What the devil phone is this?
My goodness, it's an absolute brick.
Okay, it doesn't matter.
Twitter post.
I just want to see the list of the categories.
So I pay to enter the arena,
but then I can win a prize.
If I win, it's plus 20.
If I lose, it's minus eight.
Oh my God, my slots for loot crates are currently full
and you will not be able to earn new crates.
You can still earn trophies and go, oh my God.
Okay.
Arena two, Lion City, searching for opponents.
All right.
I have strong wind resistance stats here.
Dan, are you having a hard time finding
the focus button over there?
It's locked.
It's locked?
Okay, cool.
Thanks, Dan.
Okay, it is my turn.
What do I do?
Oh my goodness, what did I just do?
I don't even know what just happened.
I don't know how to play this.
Oh, wait, wait, wait, wait.
What the, oh, what the crap?
So I'm almost out of time or something,
or like, do I let go or?
Hey, you got the top middle one.
Time for the other player to play this tic-tac-toe game
that is apparently in the Olympics.
What, it just goes exactly where you say?
What the crap?
Okay.
So it just, yeah, it just, it doesn't even drop off.
What the heck is the point of this?
Amazing.
I mean, I've played tic-tac-toe games
at like Castle Fun Park that are kind of like this.
Like, have you ever played like basketball tic-tac-toe?
No.
So you have to sink a basket.
I can imagine, yeah.
To hit the thing.
I can imagine what it is.
Right?
Um.
Apparently there's a little bit of drop off.
There's a little bit of drop off.
There's not much, because I am nailing this,
even though I've never touched this game before.
Well, maybe you're just an Olympian.
Oh, okay.
So you can convert someone else's thing to your thing.
Okay.
Okay.
So that's neat.
But then I guess I just need to do this.
Oh, oh, hello, buddy.
Okay.
So.
But then they still get to go?
Oh.
That's fun.
No.
Why on earth would they have shot that?
Future Olympian, Linus Sebastian.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Milk fantasy was defeated.
Okay.
So.
What a username.
So that's archery, but there are more sports, right?
The sports that they chose were archery.
No.
Baseball.
No.
Chess.
No.
Cycling.
Okay, chess, sure.
Fine.
Cycling, which is one of my favorite ones.
In a moment.
Dance.
Motorsport.
Sailing.
And taekwondo and tennis.
All of these are represented by video games,
as you would expect.
Some of them are.
Please tell me tennis is Wii Sports.
Honestly, when I first read this,
I assumed it was all going to be Wii Sports.
Tennis is apparently tennis clash.
Taekwondo is a game called Virtual Taekwondo.
Sailing is a game called Virtual Regatta.
Okay.
I don't know.
Yeah, Regatta is a sailing competition.
Okay, makes sense.
Motorsport is just.
Well, it doesn't make that much sense.
It's like boating culture sense.
So it doesn't make sense, but.
These two line up best for me out of all of them.
Or no, that's not true.
One of them later on does a little bit more.
Motorsport is just Gran Turismo.
Sure.
It's like, okay.
Dance is just dance.
Like, okay.
Okay.
Cycling is Zwift.
We'll get into why that's interesting in a second.
Chess is just chess.com.
Okay, all right.
Let's go.
Okay.
Okay, games.
No, how could they screw that up?
Except.
No.
Hold on.
And I, before people get into the battle
between chess apps, I like and use both of them.
Okay.
So relax.
But chess.com is the more corporate friendly,
lots of paid options version.
Lee Chess is the free for everyone all the time.
Everything is free.
It doesn't ask you to pay for anything.
Sure.
But at least it's a valid measure of your chess skill.
Totally.
Like that's where I'm coming at it from.
Because that is not archery.
And chess.com is legit.
And there's no pay to win on chess.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
That's all fine.
No major problem there.
Baseball is WBSC eBaseball Power Pro.
Sorry, I will say it properly.
WBSC eBaseball TM Power Pros.
And archery, as we've already seen.
I've never heard of any of this crap.
Is Tic Tac Bow.
Well, the reason why you haven't heard of Tic Tac Bow
is because it was literally just released.
It had, when I looked at it,
it had 100 downloads on the Android Play Store
and is not on iOS.
So it's not a game that people have really played before.
Well, I guess it's a level playing field then.
It also has-
For now, until they microtransaction the crap out of you.
So it also has some issues
because there's microtransactions
that apparently can actually give a competitive advantage.
Oh, good.
Rough.
So Olympics just becomes even more pay-to-win
than it already was.
It also looks like tennis clash has some rough-
At least the previous pay-to-win
was like which countries have the best, you know,
money to pay coaches and money to pay athletes
to just be athletes.
Or to buy equipment like special shoes or whatever else.
So now it's just, no, you actually just dump money
into a mobile game studio's account
and then you're an Olympian.
One of the ones, so chess, I think is interesting.
I think it's very interesting
that chess is in the Olympics now,
but that's kind of, I feel like chess out of all of these,
it's in its own little area.
Yeah, I-
There's no pay-to-win.
Yeah, chess is fine.
I don't know that we needed Olympic chess.
I think it could have been any,
I think chess could just do their own championship,
which they kind of do, which is totally fine.
But if the Olympics raises the profile of chess,
I think that's super cool.
Yeah, chess is kind of its own thing in this, in my opinion.
But I could almost see it being
like a completely separate event.
Like why have just chess?
Why-
It'd be kind of interesting
if they promoted like a different form of it,
like blitz or something like that.
Yeah, well, I mean, you've already got the Olympics,
you've already got the Paralympics,
why don't you just have like the board game Olympics then
at that point, right?
Like do it during the same period,
make it part of the event.
Like it doesn't have to be the Olympics.
Yeah, fair enough.
To be an IOC, you know, event.
Mind, yeah, you could have like go and chess.
Sure, why not?
Yeah, that'd be really interesting, mahjong.
Poker, like I don't care.
Yeah, screw it.
Cycling, I don't know a ton about Zwift,
but I just find this very funny.
I'm fairly certain that Zwift is just like
a stationary bike racing game.
So I'm pretty sure the e-sport of cycling-
Is just going to be cycling.
Is just cycling indoors in a stationary position.
Yeah.
Which like, that's great.
If you get your cardio by chilling at home on a bike,
ripping through whatever, fine.
Maybe you're sketched out about like biking around
in the rain if you live somewhere that's really rainy
or whatever else, because you don't want to like fall.
I don't know, whatever, it sounds good.
But did we need cycling but stationary
as an Olympic sport?
I don't know.
Doesn't seem like it to me.
Like there's, I see different categories for this, right?
So chess is in its own kind of thing,
and I agree with what Linus said.
Maybe it could be there, but if it's there,
I feel like we should have an assortment of those games,
like mahjong, go, all this other kind of stuff.
But then there's archery and baseball
and what is it, taekwondo,
or not necessarily taekwondo, archery, baseball, and tennis,
where they're just like these micro transaction
ad-based pay-to-win games, which are like clearly junk.
Like why is this a thing?
And then there's the two-
What do you mean junk?
I won that archery match.
I apologize, future Olympian Linus Sebastian.
Then there's the two,
like these are major title video games games,
which is Grand Prismo for motor sports,
and Just Dance for dance,
which is like, okay, that's interesting.
I mean, if you're gonna go full meme,
like make it DDR then, let's go.
Honestly, yeah, in my opinion.
I have watched people play DDR with fascination.
Pretty cool.
Cause it's amazing.
Yeah, yeah, I think compared to Just Dance,
DDR would actually be a much more
interesting spectator experience.
Especially if it was like, almost like a gymnastics based,
you know how they have to like pick what moves
they're gonna try to do beforehand?
So, and DDR, you could be like-
Oh, so it's down to the execution.
I'm gonna do like a multi-pad.
So I'm gonna like dance across these two pads
at the same time, like try different difficulty rating.
And then you have like kind of,
I think you could have like a touch of subjectivity,
or not subjectivity, but like you could have
kind of like what they do in figure skating,
where there are points assigned
to the difficulty of the routine.
Exactly, yeah.
So if you have to switch pads six times
that has this modifier or whatever else,
yeah, you could totally build a system for that.
That would be kind of awesome.
There is a hundred percent a way
that you could do Olympic dance that I would,
Olympic dance is an e-sport.
But Just Dance?
That I think would be interesting.
Come on!
Probably not.
I mean, the tracking's not even accurate enough.
At least with DDR, there is a clear,
there's a precision to it.
You know, there's a way to measure objectively
how close to the desired result the participant got.
You know?
Yeah.
There are people who are at master level of DDR
that I don't care if you've never seen DDR before.
I don't care if you don't care about dancing games.
I don't care if you don't care about rhythm games
or whatever, it is genuinely fascinating
to watch them just like rip
on like these insanely high difficulty songs
or in very difficult ways or whatever else.
Yeah, and they always do that thing
where they put their arms behind them on the bar.
Like if I genuinely tried to do what this person
is probably gonna do once we get into more difficult parts,
my legs are gonna twist up and I'm gonna fall over.
Like there's no, I'm never gonna get this done.
I'm not built for that.
I couldn't even touch any of this already.
And you're telling me this is the easy part?
Oh, are they doing two pads?
Yeah.
Yeah, like what the?
Buddy's on two pads.
Two pads, let's go.
Like that's insane.
And then having like a competition of this.
Sure, yeah, I'm down.
Where people are trying more difficult,
more difficult things like, yeah, absolutely.
So yeah, there's the jank pay to win games.
Then there's the like major titles that,
I also don't think Grand Turismo
should have been the racing one.
Grand Turismo doesn't need to be the one.
There are extremely high level racing sim games.
Sim grade games.
I think Grand Turismo is more sim like, I get it.
But it's not as sim-y as something like a Project Cars
or something like a.
So like, it being Grand Turismo makes me ask like,
what was the goal?
Because it's kind of like F1.
It's almost in the, yes, it's leaning more sim-y,
but it's in the middle.
It's not arcade-y and it's not sim-y.
Yeah, like you could have gone with like Mario Kart
and just had it be like totally arcade-y.
Oh, iRacing, sorry, not Project Cars, iRacing.
That's the one I meant.
Sorry, I'm not into the racing game scene.
You could have gone iRacing.
You could have gone Mario Kart.
They went not really in between, but they went like here.
Like any one of those three.
F1, iRacing, Assetto Corsa.
Sure.
Sure, fine.
I don't think I would have blinked at any one of those.
Nope. Yeah.
But Grand Turismo?
Little weird.
Like, why don't you just go Forza at that point?
Why don't you just, you know what?
Why don't you do just like Cruise in USA?
I'd be way more interested to watch
a Cruise in USA championship.
That'd be kind of sick.
Ridge Racer?
So, and then there's cycling where it's like literally,
it's quite literally just cycling.
It's this like,
I hope the person who wins whatever equivalent distance
of race in actual, just real,
actually on a bike outside, whatever cycling.
Just gets two medals for it.
Just also wins the Zwift one.
I really hope that happens.
That'd be very funny.
Yeah, Smash.
Where's Smash?
Again, this is no disrespect for people who race Zwift.
And I know that there's people that do it actually
quite seriously.
That's cool.
I'm not down on that.
The only thing that confuses me is that it's so similar.
So like what's almost,
what's the point in it being an esport, you know?
And then there's the last category,
which I haven't looked into either of these,
but Virtual Regatta and Virtual Taekwondo.
They have very obviously similar names.
They seem to be in kind of their own category.
Virtual Regatta.
It's very weird.
Okay.
Olympic Esports licensed.
Virtual Regatta offshore?
At least it's on the Play Store and the App Store.
In short, what am I looking at here?
What is this?
This is on Instagram.
Okay, so Virtual Regatta.
It looks very old.
I guess it is a mobile game.
It's a mobile game.
Yeah.
Okay, so.
You can change your sales.
Okay.
Let's go.
It's time to buy some sales.
Gamer time, microtransactions, let's go.
Okay, I can't even tell what I'm supposed to be looking at.
I don't know that it's microtransactions
Do you have any actual gameplay footage, you butt heads?
Oh man, they want us to click on,
Flippink Chat wants us to click on the Taekwondo.
It's like Kinect simulators, they say.
Kinect simulators?
You know, like Xbox Kinect?
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Okay, Virtual Taekwondo.
Invitational event, wait, what?
You need a console?
It's an indie console.
It's an indie console?
Taekwondo is in Singapore.
Okay, I see.
And the Olympics is gonna be in Singapore.
Oh, I see.
It's an indie console that was Kickstarted
and is now available.
Okay, okay, okay.
So this is a whole rabbit hole then.
The company that makes Virtual Taekwondo
has this indie console that was Kickstarted,
but you can't actually get it.
That has some kind of, okay,
where I've got some footage here
and it's the same company
that makes that stupid Tic Tac Bo game.
So what am I looking at here?
Is this it?
Are you sure?
First Virtual Taekwondo International Championship 2020.
That's 2020, I don't think that's it.
This says instruction.
I don't think this is it.
What the heck am I looking at here?
I don't think the right thing.
Where's Virtual Taekwondo?
Olympics, Taekwondo.
Okay, I gotta click the thing.
But yeah, it's the same Singapore-based company
and then the Olympics are gonna be
in like Singapore or something.
So it's a whole thing.
All right, I'm on their site now.
I'm on their site.
Follow the glory of Virtual Taekwondo.
Okay, watch now.
What am I looking at here?
Guys, this is live.
This is live.
We're reacting.
If we do what we can.
Gymnasts.
What does this have to do with anything?
No, no, no.
We're not, oh, I don't need a,
no, I don't need an Olympics strike.
Their player took a long time to load.
We should try to sell, sell.
Yeah, they should use Floatplane.
Yeah.
What is their site?
What am I even looking at?
Find out more.
I'm trying to find out more, you numpties.
I think it just scrolls you down.
How to follow, yeah, like what is this?
Stay updated?
No, I want, I don't wanna stay.
I wanna update now.
What is it?
What am I looking at here?
Okay.
I mean, that kick looks pretty good,
but like, what is this?
I'm so confused right now.
Okay, I give up.
Let's do some sponsor spots.
Yeah.
Sure.
All right.
You gotta give me a second here.
The show is brought to you today by.
Your last discussion question is funny.
We didn't get to it, but it's funny.
Oh, we can get to it after.
Let's do it.
We'll do it after.
The show is brought today by Thoram.
Thoram hand makes wedding bands and rings
from rare and unique materials.
They work with everything from whiskey barrels,
to antlers, to Damascus steel,
to World War II rifle stocks, and even dinosaur.
I can't get this thing out of the bag.
Do you want me to get it?
Thank you.
The Meteosaur is made out of black tungsten carbide,
meteorite, and real T-Rex bones.
So this 40, sorry, 4 billion year old meteorite
and a 65 million year old dino bone are proof
that good things take time,
but great things take a little longer.
You can get a ring size kit on their website
to make your life easier when it comes to figuring out
what ring size fits you best.
And every ring ships within one business day
and comes with a free Thoram silicone activity band
and a beautiful wooden box
that Luke will eventually get open.
With over 10 years of experience
and over 5,000 happy customers,
Thoram is there for you,
whether you need a wedding band
or just a cool looking ring.
So what are you waiting for?
Head over to the link in the description below
and get 20% off with code WAN.
He's got this.
He has the strength.
He has the power, power and strength.
Luke Lefreniere, here it is.
You can't see anything anyway,
but Thoram insists that we open up the box on camera.
Wow, it's heavy.
There's a ring in this little bag.
That's the activity band.
Oh, that makes sense.
Wow, that's quite the hefty thing.
It's actually kind of cool.
Okay, anyway, the point is,
the show is also brought to you by The Ridge.
Minimalist yet functional,
The Ridge Wallet is your next everyday carry.
Ridge Wallets can hold up to 12 cards
and still have room for cash
with either a money clip or an elastic band.
And if you worry about the quality of their products,
you are silly because they use
only the highest grade materials.
Okay, that's not in the talking points.
They use only the highest grade materials
and offer a lifetime warranty
so you can enjoy peace of mind.
The Ridge doesn't just make wallets.
Their key case is a favorite of ours over here at LMG.
It's made with the same materials as their wallet
and keeps all your keys secure in a small profile.
No more jingle jangle in your pockets.
And again, no need to worry.
The key cases also come with a lifetime warranty.
So follow the link in the description
and check out what The Ridge has to offer.
You can even get 10% off your entire purchase
and free worldwide shipping by using code WAN at checkout.
Finally, the show is brought to you by Zoho One.
Zoho One makes running your business easier
by integrating CRM systems with other business applications
such as accounting, marketing software, HR or communication.
Read it slowly for graphics.
Their easy to use interface keeps tools organized
so you don't need to be a technical expert.
You can send out purchase orders,
create marketing campaigns
and manage shift scheduling all in a few clicks.
Their CX dashboard helps you identify
where you need to improve your customer experience
and they've got numbers, charts, pies and funnels.
Wow, look at that.
Read slowly for graphics.
You can see the data all in a glance
and what the devil am I looking at right now?
Are you working on the beach?
No problem.
Their mobile app makes your dreams come true.
You can easily run your business anywhere.
This has to be Dennis.
I bet Dennis was involved.
So check out Zoho One using the link down below
and get a free 30 day trial with no credit card required.
I'm hijacking this back.
I'm taking my camera view back.
Yes, it was Dennis.
All right, well that makes perfect sense.
Oh man.
Oh, that was a big one.
Man, okay, what was our second discussion question?
Oh my God, that's not a good discussion question.
I disagree with both of you.
It's not a question, it's just a statement
but it's very funny.
The discussion question is,
Skyrim and the Olympics win.
I wanna see the bronze medalist clip through the podium.
That's great, that's great.
It's pretty good.
But yeah, there's a lot of speculation
that a lot of the titles were chosen on the basis
of their close relationship to established governing bodies.
So developers in Singapore that had close relationships
with the governing body in Singapore.
I think it's pretty clear this is all corrupt as fuck
and we should reject it, everything but the chess one.
Yeah, cause like chess.com is fine.
All right.
Oh, we should do a couple of merch messages.
If you guys are wondering, the way to interact
with the show is not through Twitch bits,
not through super chats over on YouTube,
it's through merch messages and we've actually got,
oh, we've got a crap ton of stuff to announce
for the store today, don't we?
Those of you who have been paying very close attention
will have probably already noticed
our big product launch of the week.
Hey Dan, I think I need to put you back on the camera.
He's like, I'm paying attention, I'm paying attention.
So the way to send a merch message,
which means that you're not just throwing money
into the ether, you will also get an item in the mail
is to go on lttstore.com and in the checkout,
there's a place to leave a merch message.
And one of our new items for this week,
ah, the reason I'm digging this out
is because I have a full one.
Ah, okay.
So here's my loadout for the tech pouch.
It's a pouch and you fill it up with tech or toiletries
or tools or realistically anything else
that you could possibly want to fill it with.
So you wanna have a look at my tech pouch?
Yeah, you got it.
Can I open up my tech pouch for you?
You can take everything out.
Oh my, okay.
Feel free to unload it, let's go.
You might wanna move your water bottle a little bit.
Poor Dan is, you know, got a situation here.
Action can, you want it down here?
Is that better?
Yeah, I'm sure, yeah, whatever.
So you've got, I don't know what this is.
A dock or something?
That's an external USB.
Drive, just a drive?
Yeah, USB SSD.
Okay, cool.
Yeah, sometimes I'll have to copy
like very large game libraries or whatever else and it's.
I still have my angel bird.
Yeah, yeah, so that one's a higher capacity,
it's like four terabytes.
Probably a lot bigger, yeah.
He's got a,
Compensating.
A, he's got a C, a three.
I have a much bigger,
I have a much bigger X than Luke
and X is external SSD.
Cause it sure isn't anything else.
These I believe have been accessible to you for many years.
I don't think these are new at all.
Nope, they're not new.
They're just headphone adapter things.
They're in my thing, yeah, yeah.
If you need to go four pole to dual three pole,
just dump them on the table, dump them on the table.
Let's go, let's go.
What's in my tech pouch?
C to C, lightning.
Yep, thunderbolt.
Thunderbolt.
Yep, very close though.
Oh, here it is.
Good job.
There's the angel bird.
I also have my angel bird.
I never use it.
It just has like some crap on it
that I might need once in a while.
They're so cool though.
Yeah, I know.
I actually really like them.
Okay, so this is an expandability thing.
Sexy dongle.
Yeah.
Yeah, HDMI.
Everything you could need for a laptop
to make it less annoying to use as a laptop.
Jerry rig everything nice.
Oh yeah.
Oh yeah.
I even misspoke and called it a nice,
but I'm down with that.
It's pretty nice.
LTT screwdriver.
Of course.
Why wouldn't I?
So the tools you need all the time for everything.
My needle nose pliers and my side cutters would be in there,
but I left them at XQC's house.
So I asked my assistant to get me some more.
That makes sense.
Sorry?
He's still yours.
That's hilarious.
He apparently took Dan's.
I love it.
You've got a like cap for a controller.
Yeah.
Like a thumbstick cap.
That was just garbage that was in my bag
that I accidentally threw into the tech pouch.
So there's no reason for me to carry that around.
I mean, it could be useful.
That's a mic.
If someone has like a grody thumbstick
and you just cover it.
That's a lavalier mic holder.
That makes sense.
It's routed on the back.
It's already printed.
There's no lines on your shirt
less noticeable when you're wearing a lav mic.
So it's just the kind of thing I would have to carry around
that no one else would.
Tons more random cables.
What the heck?
Yeah, that's like an everything cable.
It can be like adapted.
So you can, yeah, see?
Oh, I see.
Yeah, pretty cool, right?
So micro B for my-
That's the same prong thing that Logitech uses.
That's because it's for the Logitech mouse
that is in there.
It just happens to have that adapter on it.
Is my mouse not in there?
Where's the mouse?
Someone take my mouse.
Nope.
Here's some lavalier tape.
Yep, yep, yep.
That's the medical tape that I use.
There's an outside zipper.
It uses the same YKK waterproof TM.
I consider them water resistant,
but they call them waterproof.
So the same YKK water resistant zippers
that you would find on our backpack.
The same reprieve recycled water bottle material.
That's a two and a half gig network card, by the way,
that you're holding.
Yeah, is this for the framework?
Yeah.
Yeah, yeah.
So it's, I think just USB-C to the network.
And so you could use this on anything really,
but it's made for the framework laptops.
It slots in nicely.
Yeah, it's pretty cool.
That's cool to have.
Cause you could use it for your actual laptop
or anything else really.
Did someone steal my M.2 SSD?
That's just an external audio, like sound card.
This thing is actually sweet.
Cause it just seems to work on everything.
Yeah.
I've used this.
Yeah, yeah.
And it's just, yeah, USB to just 3.5.
It literally seems to work with everything.
Some of my tools aren't in there.
My pin removal tool is not in there.
Oh, oh, they are in there.
Oh, who put those in there?
Oh, okay.
That's great.
You can take all those out.
They were playing around with my stuff
a little bit for the shoot,
but so I have like jeweler screwdrivers
and then I have like an ATX pin removal tool,
molex pin removal tool.
Some spare like water cooling fittings.
Yeah, every once in a while,
you never know if you're going to need a fitting
or whatever else, but yeah.
Do you want to just kind of spread it for me?
Not that part.
Okay, that's very awkward.
Okay, I want to see like the little pockets on the outsides.
The.
Oh, oh, like this?
No, no.
Oh, you mean this?
Yeah, on the outside edges.
Yeah, or the inside of the outside.
I don't know how well that's going to show.
There's, okay, so there's a pouch here.
Yeah, the elastic ones that are on the orange.
Here.
There you go, pockets.
Oh.
So there's lots of pockets.
Oh, there's an SSD in there.
Now you never know when you're going to need an SSD.
That actually comes up a lot for me,
but if you just give them a bit of a better angle
so they can, there we go.
So there's like three pouches back here.
And then the other side has something similar.
Pen holder.
Pencil or pen holders there.
And then on this side, there's like just a bunch of loops.
Yeah.
Brother.
So we, we have some loops.
We did a lot of internal polling,
finding out what people wanted to be able
to carry around with them.
It fits perfectly in the bottom of the backpack,
obviously with a water bottle next to it.
Yeah, it's okay.
We're back to the main camera now.
I think you've made your point, but yeah,
it's a tech pouch, really high quality materials,
and it's on lttstore.com.
And does it, does it fit in a specific spot in the backpack?
Yeah, it just sits at the very bottom
of the main bag of holding.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
We've got a couple other LTT store things to discuss,
but I-
Do you be asking for dimensions of the pouch?
Is that not just on the store?
I hope it is.
Is it not?
Okay.
We should get that updated for you all.
Oh man.
I would look forward to that being
in the product information in the future.
Yeah.
Yeah, that'll be, that'll be there very soon.
D by 900 D?
I don't know what that means.
Man, what were the other things I was supposed to say
about the store?
Dan, do you remember?
Stickers.
Oh yeah.
Stickers.
Where are the stickers?
Stickers.
Oh, they're right here.
Yeah.
Oh, Dan, back to the camera.
We have a new 2023 sticker pack.
So it's in the bonus bin, which are the free items
that you guys can get on lttstore.com with your order.
So we now have new stickers.
That one's really fun.
Let's take that one for last.
Let's do all the other ones first.
No one gets to see it.
We've got Soon TM.
Hold it next to your face.
I'm holding it next to Luke's face.
Hey, there we go.
Soon TM.
Oh, oh, we got the trust me bro guarantee.
Yeah.
Sarah was like, really?
Really?
I don't need to be that in focus.
Yeah, he doesn't need to be in focus.
Just make the stickers in focus.
Yeah, yeah, we're good.
We're good.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Yeah, yeah, we're good.
Hold on, hold on.
You had it there for a second.
Oh boy.
Can he do it?
Oh, it's locked on your face, Luke.
It's locked on your face.
Why do you keep putting it over there?
Okay, all right.
Trust me, bro guarantee.
There we go.
We've got LTT store dot, is it calm?
Is it come?
No one knows.
Can't read it.
This is the lab?
Yeah.
That's a cool reflectively rainbow.
Sarah pushed hard for that design.
She really likes it.
Hey.
Hey, float plane sticker.
I think it's a little bit of an angle.
Yeah, nice.
What else you got?
A little retro computer.
Cool little CRT.
Yeah, old school computer.
Oh, that's a bit of a throwback.
Fucking egg shell, let's go.
That's sweet.
All the memes from this year.
Hard takes, a little WAN show shout out for us.
Yeah, yeah.
Very nice.
It's full of WAN show shout outs.
And the generic.
Classic.
Did you just call that the generic?
What would you call it?
LTT circle logo, obviously.
Generic LTT circle logo.
This is the best one though.
This was brilliant.
This was Sarah's idea.
I can't take any credit for it.
It's blank.
That's actually pretty sweet.
So it's a window, like an explorer window.
And it's a tech tip.
So you can write any tech tip you want.
Yeah, so cool, right?
And based on the material,
I don't want to say that you could.
I think you can erase it.
You might be able to erase it, yeah.
So you could update your tech tip.
That's actually pretty sweet, that's a good idea.
Those are cool, those are all good.
The last big update is,
we finally have some bloody printed shirts in stock.
Let's go.
Screwdriver T-shirt is back.
Case T-shirt is back.
The one I'm wearing today,
the display panel layers shirt is back.
And so is the headphone shirt.
There you go.
So we finally, finally have some shirts back in stock.
By the way, if you were signed up to get a notification
when these came back in stock
and you got like seven notifications,
let support know because we had an issue with that.
So we actually turned off our back in stock notifications
while we were trying to solve it.
We're just gonna have to make our own thing eventually.
Really?
Probably.
Why can't Shopify plugins not just work?
Some of them do.
I don't feel like I'm asking for that much.
Some of them do.
All right, well, at any rate.
But we've had like other problems with it
and it's just getting kind of frustrating at this point.
It's not like super high on the list,
but I feel like someday it's gonna just, yeah.
All right, well hit me with a couple.
Apparently Conrad's already fixed it, which is good.
Okay.
Hit me with a couple of merch messages, Dan,
and then we'll get into some more topics
and then we'll do some more merch messages.
Maybe we'll get some dinner, do WAN show after hours.
No, probably not.
I think we could wrap this up.
Really?
Now we're doing it.
Yeah.
If we're gonna be here for like the next 10 hours then.
Yeah, 24 hour WAN show WAN.
Yeah.
That's why you have a producer.
Someone just beat Ludwig's record,
his like subathon record.
And I was thinking we should just do
a like subathon WAN show where we just swap the hosts out
and the WAN show just keeps going forever.
The WAN show never sleeps.
The WAN show never stops.
I got a question for you.
If I buy you dinner,
did you technically buy yourself dinner?
If you expense it, then yes.
Then yes.
All right, I got one here from Griffin.
Hey guys, starting a new IT job next week
and I thought the screwdriver
would be the perfect gift to myself.
Any comment on why the tech pouch looks eerily similar
to the Peak Design one?
Honestly, we started from a very different place.
I had never seen the Peak Design one
until I saw people mention it in the chat before the show.
So I was like, oh, I will go look at this.
A lot of times like there's people
that completely unrelated like pre-internet,
they'll invent the same thing at the same time,
different parts of the world.
Calculus?
I mean, I have no doubt that our designers
probably looked at other options on the market.
What is different about this one
is that the layout of the inside
is very much tailored to what our team requested.
So we made sure that the, so here, hold on one sec.
And a lot of it's like the materials involved.
Like it's the reprieve fabric again.
So it's made from water bottles.
I've always appreciated personally.
So here's a bit of feedback
that I gave them early on in the process.
I was like, these pouches need to be able to hold
like a gaming mouse, not just a magic mouse.
That was something that we observed
from some of the samples that we did bring in
where I was like, this is stupid.
Like I can't even put a mouse in this thing.
How am I supposed to operate without a mouse?
Also, if you have an LCD backpack,
it like perfectly visually matches,
which I think is cool.
I like the orange.
I haven't looked at the Peak one.
I have no idea if they have like highly visible fabric.
Probably good.
I've heard very, very good things about their stuff.
Everyone that I know that has bought Peak Design stuff
is very happy with it.
Yeah, I mean, that's the thing, right?
Is LTT store is not,
I don't see us as like a bitter rival with anyone.
You know, like just because we have a screwdriver,
does that make us a Milwaukee competitor?
Yeah.
Like realistically, no, it's not our primary business.
It's, you know, I think that we take
a very different approach to merch.
You know, I don't like calling it merch
because I think their products, you know,
I don't think they're just merch.
I don't think we just silkscreen our logo on things, but.
I don't think people, like,
I think with some creators' merch,
the driving idea behind buying their merch
is just supporting the creator.
I think with our stuff, which it also sucks to call merch,
is you're buying good stuff.
Yeah, and by the way, we're building a lab.
Yeah.
Let's go.
It also supports the like vision and direction
of the company and all that kind of stuff.
But you're buying the stuff
because it's actually just really good stuff.
We shipped out the screwdriver
and had like tool reviewers review it
and it reviewed really well
because we're trying to make really good stuff.
Yeah.
Not because we're just trying to make random merch.
We could have, man,
we could have made a screwdriver a lot faster.
The shirts are like great.
I love our shirts.
And they went through a lot of revision
to get to a point where they're good and yada, yada, yada.
Like it's not just like puked out merch
to in order to support a creator,
which I'm not even dogging on.
It's just not, it wasn't our approach.
That's all.
I have bought merch from creators
with the sole idea of it supporting the creator.
Yep.
And I'm totally fine with that.
And most of the shirts didn't survive a super long time,
but like I was really doing it to support the creator.
Yeah, my burnt face man hoodie lasted pretty okay
until I lost it.
So I don't know how long it would have lasted.
Yeah, yeah.
Yeah.
Okay.
Do two more and then get back to that.
Next up is from Mike.
Love this tech purse.
Was there any follow-up to the uncensored WAN show?
Exploded monetization or anything?
Excited to hit five hours on WAN show tonight?
No, no.
Monetization actually stayed active
even though we like cussed a bunch and all that.
I was pretty surprised.
Me too.
I thought it was going to get age gated or something,
but it just went.
That was the one.
That was the one where I was surprised that it was live.
And I got caught totally off guard.
Was that it?
Yeah, because I just sat there for so long
at the beginning thinking,
oh, it couldn't possibly have started yet.
I realized that the show was started.
Yeah, I remember it was that one.
Yeah, I remember because I had intended
to start like swearing a bunch
right the second the show started,
because I know that in the first little bit,
it matters more.
And so some people had commented,
he probably waited because of what?
No, I waited because my dashboard
usually has a 10 to 20 to even 30 second delay
before it actually goes live.
But it went like immediately that time
and I didn't realize.
Okay, last one for this section is from Anthony.
Linus, what is your biggest regret
as far as decisions you've made for LMG?
These are spicy.
My goodness.
Biggest regret?
Uh, not taking the offer.
No, no, no, I don't regret that actually.
I'm worried I would.
Did I ever say how much the offer was?
No, no.
Oh, well, it wasn't six figures
and it wasn't seven
and it sure as hell wasn't five or under.
Yeah, there's a lot.
It wasn't eight either.
So that should give you some idea.
Yeah.
I have not regretted it for a moment.
I think that the timing was perfect
to take an offer.
We were having an absolutely,
we were in the midst of an explosive year of growth.
It was pre-income from backpack and screwdriver.
Yes, but we left the door open to kind of say,
hey, here's how we're projecting that's gonna go.
And we had had some discussions
about how that offer might change
if they crushed it the way that we thought they could.
Got it.
And so knowing that we were heading into a period,
I think 2023, 2024 are going to be reinvestment periods.
So if we were looking for an exit,
2022 was the year to do it
because we were hockey sticking, like absolute crazy,
lots of cool stuff on the roadmap,
but the costs for that cool stuff
hadn't started to hit us yet.
Like building out the lab has been phenomenally expensive.
Honestly, like if you bought a screwdriver,
if you bought a backpack,
if you sent to any kind of merch message,
if you, anything, anything,
yeah, if you subscribe on Floatplane,
you're a huge part of why this vision is happening
because, well, because we couldn't do it otherwise,
it's that simple, right?
So if we wanted to take an offer,
that would have been the time to do it,
knowing that we were gonna be heading into a couple of years
that we're not going to see profits grow,
maybe even shrink.
Right now, we are down year over year
in terms of profitability.
Don't worry, we're fine.
Everything is fine.
We're still profitable,
but we're down compared to last year.
And that's even before factoring
in screwdriver and backpack, right?
And so because the kinds of companies
that acquire pieces and build portfolios
are looking not just at some multiple of your EBITDA,
it's what kind of multiple you get, right?
The bigger, the growth they expect,
the bigger multiple you might get
in terms of the valuation of your company.
So EBITDA would be like your earnings before taxes,
something, something, but basically like your net income
or your net profit, whatever it is.
So pretty much how much money you made.
So they will basically go, okay, that amount,
let's say times three or times five or times nine
or whatever it is,
is how much we're gonna offer for your company
because we will expect that it will continue to make money
and we will make that money back on our investment
over some period of time.
And the more your growth looks explosive,
the higher that offer because you could basically argue,
well, yeah, sure, you could give me five X EBITDA today,
but the earnings you're gonna get
in this next four or five years here
is gonna be so much more because we're growing like this.
So the time to take it was 2022
and the not time to take it is 2023, 2024
because I knew that that wasn't gonna keep happening
the way that it was.
Obviously, if all goes according to plan,
I'm gonna look back at the 2022 offer and I'm gonna say,
well, I would have been an idiot to take that
because my vision was great
and we're worth twice as much or three times as much,
but I know there's gonna be a lull here.
So I'm in it to win it.
And even if that doesn't happen,
there's times that I've thought, should I have, right?
Like, should I have taken the bag and run,
taken the ball and gone home.
And to your credit, if you were just financially motivated,
I mean, you said the amount of figures, right?
I did, basically.
You would have been chillaxing to the end of days.
All cool.
Yeah.
With some b-ball outside of the school or whatever.
Yeah, something like that, yeah.
So like, clearly it's not just financial motivation.
I've got unfinished business.
I think that's a big part of it.
I don't think that the team would have been happy.
There's a lot that we could unpack.
I don't think we're gonna talk in detail
about this right now. There's a lot
of different angles, yeah, yeah.
Yeah.
But the bottom line is that would have been
the time to take it.
I forget what the question was.
What's your biggest regret?
Oh yeah.
I jokingly pointed that out.
Yeah, so.
That was obviously me.
No, I have not regretted it.
It's hard for seeing where we came from
and where we are today.
How on earth can I possibly say regret about any of it?
Part of my, I guess we might get into this later,
but I've been reorganizing and getting rid
of a bunch of old stuff and whatnot.
And I was finding some old hard drives
that I had stashed away and making sure
that it had all the data off them onto my NAS.
And basically in every case I did,
but I was still sorting through old stuff.
And I found my like archived forum folder.
Oh.
And I found a bunch of like,
like when my Twitter account passed 1,337 followers,
I have like a screenshot of when it got exactly then.
I have a bunch of the screenshots
from the V Bulletin days of the forum.
Nice.
I have the screenshot from when wind speed
and I were dealing with a certain server host
that I'm not going to point out
because we requested an IP KVM
and they hooked it up to someone else's server
and then gave us the access to it.
So we had full direct control over someone else's server
and I screenshot the communication log of wind speed
and I'd be like, guys, you need to take this away from us.
What are you doing?
I've had a bunch of old stuff like that.
That was, that was quite the memory lane to go down.
The old original design of the forum
when it finally came over to IPS,
like all this other kind of stuff.
It was very cool.
Oh, screenshots from razors, like discord competitor.
Oh, comms.
Yeah.
Good old comms.
Yeah. There's a, it's been, yeah.
It's been a ride.
It's been a ride.
You know what? Okay.
I don't think we would have done the sponsored video
on the Facebook portal.
Or was it something?
I don't know.
There was some like, I don't know.
Is Facebook even the worst of the tech giants?
They're all just sort of terrible.
There's a lot of stuff where-
The question is biggest regret.
I could easily come up with regrets.
Yeah.
But for it to single something out and go biggest regret.
That's tough.
And it's-
That's tough.
Regrets are a hard thing too, because like, yes.
Maybe not doing that thing would have been better.
Yeah. It implies you would have done it differently.
Exactly.
With all the information that I have now,
would I do that differently?
Like, yeah, but also it clearly didn't hurt us that much.
So maybe not.
It's not a super applicable real question
because you didn't have all that information.
So like what?
And even the times that we have financially engaged
with Facebook, we haven't done anything
that breaches our internal ethics guidelines.
Like we never said anything, or external ones,
we never said anything we didn't believe.
We specifically in the, I think it was the quest one,
we did a sponsored video.
We specifically told Facebook,
look, we are simply not doing this
if we can't address the requirement of a Facebook account
and like these things, we're not gonna gloss over these.
And we held the line, we drew our line in the sand.
And if companies are okay with that line,
then like who cares?
Yeah, then from my point of view,
I'm sitting here going, okay,
so you wanna basically pay me to make the video
I would have made anyway?
Like, okay.
Yeah, yeah.
I've done a lot of those over the years.
Sure.
A really good example of that was the Micron factory tour.
Like, silly Micron.
I would have come here regardless.
Yeah, they didn't have to give me any money,
but I still, I had the business team.
And I was like, no, no, grind them, grind them.
Put the screws to them.
Cause like, I'm running a business here, right?
I can't.
You have to do that kind of stuff.
I can't pay Luke and Dan in a great experience
that I had in Idaho, right?
Let me, can I?
I mean, there's been some times,
you know what else I found on that server?
Uh oh, were there pay stubs?
Yeah.
Oh no.
I don't take responsibility for the NCIX ones.
That was not my fault.
In November, before we broke off.
Okay, not by problem.
So yeah, it's NCIX days.
I have an email sent to you,
because as much as it was NCIX, you were my boss.
But I have an email sent to Linus with an invoice
and a request of like, could this be paid relatively soon?
Because I haven't been paid in two and a half months.
And I need money.
And I looked at the invoice and I remembered
that I used to get paid $5 per LTT video.
That is not my fault, actually though.
And I fed him, that was out of pocket.
That invoice was genuinely hilarious to like read over.
And I would like to make another point.
Has a paycheck from Linus Media Group Incorporated
ever been late?
No.
Okay.
And I have-
Dan, late paychecks?
Never, never, never.
You can say if they've been late.
Well, I don't get paychecks, so you know.
Well, okay, yeah, we do direct deposit now.
We used to do paychecks.
We did paychecks for a shockingly long time.
I didn't want to give it up,
because it like cost like a dollar more or something.
That's so funny.
I remember just being like, come on.
Oh no.
But yeah, it was five bucks per LTT.
And if I-
Remember, that's Canadian rubles too.
Yeah.
It was, I don't know.
It's funny now.
It wasn't that funny then.
Yeah, I remember there was one time
that Linus called me, I'm sure you remember this,
telling me that like they were gonna have to do
something different with the taxes that were on my thing.
Oh, okay.
I don't remember the exact details,
but I remember I like freaked out.
I like broke down.
Because at this point in time,
I was eating two meals a day,
and it was very often that one of those meals
was a single bowl of nongshim ramen.
Yeah.
And I was like skimping on toothpaste.
I was stealing toothpaste and food
from my parents' house when I could.
And I was sleeping on a cot somewhat illegally,
because my ex roommates were renting
literally a cot in the living room to me,
just because I couldn't afford a room anymore.
And the landlord didn't actually even know I was there.
Was that the place you were living
where there was the guy that played cod zombies
and smoked pot and that was basically all he did?
Yeah.
How did he have more money than you?
Because he had a job at,
what's that auto parts store that will like drive parts?
Yeah.
Yeah, okay.
He had a job at Lord Co.
Okay.
Like a part-time job at Lord Co,
like massively out-earned what I was doing.
But like at that point, I don't know,
at that point in time, I was-
Yeah, what the hell were you doing?
No wonder your parents told you
you were an idiot for hanging around with me.
Ha ha ha.
I don't know, I saw the vision.
And at that point in time, I could do it.
I don't think I could live like that anymore.
Me neither.
Like I just-
I couldn't do what we did 10 years ago.
Yeah, I know.
It's a young person's game doing that.
Like now, like now the game is putting up moats, right?
Yeah.
We're in the castle.
So it's like, all right.
We have to do our best-
Build moats.
We have to do the best we possibly can.
Yeah, to make it so that people who can work 18 hours a day
still can't make up the difference.
Whether it's building a team, that's a moat,
because there's more expertise in this building
than any one person could possibly hope to have
in 50 lifetimes.
Like there really is.
So that's a moat.
Equipment, like lab equipment, that's a moat.
A newcomer can't afford it, right?
The business team, the business relationships,
that's another moat, because, you know,
even if we have a rough month in terms of views,
we can count on those relationships and those negotiations
to kind of go, hey, look,
no, you guys need to still pay the same rates.
We're going to get our feet back under us.
Don't worry, we got this, right?
We can buy time, essentially.
So we're putting, yeah, so we've got moats,
but pulling all-nighters,
that ain't a moat that we can build anymore.
Jaden says in full-plane chat, in quotes,
how did he make more money than you?
And then in quotes again,
he had a job that paid minimum wage.
I think that's literally true.
I think that's literally what happened.
But I don't know, we were communicating pretty early on
about like, we should take this to another level.
Like this is not the goal.
The original idea was that I would work,
I've said this a bunch of times on the mind show.
The original idea was that I would work with Linus
four to eight hours a week.
And then within like a week of working together,
we were like, ah, we could crank more.
We could do more with this.
We could release more episodes.
We could go to a daily release schedule.
We could do this other thing with NCX.
We could include this like tech linked thing,
or I don't remember what it was called,
Net Linked at that time, Net Linked Weekly or whatever.
We could start doing these other things
and we could start pushing further, pushing more.
And then I kind of saw like, you know what?
I think this kind of is the future of media.
And I think we're kind of on the cusp of it.
This is not exactly what I thought I was going to do,
but like I kind of want to go this route.
It seems more interesting.
And then just, I was at an age where I could do it.
I could deal with those types of problems.
One of the benefits was that Linus was at least
to some level okay with me,
literally falling asleep at the job.
Cause I was still going to school full time,
trying to study to keep good grades.
When I first started working with Linus,
I was like very high, not necessarily top in my class.
I was top in my class in one or two classes,
but at BCIT I had a huge course load.
So definitely not all of them,
but I was doing very well in school.
So I was trying to keep that up.
And then working with you is supposed to be four
to eight hours, which would have been sustainable,
but then we 10 X'd it.
And then that stopped being sustainable very quickly.
So I was literally sleeping like almost nothing.
So I would be,
so the biggest downtime I would have in the day,
outside of like literally one to three hours
a night of sleeping was like, I'd press record.
And then there's nothing for me to do for like five minutes.
So I would literally fall asleep in the chair.
And then he'd have to like yell at me
and I'd wake up and stop recording.
It was crazy.
Yeah.
Yeah.
It's easier now.
Totally different world.
Some people are asking what I mean by moats.
It's barriers to entry.
So it's competitive advantages.
It's ways that we can take what we're good at
and compete with our strengths
against what someone else's strength might be.
And their strength might be that they don't need sleep
and they don't have children
or whatever else the case may be.
By the way, Dan, I do monitor floatplane chat.
No, you don't.
What are you saying?
People are asking, I think I'm just,
I'm just, I'm just tuning in here for a second.
People are asking about the Christmas album remaster.
And Dan replied to someone,
I have decided to do something worse with it.
Okay, sir, we've been through this.
You are not deciding what happens to the Christmas album.
I have decided that the Christmas album
is going to be left dead and buried.
And then Dan goes, I can't say anything.
Linus is here.
You've said enough.
And yes, I am here and I see it.
How many Christmas albums did we sell last week?
Thousands.
That is-
Oh, last week specifically,
I don't actually know the exact number,
but I know that as of right now,
we are in the thousands of totals sold.
And it's definitely a ton more than it was before.
To the point where, if I'm correct,
I sent you a message.
I think we've revenued over four grand on it.
Linus tech, Linus tech tips.
Christmas album.
I think someone put it on Spotify
and I actually don't think it was us.
Okay.
Someone's selling it on Bandcamp.
Like, yeah, I think someone pirated this
and put it on Bandcamp.
I don't think this is us.
I doubt it's us.
I'm pretty sure we only sell it through the forum.
Yeah.
I give you my permission to go download the pirated one.
I mean, we're going to pull it down at some point,
so go fast, but don't pay money for it, please.
Oh, A prime says we have apparently
actually had one late paycheck.
It was by a day or a couple of days.
I can't remember the exact time it has been years.
All right.
Well, apparently we've had one.
I'd have to check because that might've been,
that might've been unique to A prime though,
because I think the last time I checked with Vaughn,
she told me that we hadn't been,
we hadn't been late on a pay period.
If we get to 2K purchases, can Dan remaster it?
Cause it's currently at 1333.
Well, ideally no one buys it.
Yeah, that would be the best.
I just told you guys, I just gave you my blessing
to go download the pirated one.
We don't, LTT store, everything on it has to be good.
Oh yeah, it's not going on LTT store.
We can't.
There can be garbage on the forum.
They want it to be a bonus bin item.
Even that, like.
Is my version going to be good enough for the store?
You're not going to have a version, Dan.
We've been through this.
All right, one last merch message,
and then we'll get into some topics here.
Okay.
Okay, that sounds great.
This one's from Austin.
We know a lot about your house, Linus,
but Luke, what is your favorite part of your home?
Yeah.
Is it the leaking plumbing?
Or the stuffy upstairs sleeping area?
Or the...
The AC mini split that leaks if you leave it on overnight?
Could it be...
The only time I would want it to be on?
Could it be the...
Hmm, let me think.
He's had kind of bad luck.
Yeah.
To be perfectly honest with you.
Got a bit of a lemon.
So, just for you guys,
if you happen to see Luke's place for sale at some point,
don't buy it.
Don't worry, you'll find some sucker to buy it, Luke.
But if you're shopping in the Metro Vancouver area,
just ask the realtor.
Hey, does the seller's name happen to be Luke Lefreniere?
And if they say yes, like you guys are gonna know,
but no one else will know, Luke, it's okay.
You guys are gonna know.
If he says yes, you just say thank you very much.
James is like, you have a mini split, jealous.
Don't be that jealous.
I can't use it.
I've brought in three different people to try to fix it.
No one can fix it.
It just leaks all the time.
It just leaks.
It only leaks.
And people are like, have you cleaned the filters?
Yes.
It just leaks.
It's in the bedroom.
The only time I would want it on is when I'm sleeping,
meaning it's gonna be on for eight hours, ideally.
If you leave it on for that long, it leaks.
It just leaks.
And then I would need to spend like an insane amount of
money to get a new one because they're really expensive.
So then it's just like, well, I don't really want to do that.
Well, I'll tell you what, if you move, we will, we will,
we will do, we will do like a cool cooling,
DIY cooling round two.
Let's go.
Let's go.
We'll only cool your computer.
We're gonna cool the inside of your computer case with like
a full-size air conditioning.
I've wanted to do it for a while, actually.
I'm gonna pivot us to a new topic then because I think I
would need that to use what I'm currently using.
Really?
The radion card is so hot.
Oh yeah.
So we're working on a challenge right now much.
Even compared to your SLI set up.
Come on.
That can't be right.
No, the dual 10 eighties, not even close.
Really?
Yeah.
Like this, it might, no,
I don't think it's the position so much.
So you know where it's currently mounted.
It's in the videos.
People can see it.
It's just like sitting on top of my computer.
So it does plume the heat up and then plumes out.
But my legs are just like cooking all the time.
Yeah, that makes sense.
It's brutal.
But I mean, in the other, with the 10 eighties,
it would have gone outside of the case
because I had the glass off.
I was amazed by how well heat rising worked.
Like obviously I've known heat rises, right?
Hot air rises.
Sure, fine.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
But when I tried to do that video using the mining PC
for heat, I just, I don't know.
I just, I underestimated just how buoyant.
Oh yeah, it's like gonna go away.
Yeah, like fast.
So I mounted it right above the monitor
kind of blowing at me with fans, you know?
And what I realized like later was,
like later on in the video,
I don't know if it actually made it into the final cut,
but it was pretty much boomeranging.
Like it would not go, you couldn't force it down.
It's like trying to push bubbles down in water.
And I didn't realize it would be that extreme.
I just, I don't know.
Never really, I just never really thought about it.
Which makes-
If you haven't actually done something like that,
you probably wouldn't necessarily realize.
That makes sense.
I just didn't really think about it.
And so, you know, one of the things that I, again,
it was, I mentioned it in the video.
I don't think it made it into the final cut,
but I said what I should have done
was mounted under the desk
because then the heat would get trapped by the desk
and leak up around me.
That's literally happening.
So that's what you're doing.
And that's probably why the case wasn't as bad.
Because yeah, if it's blowing it out the back,
it's probably going like straight up and not hitting you.
I had the, the 10-80s that I had
with like those triple cooler,
I'm trying to remember, Strix, whatever.
So it wasn't necessarily-
But your, but your case would have had airflow.
Yeah, I had the side of the case off though.
Even then though, there would be like a suction.
Like it would-
Oh yeah, because of the front fans.
That makes sense.
Exactly, exactly.
Okay, so it would go out the back, yeah, yeah.
So I don't think it,
I really don't think it's to do
with the actual thermal output.
I think it's probably just airflow optimization.
That's definitely fair, yeah.
Speaking of which, the case, you said case,
and it reminded me of this.
Again, I'm reorganizing things.
Guess what I dug out of the, I'm going to say garage.
It's like a slot in the wall
because I live in an apartment,
but guess what I dug out of the garage.
You don't still have your stupid aquarium, do you?
Not that one.
The, really that ITX, what, like leftover one
that you got?
I have the two, I believe it's two remaining.
Mineral oil cases.
I've got them.
This is starting to feel a little bit predestined
because you'll never believe what happened
earlier this week.
Well, we uploaded that video with the tour of the lab.
Okay.
And I mentioned like mineral oil cooling for some reason.
Either it was in that video or is it,
no, it was on a live stream, sorry.
I was on a recent live stream.
Someone sent a merch message asking about mineral oil
cooling when we did that build stream.
And somehow a ball got rolling internally
without me knowing about it, where we started,
no, where we start, cause I said, look,
I think we've said everything we have to say
about mineral oil.
If we were to do a follow up with like floor inert
or something like that, you know,
maybe take it to the next level, you know,
maybe we'd revisit it, but even then
we can't get these aquarium cases anymore
because of a patent troll, blah, blah, blah.
So someone internally starts trying to source floor inert
and I'm sitting here going, okay.
That's really expensive.
And really hard to get.
Yeah, both.
Apparently like they just don't even
make it anymore basically.
Oh, there's some, there's like a newer.
So then the conversation somehow made its way
to Jake Danes from the lab and he's like,
oh no, not floor inert, you want this one.
And it's like for submersion cooling
for like mining and GPU's and stuff.
And it even, there's like even a cleaner
that you can use to get everything back to pristine.
He's clearly up to speed.
And it's a couple of hundred bucks
per five gallon pail, which is like,
it's expensive compared to floor inert, nothing.
Floor inert was absurd.
Yeah.
Mineral oil was cheap relatively.
Yeah.
And then this thing is, it's expensive, but it's not like.
It's closer to mineral oil than it is to floor inert,
but it's in the middle.
Floor inert you were going to spend like thousands.
And so I'm sitting here going,
we've got cases, we've got fluid.
Am I going to be able to avoid this?
It's happening.
I'll tell you what.
What?
Here's the deal.
Okay.
We'll build one, but you have to give me back
your old computer and you have to daily drive it.
Wow, wow.
Don't know if I want to do that.
It'll be top spec, new spec.
Yeah, but it's going to be in oil.
I think we need to poll the audience.
Should he do it?
Should he not?
I forget how to set up polls.
New top spec in oil is like actually quite questionable
because the thermal.
Well, it won't be oil.
It'll be that other stuff.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, man.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
But it's designed for GPU's and stuff.
Thermal fluid, whatever you want to call it.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
So my comment isn't.
Look at this guy.
Just answer the question.
You want me to do it because you know
it's going to be terrible.
Yeah, I know.
That's where the pressure is coming from.
I just want to make sure that everyone understands.
I mean, they want it for the same reason.
Floatplane chat is unanimous here.
Let's go.
Of course they are because it's terrible.
What if I use it as a workstation
because I'm going to be here locally again soon.
Nope, it has to be at home.
It has to be at home.
No, we will do Luke personal rig update,
mineral oil edition.
I can't even fit all my drives.
Is it the ITX one?
I didn't actually look inside the box.
If I remember correctly, I have two tanks.
I don't think either of them are ATX tanks.
Well, how much capacity?
It's just in the shipping box.
No, I mean how much hard drive capacity do you have?
I currently have two very large hard drives
and I have three standard two and a half inch.
SSDs, three, four, three or four.
And then I have two NVMEs.
Why do you need so many drives?
I have a lot of drives.
What the, yeah, I didn't ask if you have a lot of drives.
I asked, why do you need them?
I save a lot of stuff.
You have a NAS?
Yep, I do.
The NAS is huge.
I have lots of things, okay?
Yeah, no, I clearly.
You're leaving it there, aren't you?
Yeah.
How much total space is that?
It's a lot.
No, no.
Each one of the hard drives is like 10 terabytes.
My deal stands, we will load up everything
you could possibly need for game storage.
We will load you up with enough storage
for everything you could possibly need
for actual local storage.
And we will upgrade the NAS to make up
for any space you lose in the desktop.
The NAS is all 10 terabyte drives.
The NAS also has to be mineral oil cooled.
What?
Yeah, do it, do it.
That is so dumb.
Okay, wait, wait, what?
So it's gonna be all SSE?
We use both tanks.
It's all gonna be solid state?
Well, no, we could.
So you're gonna replace 80 terabytes of hard drives
with solid state drives?
No, no, we could use a PCIe riser out
to an external hard drive enclosure.
What is the point?
Oh my God.
The suffering is the point.
God.
People no longer think you should do it.
Actually, no, FlowPlane does.
FlowPlane is ready.
Oh, this is so dumb.
No, no, the NAS does not have to be mineral oil cooled.
Yeah.
But we will expand the NAS to the point where,
what, more hard drives, what?
It's full.
Yeah, yeah, whatever.
I mean, NAS is.
It's like, I don't have a dedicated,
like actually proper system for it.
It'll just include a NAS.
It'll include a NAS.
That's fine, that's fine.
So we will make you whole in terms of storage.
That's my commitment.
Let me even see what the state of them are first.
All right, all right, all right.
Yeah, you don't have to make a decision now.
You can be a little, oh, I don't know.
Having a submersion cooled system again
could be kind of cool.
I'm a little bit worried in an apartment.
If there's a leak, it could actually be like, super bad.
I mean, that sounds like a Luke problem to me,
not a Linus problem.
So, you know.
Oh my goodness.
Wow, we'll see, we'll see, we'll see.
Again, I don't even know what tanks they are.
If it's genuinely just one ITX tank,
because I'm pretty sure at least,
I think there's at least one ITX tank.
I think they're both ITX.
Is it two ITXs?
I think it might be.
I honestly don't remember.
Basically, Puget gave us the last of their tanks,
and I think we used the last ATX one
to do the last build we did,
which we eventually like, sold on Facebook Marketplace
or something like that,
because we were tired of just having it around
and carrying it places.
And then, I think you were like,
can I just like, have these ITX ones?
And I was like, realistically,
I'm never gonna do anything with these.
Just take it and go.
I mean, he stole it, rather,
is how that probably went down.
No, if I remember correctly,
you like, didn't know what to do with them.
Yeah, no, no.
And I was like, I'll take it.
I was just memeing with the whole
stealing things from the office thing.
Yeah, yeah, so that's the deal.
I mean, there's some of that.
I was cleaning up.
I found a few of those.
Yeah.
We're a lot more on top of that stuff now.
We have like, a whole inventory system
and asset tags and everything,
but things were a little more loosey-goosey
when people were not being like, paid well.
You know, it is what it is.
We made do with what we had.
There's a few things like,
I found a pair of headphones that I remember I got
because instead of like, expensing a bunch of stuff,
I just like, got the headphones.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
There's like, some stuff like that.
There was some loosey-goosey stuff.
I mean, another thing too is,
when we were a much smaller team,
if, you know, a Luke was just like,
yeah, I need a new mouse,
I didn't have to worry about 98 other people
coming to me and saying,
well, where does Luke get a new mouse?
There's so many-
It's a lot easier to deal with.
Yeah, there's so many-
The scale gets a little wacky.
Things you just, like,
it really does come back to like, grade school rules.
Did you bring enough for the whole class?
No?
Okay, well then, you can't, then we can't.
That simple.
But yeah, if it's just ITX cases,
I honestly don't think I'm that.
I don't think I'm gonna do it.
You don't think you're gonna do it?
Really?
Not for just an ITX.
Well, yeah, but it'll be like, top spec, top spec ITX.
Part of the problem is the volume of the tank.
Top spec ITX?
Because they, even though you're potentially
putting more in it,
I'd have to look at the properties of the new coolant,
because I know it like, exists,
but I haven't actually planned on doing a build in it.
I expect an answer next week.
Oh my goodness, okay.
People expect an answer next week.
I'll talk to Jake.
I'm sure he knows, he's more up on the current stats.
I don't even remember.
Was this a merch message?
Linus and I have this agreement from ages ago.
Like, pre-Linus Media Group, ages ago.
Back from when I was paid less than minimum wage,
where he had like, upgraded my system.
I got a 4080.
480, you mean?
480, yeah, sorry.
A 480, and I don't remember what else was in there,
but it was like, my first system upgrade
after the mineral system.
It was in an 800D.
Nice.
I got a 480.
I don't remember what processor it was.
Probably some Ds.
I think it was like, a 2600K or something.
It was, it was like, solid.
It was all like, good stuff.
Yeah.
It was a big upgrade from what I had at the time.
And then I was,
I don't remember how we got into the conversation,
but we were standing outside of the badminton center
that you wanted to go to that night,
because I needed a ride home,
and he wanted to play badminton first,
so I used to study.
I would study on the couch at his badminton center.
We didn't actually do that that many times.
I think that only happened a handful of times.
Yeah, I honestly didn't care.
I just needed to study,
and there was a place to study there,
so it honestly didn't make a difference to me.
I had my laptop and my textbooks anyways,
so like, it's basically the same thing as being home.
And we had this conversation,
and he was basically like,
as long as you work with me,
I'll make sure that you have a good computer.
And I was like, I'm holding you to that,
and now it's been 12 years or something,
and it's paying off, let's go.
Except now it might turn into an oil rig,
which is concerning, but we'll see.
And yes, Linus, this was a merch message.
Oh, okay, A prime's all upset.
He's like, where's my oil PC?
Come on, come on.
I have made no such agreement with you,
so screw that agreement.
Yeah, yeah.
Screw your agreement.
This was the worst part of Luke's house.
SS Tom asks, any chance of a badminton match
with Stephen Hee for a creator clash
or a Dennis Fightlake thing?
I really want it to happen, so I'm posting this again.
Does Stephen even play badminton, or are you profiling?
Because I couldn't find any reference
to him playing badminton at all.
I'm not putting up to a poll, guys.
You guys don't actually get to like,
decide that I have to do this.
It's not happening.
Oh, no.
All right, what other topics do we want to talk about today?
I also have to make sure
it's gonna be okay for the birds.
Yeah, okay.
That should be fine.
There's certain things that I actually have to go figure out.
That's fine.
And not everything is fine, right?
Because there's certain chemicals in the environment
that'll just kill them,
and it might not be harmful to humans,
but it might be harmful to them.
I gotta figure stuff out.
Nokia hypes their super fixable phone.
I haven't gotten a chance to have a look at this yet,
but Pocket Lint has an article about this.
Let's go have a look.
It's pretty low spec.
Like, I think describing it as entry level
is definitely accurate.
I will say, though, that we're in an era of phones
where I don't think that's actually gonna bother
that many people.
It's pretty low spec.
I just saw it.
Okay.
Yeah.
Hoping for a little more than that.
Buddy immediately backtracks.
I got down to the display and hardware section.
I was just like, ooh.
Recycled plastic rear, IP 52 protection.
Let's talk about the specs a little bit.
6.5 inch, 1600 by 720 pixels, 90 Hertz refresh rate.
You know what?
Is that a longer conversation here?
Would you rather have 1080p at 60 Hertz or 720p at 90?
With how I currently use my phone, honestly, 720 at 90.
Really?
Yeah, I think so.
Because it's almost all like text communication.
It doesn't need to be.
I don't care.
Yeah.
But it's not sharp.
The difference between 720p and 1080 is a lot bigger
than the difference between 1080 and 1440.
This is gonna be a first world problem.
I haven't experienced 720 on a phone in a hot minute.
Yeah.
So maybe I don't know.
Not great.
Yeah.
But then 90 Hertz really does make things
feel more responsive,
even when you're dealing with slower hardware.
Usually, text communication on my phone,
I'm just trying to go fast.
Like.
Yeah.
Yeah, and it feels better when you're typing.
Yeah, that's a tough one.
Anyway, sorry, you were telling the specs.
Yeah, unit SoC, T606, four gigs of RAM,
64 or 128 gigs of storage, plus a micro SD slot.
Thank you.
What the heck is a T606?
I'm looking this up.
Tiger T606 processor,
entry-level octa-core SoC with two ARM A75s
at up to 1.6 gigahertz.
Blazing speeds.
And six efficient A55 cores at up to 1.6.
That is not a fast chip.
Nope.
Okay, carry on.
5,050 milliamp hour battery.
That's a big battery.
This thing will last for like three days on battery though.
20 Watts charging.
Okay, that's fine.
It will take a while to charge that big battery
at 20 Watts though.
I don't really mind that.
If it's a huge battery, it takes long to charge.
I feel like it might just extend the life of it
because you're going to sit there
with it plugged in a hundred percent less often.
Yeah, I guess that's fair.
With my usage, I wouldn't mind that personally.
I'm trying to find any sort of-
We deserve a pull, you deserve nothing.
I'm trying to find any insight
into what exactly makes it repairable.
So some of the ease of repair apparently,
oh, oh, oh, here we go, here we go.
A new battery and all the tools.
Okay, I'm just going to read the thing.
So iFixit is partnering with Nokia
on the creation of the G22,
this phone that is aiming for a price of $170,
which is a lot more reasonable for the spec
and compared to some of the other more open
and repair-oriented phones that we've seen in the past.
It's designed to be easy to use and inexpensive to repair
and iFixit will sell repair kits
for the battery display, rear panel,
and the USB-C module,
which are four of the most common components
to break in typical use.
And they will sell them for at least five years.
That's super cool.
But will it get software updates for five years?
A new battery and all the tools to replace it
will cost you $30 and it should take about 10 to 15 minutes
for a typical user to complete the repair.
The most expensive part is apparently the touchscreen at 55.
By the time you're spending $55 on a touchscreen,
couldn't it be 65 and be 1080p?
I gotta kinda wonder about that a little bit.
Some of the ease of repair comes from the fact
that this is an inexpensive phone with inexpensive parts
and that ease of disassembly has a direct trade-off
with modern waterproofing measures.
However, Nokia has genuinely eliminated several barriers
to removing the back of the device
and it retains its IP52 waterproof rating
even after the back has been replaced.
So IP52 is not watertight,
but it can take the odd accidental spray of water.
They're only providing three years
of security and operating system updates.
So even though you can get parts for five, it's three years.
And I gotta imagine that three years is from launch,
not from when you buy it,
so not from when they stop selling it.
Man, I'd love to see an actual compelling repairable phone
because on the one hand, I wanna look at this and go,
progress, but on the other hand, I'm looking at it going,
this is like a half measure, right?
This is like coming out and being like,
yeah, we made a repairable phone and nobody wanted it.
So clearly the market has chosen non-repairable phones.
No, the market chose the only options that it actually has.
And I don't know that for a lot of people,
this is a truly viable option.
What minimum spec would it need to be
for you to think it would be a viable option?
Man, you know, I would have said something like Note 9,
but I've been using it lately just to listen to music
when I'm riding on my bike and it's pretty slow.
It's slowed down.
I'd say-
There's some arguments that people might make
about planned obsolescence stuff
that doesn't have to do with the actual speeds
and feeds of the device,
but more has to do with like different certain updates
that might actually intentionally slow it down
from the manufacturer side.
Ars Technica apparently ripped into it.
It's 39 steps to replace the screen.
See, this is what I'm talking about.
Like that doesn't need to be the case.
Why doesn't it just use screws?
You need to hold the back panel on.
Like why does everything need to be clips
and clips and glue?
And I don't remember what your question was, I'm sorry.
What would-
Oh, right.
I would say if it's three-year-old
flagship tier performance,
I would consider that to be more than acceptable,
but I feel like phones like computers
have gotten to the point where,
A, the improvements generation over generation
are not that big anymore.
Meaning that you can use three-year-old hardware
really, really easily
and have a really great experience with it.
But also B, it means that the value
of that three-year-old hardware
isn't dropping the way it used to.
Like you look at the way PC hardware
is plummeting right now,
generation over generation in terms of price.
Like you can get Ryzen 2000 stuff on eBay for like nothing.
Ryzen 3000, very reasonable.
For a long time there,
when Intel was releasing quad core after quad core
after quad core, the 7700K comes out
and 4770Ks are like $10 cheaper on eBay.
3770Ks are maybe $25 cheaper on eBay.
And I feel like we're seeing that with phones, right?
Like they're not dropping in value quite as fast
within the software update period
because that's a different kind of obsolescence.
I like basically didn't even realize how old my phone was.
I only thought about it recently,
but like I don't, it doesn't affect me.
The battery is still in okay enough state
that it lasts a day.
So I just charge it at night, whatever.
It's not the most efficient way
because it hits a hundred percent
and sits there for a bit and stuff like that.
But it's old, I'm not that worried about it at this point,
stuff like that.
But like, it's fine.
Yeah, I have some problems.
It had a lot more problems when I first got it,
but it received software updates
and it fixed a lot of those problems.
And now it's just like, I don't know.
I use what, like Slack teams and Discord.
That's like 90% of what I'm doing on it.
The rest of it is like reading news or whatever.
Like it doesn't need to be super powerful for my use case.
Sure, maybe some other people
are doing more complicated things with phones, but not me.
So I don't really care that much,
but I do like get really frustrated
the second it like slows down
because I'm very often trying to do quick tasks
since when a message replies something really quick.
And if it like chugs while doing that, I do get frustrated.
So there is like a minimum level of performance
that I want it to be.
I doubt that this would be satisfactory for me.
And I think this is too low.
Yeah.
Well, that's a bummer.
Yeah.
Is there anything else that's critical for us to,
oh, oh, announcements.
I have a mock-up for the screwdriver holster.
Yes.
Dun, dun, dun, dun, dun, dun, dun.
Where's the loop?
Is it like a belt loop thing?
So it's like a click, it's like a hinge.
Oh, okay, yeah.
And then it has like a clicky thing
so you can adjust the angle.
Oh, that's kind of neat.
So if you want it to kind of more face forward
for a cross-body draw,
or if you want it more like up for a...
Yeah, you can change your draw.
I have been warned that if we go hand stitched,
this thing could cost like a hundred or even $200.
But the advantage of hand stitching
is that if a stitch breaks,
the whole thing doesn't come apart.
So like machine stitching for leather.
Is it leather?
It's just black leather?
It'll be leather.
We're gonna go full grain.
And if we get it hand stitched,
it'll probably have to be made in North America.
So this thing could be extremely expensive.
I don't know if this is gonna be a viable product,
but this is the initial design.
The cutout here is so that you can pop the screwdriver up
from the bottom to make it easier to grab from the top.
Oh, wow, nice.
Yeah, so you kind of pop it up
and then obviously that's a snap.
I told the team, I was like, I want the snappiest snap.
Like just like, I want it to be ridiculous.
You know what I mean?
Yeah.
I think it should be silver actually.
I'll talk to Matthew about it.
He's the one.
It'll be,
if we can find an alternative leather
that is just as strong and durable,
we will consider an alternative leather.
But right now I can,
I think it's probably going to be cow,
cow,
outer layer.
That sounds worse.
I think it's going to be cow, cow.
It's not that I hate cows.
I do hate cows, but that's not why.
It's just that leather is, you know, it's leather, man.
Someone said brass for the button.
Ooh, I don't know.
I'd want to match the finish of the silver shaft.
Yeah, so I was, I was sounding at,
listening to the cost, I don't think this is really viable,
but releasing one that was black
and releasing one that was silver.
Yeah, no, there'll be one version.
Would have been pretty sick
for people that got the black shaft screwdrivers.
But yeah, the costing and stuff,
you're only going to have one version.
I think it's going to be a low vol, a low volume product.
And hey, the people with the black shaft screwdriver
still be silver eventually.
It's possible.
It's true what he says.
It's possible that the,
it's possible that the machine stitching will, you know,
we'll find a place that, you know,
the quality is like really good or whatever,
but it seems quite likely right now
that it's going to end up being hand stitched.
And that means it'll end up being probably very expensive,
not because we're gouging,
but because we unapologetically are just going to make the
best products we can.
And if you don't like it, then you don't have to buy them.
You can see a lot of people are into the philosophy and
thanks, Matthew L are, are, are,
are really enjoying the tech pouch.
We've, I've been kind of keeping my eye on it.
A lot of, a lot of people are into the tech pouch.
I'll, I'll say that much.
Yeah, hell yeah.
Been a bit of a day for the store.
It's not the cheapest way that you could have a bag of said
size. Nope, not even a little, but it's really good.
Yeah. There you go.
Can we create a poll? Yes.
We want to figure out how much of the total addressable
market for lower body undergarments we're missing out on by
only having boxer briefs.
So is this question, what is your favorite?
Yeah. What's your preference?
Boxers or briefs or boxer briefs.
So Luke's going to create a poll and hit up float plane.
And I will move on to the next topic.
What we currently have is boxer briefs, correct? Yes. Yeah.
Ford is, this is awful.
Ford is seeking a patent for a new system that would allow
them to gradually shut off features in delinquent customers
cars, like seat controls, automatic locking and windows,
as well as air conditioning and the infotainment system.
After enough missed payments,
the car would simply drive itself away.
Is this the most dystopian timeline, Luke?
Yeah. It also sounds like so ripe for abuse.
I mean, seat controls,
you could make a very strong argument for how dangerous
having an improperly adjusted seat could be.
If you're sitting too close or too far from the steering
wheel, that could be a life or death issue. I mean,
honestly, you could say that about almost anything.
Automatic locking?
Yeah. So, okay, man,
my aunt had the wildest experience, downtown Vancouver.
She's just driving and some tries to get into some lady just
like got in her car. Yeah. Like, Hey,
I need a ride to here. And you don't know,
do they have a knife? Do they have a gun?
Do they have a syringe full of AIDS? Like, you know,
you don't know, you don't know what they have,
but just got in the car and she was terrified.
As it turned out,
she drove her where she needed to go and she like got out
and left, which is like lucky, right?
But so someone's automatic locking is not working.
And then, and that happens. Who's liable?
Does Ford just basically go, well,
you should have made your payments and you know,
fair enough, right? There's no free lunch in this life.
If you don't pay for something, you are effectively,
that you have stolen it. And it is,
it is now Ford's property and not yours, but holy.
Like it can't go down like this.
And like the ability for someone to just steal your car
by, I mean, we,
we talk about vulnerabilities in cars all the time.
We talked about vulnerabilities in Kia's the other day where
people could just steal them willy nilly.
And it took an actual extreme amount of exposure to get them
to do anything about it. I think it was Kia and Hyundai.
I think it was both.
You think this is going to stay secure forever?
What about in 10 years when this car is still on the road?
What about in 15 years when the car is potentially still on
the road?
That's something I really worry about with Tesla.
They have so many different revs of their cars.
Like they don't have model years,
the way that traditional car companies have model years.
What is going to happen when they don't feel like dealing
with the,
with the software baggage of all those model threes with
LIDAR that like don't have as good of a camera system and
like used supplementary LIDAR and what a pain or anything.
I just,
yeah, I worry a lot about that.
And it's a really good point.
Like the automotive industry in general and to their credit,
Tesla has the probably the best reputation out of all of
them,
but the automotive industry in general is terrible when it
comes to maintaining software.
So anything where I have to trust them to do anything post
purchase, I just, I, I just, I write it off.
It doesn't exist to me.
Take your car back remotely.
Yeah. So that's not cool.
The technology to do this has yet to be developed
apparently,
but it is at least theoretically possible given the current
trajectory of self-driving cars.
And a few days after this patent was filed by Ford,
they announced the creation of a semi-autonomous driving
subsidiary within the company.
The idea is not entirely new in some places.
It is legal for dealerships to install remote systems that
beep incessantly,
or even kill switch the car from customers who are using
credit in the event that they don't pay.
Our discussion question is what is the likely consequences of
having these sorts of back doors?
I think we've kind of gone through it.
Luke and I are not in favor of this,
I think is pretty fair to say.
This is it's dystopian.
It's dystopian.
I'm not using that word lightly.
It is.
This is it.
Also a car related topic.
Streamer has van stolen.
The internet gets it back.
Our source is Ludwig.
This guy.
Yup.
What great hair, you know?
Fantastic.
Like that's not fair to other people to have hair that good.
Anyway, two days ago,
Ludwig announced that his prized 1997 Subaru Sambar micro van
had been stolen from outside the warehouse where he films
after a storm knocked out the power to the electric gate.
Ludwig's assistant and a collaborator managed to track down
the van that evening.
Unable to acquire police assistance,
they entered the van only to find someone in it.
The man seemed confused and told them he didn't steal it,
but was given it by someone who owed him money.
He then offered to return the van if they gave him $10,000.
After they decided to call the police again.
Which it's not even worth, by the way.
Yeah, we'll try that route.
The guy took off in the van.
At some point, he drove it to a massage parlor
where it was spied by a Reddit user
who had heard of the theft.
The police finally showed up and the driver fled on foot,
allowing the van to be recovered.
Our discussion question here is that Reddit has been
obsessed with my new car and maybe it's a positive thing.
That's a good thing.
Yeah, they gotta know everything.
They have a little army.
That you guys know what car I drive
so that in the event that it gets stolen,
you can help me recover it.
So I've been kind of easing into it
as some of you have noticed.
No, it was never a leak.
Every time there were glimpses of it or whatever,
it was intentional.
I just didn't want it to be like,
surprise, I finally bought a fancy car.
So I think it made its first appearance
in the heating the garage with mining video.
And then I alluded to what dealership it came from.
And then I think I mentioned
Porsche's infotainment system a little bit after that.
And then it showed up in the parking lot in the labs tour.
So I've kind of been, I've wanted it to be a bit of a-
Did it have the wrap on it?
Yeah.
I've wanted it to be a little bit slower
just cause I didn't want it to be like kind of a shock
by the time people are like, oh, he bought a fancy car.
I wanted it to kind of be old news.
So mission sort of accomplished.
But my unintended consequence has been
that it's created this intrigue.
Like I've talked a lot about how one of the best things
we ever did for our privacy was to just announce
the location of our studio and put it on Google maps.
Because all of a sudden,
everyone immediately stopped caring.
So I guess I kind of forgot that lesson.
And I've been sort of intentionally slowly, you know,
priming that, yes, I bought a fancy car
that hopefully doesn't immediately make me
a complete douchebag, but yes, I have a nice car now.
So let's put it to rest once and for all.
It's a Porsche Taycan, it's 2022.
It's higher spec than I probably would have gone for,
but the deal was-
Been used.
Right.
It had just over a thousand miles on it.
That's a pretty sweet spot to buy used.
Which is, it smelled new.
Yeah.
You know?
Yeah.
But because it was used,
there was no provincial sales tax and no luxury tax,
which is a tax that applies to vehicles
over a certain value where we are.
Which by the way, the average sale cost of vehicles
is creeping up to that luxury tax
because all vehicles are just expensive now.
They've gone down a lot.
I mean, Tesla slashed their prices big time.
You see how many more Teslas are in the parking lot?
No.
There was so much time.
Oh, I was going to say, no, you probably didn't notice
because you don't work in an office,
but yeah, you come in for one on Fridays.
Yeah, like four people bought Teslas
immediately after the price drops.
You see that?
I don't think all of them have even been delivered yet.
Our parking lot is just,
basically looks like a Tesla service center.
Yeah.
It's unbelievable.
Anyway.
So yes, yes.
Yeah, how they got the truck, minivan, microvan?
I don't know, whatever.
How they got that back was actually pretty cool.
Little community effort.
So yeah, if it goes missing,
I can count on you guys, right?
Yeah.
Sweet.
Yeah.
Ooh, we shot a video about this today.
This is super cool.
4K upscaling for web video.
Nvidia just announced RTX Super Resolution
is now supported for users of RTX 30 and 40 series GPUs.
We were talking earlier in the show, sorry.
We were talking earlier in the show about moats.
Yeah.
Nvidia's additional technology
that you get to leverage when you have their GPUs is a moat.
Yes.
Yeah, that's a perfect example.
So upscaling for videos played in Chrome and Edge
with support for the RTX 20 series likely to come.
So we'll see how that goes.
Anything from a 360p to 1440p plus video is supported
and can upscale up to 4K.
4K upscaling was previously only available
on Nvidia's Shield TV and not for high refresh rate video,
and it didn't go as low as 360p.
RTX VSR, that's what they're calling it,
uses AI upscaling to sharpen low resolution video
while removing compression artifacts.
This is wild.
I'm not gonna spoil the whole video.
It's definitely worth a watch,
but I actually preferred the RTX upscaled 1080p
to the native 4K on YouTube.
Whoa.
Whoa.
Yeah.
That's okay.
Because 4K on YouTube still has a lot of banding.
It does.
It's pretty low bit rate.
Yes.
So with a little bit of sharpening.
Did you mess around with FlowPlane at all?
And smoothing.
No, I didn't think to try that.
I'm interested.
We should play around with it.
Because it's a little, it's different than FlowPlane.
It worked on.
Sorry, than YouTube.
It worked on CBC Gem.
Like it seems to just work on anything.
I suspect it would work.
Which is cool.
I just wonder like how the results would be.
So it worked on DRM protected content,
which I wasn't sure if it would.
Interesting.
Yeah.
Like it's pretty cool.
That is actually quite interesting.
And FlowPlane would be DRM protected as well.
So yeah.
Yeah.
Well, okay.
No, don't worry about it.
So the missing information though,
rather than just like edge detection and sharpening,
is predicted by a neural network
that's trained on large data sets of images
at different resolutions and replaced,
which is how that works.
Welcome to everything these days.
It's pretty impressive.
There are some issues
and you guys are going to want to check out the video, but.
Apparently someone in FlowPlane chat
is using it to watch the stream on FlowPlane right now.
Okay, how is it?
Yeah.
Maybe talk about that while I run and go pee.
Sure.
My bladder's gonna explode.
The show's too long.
We're already at three hours, I think.
I think Dan left to like make coffee.
Is that what I heard?
No, that's the drainage system for the air conditioner.
Oh, that makes sense.
I have done a merch message every 22 seconds this stream.
Wow.
My fingers hurt, my eyes hurt.
So I just had to go look at something far away for awhile.
Yeah, we're at a little bit over three hours.
Okay, I haven't seen a response yet from Prometheusawoken,
who's the person who said they're using it
to watch the stream right now.
Is anyone else using it
to watch the FlowPlane stream right now?
Maybe they will respond soon.
Oh, there it is.
FlowPlane's good already,
but it's hard to believe this is live, quality's insane.
Does this mean we can talk about the Christmas album?
I love that.
No, I have not.
Maybe, maybe, maybe.
I love that comment
because FlowPlane already looked good, it's great.
But the fact that it looks even so much better is fantastic.
Yeah, what is the bit rate on FlowPlane?
So when people talk about bit rate on YouTube as well,
it's not really a fixed thing.
It'll vary, right?
So we have targets and stuff, but it's variable bit rate.
It's gonna change quite a bit across the course of a video.
And there's videos just fully self-emitting.
There's videos that Linus Tech Tips has uploaded
that have parts of them that don't really look that good
because however the variable bit rate and compression,
all that kind of stuff decided to deal with it,
it just didn't really deal with it that well.
And that's true for every video platform
that does those types of things.
And we just try to target a better amount
than normal, basically.
The response was, where'd it go?
Oh no.
Basically, it's better.
They said FlowPlane video is already really good,
but watching it through the Nvidia, oh, there it is.
FP looks good already,
but it's hard to believe this is live, quality is insane.
Wow, that's really cool.
That's super cool.
Our discussion question is, what does this mean
for the future of digital video streaming?
I mean, right now, spoiler,
it consumes up to 300 watts of power,
so nothing in the short term
because realistically,
so much of streaming video consumption
is on devices like this that would light on fire
if they were consuming 300 watts power.
But in the very long term,
I could see it fundamentally changing
the way that we build video streaming infrastructure,
just kind of going like, yeah,
instead of optimizing your stream
for what looks the best to the eye at a given bit rate,
you might start to optimize your stream
for what might be most easily interpreted
by an AI-enhanced or machine learning-enhanced player.
So for example, you might basically be able
to encode information into the video.
Like this is, just put like a pattern.
This is like a rock outcropping or whatever.
This is grass, fill in the blanks,
which could lead to people having
very different viewing experiences
depending on which data set
their machine learning-enhanced player was trained on.
Like it could be like, okay,
you know that tool that NVIDIA built
where you just essentially MS paint
and it turns into a landscape.
Oh yeah, yeah.
Yeah.
I could see it being kind of like that to a point
where you could just stream blocks of color
and it would just-
Like decides things.
Yeah, you could have metadata.
I don't think they were-
This actor is angry.
I don't think NVIDIA is going to build this that way,
but I think this same technology could absolutely do that.
Like I bet you something that you could do
is with a certain pattern, like almost QR code style,
you could tell an interpretive, whatever,
to repeat or to continue.
So you could have like a certain pattern
and then some indicator amongst that pattern
to take this pattern and either continue it,
so change it as it goes, but keep the theme,
or to just repeat it.
So it's like object-based compression almost.
Yeah.
So instead of like, you could have like a wall,
like this wall, which they can't really see,
but you could have like a more complicated design on a wall,
but then instead of filling all your bit rate
with that complicated design-
It's almost like mocap, like motion.
So you could almost have like encoded dots,
like object markers.
And then you essentially, instead of streaming data,
you are actually just rendering it in subsequent frames.
It wouldn't work very well for really fast-paced video,
but for something like WAN Show,
you could probably get the bit rate
essentially down to negligible.
And I wonder if there's ways that you could communicate
to it like confetti cannon,
because one of the biggest things
that compression algorithms have a lot of problem with
is lots of small things that are moving and shifting.
So confetti has always been this,
like people noticed it originally
from when we moved to digital video for TVs
and the NFL was playing.
They would shoot confetti cannons at the end of the game
and the whole thing would just turn into like fuzzy snow.
You can't see anything.
And people were very confused about it.
It's the same problem we have today,
literally the exact same thing.
You have digital video, you compress it,
you put too many things moving in different ways
and it's just your quality is just gonna tank immediately.
So if you could just tell the GPU to do that
and just tell it to generate it
instead of needing to like deal with all these changes.
Very cool.
It'd be really interesting.
YouTube announces some vague new AI tools,
something something, create artificial scenes,
swap clothing virtually.
Sounds like kind of VTuber stuff.
They're also apparently rolling out a feature
where creators can record a short parallel to another video
similar to TikTok's duet feature.
It also happens to be similar to YouTube's own
long defunct video responses feature,
which was discontinued September, 2013,
because it had a click-through rate of 0.0004%.
At the scale YouTube's at now,
0.0004% could actually be worth having.
I think that's pretty much it for topics today.
We've got a thing where artists and computer scientists
are designing anti-facial recognition clothes.
It's pretty cool, but I think we can leave it for a week
where we aren't already three hours in
with a lot of merge messages to get through.
Do we want to deal with these extra topics or no?
The ones at the bottom?
Yes.
No, no.
I don't think we need to.
No and no.
We're not gonna talk about you organizing
and your wrecked thumb.
I'm sorry to hear about your thumb though.
It's okay.
Merch messages time.
Let's go.
When show after hours.
All right, here we go.
We've got quite a few tonight.
There's been a lot of merge messages.
First one up here is from Jeremy.
How reliable was your Thunderbolt 2 closet PC setup?
Thunderbolt always seems to be finicky for us
in the workplace.
When it works, it's great.
But you probably noticed that I have other boxes on my desk.
They're from a company called iKron
and they do optical USB.
Those things are bulletproof.
When my Thunderbolt,
I always have my peripherals connected to that
so that in the event that I need to troubleshoot
my stupid Thunderbolt dock,
I have a working keyboard and mouse.
I also have an optical display port
directly from my computer to my monitor now
through the walls,
rather than relying on Thunderbolt to carry DP
for that same reason.
When it works, it's amazing.
And just one cable, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
But when it doesn't work,
boy, is it ever a pain in the butt.
Okay, next one here is from Justin.
Hey guys, I enjoyed listening to the WAN Show
on my Friday nights while catching up on the week's email.
As your jobs get more administrative and less technical,
how do you keep up with your tech skills?
I still end up doing a lot of tech stuff.
I still get called in to help with stuff sometimes.
I know just enough about everything,
which is sort of unique in the office here.
Like there's obviously a lot of things that,
you know, an Anthony or an Alex know more than me about,
but there's still things that I know more about than them.
Like I'm a generalist, right?
So I still end up doing a lot.
I also am surrounded by people who know more,
like no matter what it is.
Okay, so no matter who you are,
there's something I know more than you about,
but no matter what it is, there's someone in this building
that knows way more about it than me.
So I pick up a lot by osmosis, just being around,
you know, hearing what the trials and tribulations were
and seeing the solution.
Like I'm immersed in this stuff all day, every day.
So even though a lot of it's administrative,
a lot of the admin stuff that I do,
like paperworky stuff is things like script review.
So yeah, on the one hand, I did a lot of admin this week,
but I also got into the weeds of how applications worked
on Apple's X serve line of servers.
We've got a video coming about those, by the way,
we got our hands on the last model that they ever built,
like played around with it.
You know why it died?
Spoiler alert, it's too good.
It's too good.
Do you just like never have to swap them out or something?
Well, so that's part of it,
but that's not the biggest part of it
because the way that Apple manages hardware obsolescence
is through not providing software updates anymore.
So realistically they could have just, you know,
shortened the software support cycle on it
or something like that.
But what they were up against
was completely different revenue models.
Their model, right, is to sell hardware
for better or for worse, or at least, you know, in 2009.
Yeah.
Well, how do they compete then with, you know,
Microsoft and their partners like Dell or HP Enterprise,
where they charge you for the hardware
and then you pay for the software
and then you pay for client access licenses.
And at that time they were trying to figure out
how to turn everything service-based
and Apple's sitting here going,
well, we're going to have a riot on our hands
if we try to convert like this,
why are we even bothering
when everything's going to go to the cloud anyway?
So they're sitting there going,
okay, how do we turn this into a recurring revenue model?
We can either, you know, duke it out
in like this stupid specialized hardware space,
or we can just turn everything into software, sorry,
everything into like a service-based cloud-based solution.
Obviously we know which way they went, right?
Yeah, yeah.
It's so good, it does so much.
And you just like get new software
that just comes out for it.
And there were some, you know,
dumb locked into the Apple ecosystem things.
You had to buy their hard drive, for example.
Oh yeah, gross.
Yeah, stuff like that.
But once it was up and running,
I can see why people loved them.
And people did, like I couldn't figure out
before we really dug into it,
why anyone cared that Xserve went away.
Now I get it.
It acted as you could use it
for like Windows domain services.
Oh.
Yeah, right?
I wouldn't have expected that.
SMB file sharing, like it did everything.
Very cool.
Yeah.
Okay, next one's up from Zach.
Hey Linus and Luke, I bought a house a year and a half ago.
Congratulations.
Nice.
And it's been a money pit.
Oh.
Ah, yes.
Would you like to retract your statement?
Last week my roof leaked
and badly damaged my ceiling and floor.
Do you have any homeowner horror stories?
Well, my garage has a roof leak in it.
The roofers have been back to fix it once.
It leaked again in the snow, this most recent snow.
So it's all wet again.
So that's cool.
I know Luke has had some horror stories.
My bathroom has leaked three times
because I was being gas lit
by everyone that came to repair it.
And they kept telling me
that it was something that it wasn't.
And then I finally got my like dad in
who can't do it himself
because he's not a licensed plumber anymore.
But as a plumbing instructor and knows his.
So he came in and actually figured out
what was actually happening.
And then he got one of his students,
ex-students who's a licensed plumber now
to come in and fix it.
And now it hasn't been a problem anymore.
But that leaked multiple times.
The roof has leaked twice.
The whole building had this like Christmas tree style leak
because there was a leak on the top floor
that leaked out and down throughout the entire building twice
because it happened.
And then the company that was trying to restore the building
from it happening caused another one to happen
on the floor right below that one.
Sick.
So it happened again.
And then it took them like a year to fix that.
And then a bunch of other things got wrecked and just...
It's been just a living nightmare, basically.
Do you remember the engineered hardwood that we put in
as part of the cleanest living room upgrade?
Like when we went from the dark brown to the gray?
Yeah.
So we chose that from a local flooring store
and the supplier for it was in California.
And basically what happened was they installed it here.
Our humidity apparently either is too high
or fluctuates too much.
And the whole thing contracted and ripped apart.
There's gaps in that floor this big.
Yeah, between the boards.
The installer tried to blame the store.
The store tried to blame the manufacturer.
They like sent in like a third party expert basically
to try to gaslight us into that our house
first they told us it wasn't humid enough.
Then they told us it was too humid.
Fortunately, we had a nest
that monitored our humidity constantly.
We were like, actually, no, that ain't it.
This is a defective product.
You guys didn't allow it to whatever enough
or you didn't secure it well enough,
or you buffered too little or too much.
You did something or the product just...
Anyway, they ultimately never fully fixed it.
And unless we want to sue them,
there's nothing that we can do about it.
I mean, there's my pool that isn't done yet.
That's pretty cool.
There was also when I installed the DIY air conditioning.
Well, first it leaked because I made a mistake.
And then that was fixed pretty quickly,
but it caused a little bit of damage.
Then we got, you know, by the laundry room,
the ceiling, yeah, the old place,
the ceiling there was like bad.
And like the floor was wet.
Oh, this was the new floor,
brand new floor was wet and was like rippling.
So that was separate from the issue with the floor,
which they tried to blame that.
They tried to blame the separation on that,
but we were like, no, no,
there are completely separate rooms
that are also separating, that ain't it.
Anyway, so it was like rippling
and we didn't realize until it had like come up
in between the things,
because the leak was really slow.
As it turns out, the problem was not that the AC unit
was leaking because you know how it collects condensation.
And it has to drain it somehow.
Well, that was all fine.
That's what I thought was the problem.
But I checked those units over and over
and over and over again.
They weren't leaking.
But the volume of water coming through
was obviously substantial.
You know what it was?
It was the main bathroom shower.
Do you know why we never noticed?
Because only Yvonne showers, I bath.
So it was a micro fracture in an elbow,
like a PVC elbow.
And as long as it was one shower once in a while,
it didn't leak enough to cause any kind of problem.
Like a few drops or whatever,
it will eventually make its way away
and it'll dry or whatever, even inside a wall.
But now that the AC was running continuously,
it revealed a flaw that had actually
probably been there for years.
Okay, so there, is that enough horror stories from you?
Homeownership do be like that though.
It kind of sucks.
Don't be down on baths.
What the is wrong with having a bath?
I take a different type of bath, but I take baths.
Yeah, I mean, your bath is more manly than my bath.
I got the scented candles up in there.
I got the chocolates on the side.
Yeah, I take a bath.
Look, man, when I, especially when I exercise,
I need a bath.
Like the heat, man, it's good for the muscles.
Yeah, those are good.
It's good for the muscles.
Okay, there's next one.
Everyone's saying dual shower is a lie.
Neo Choen says, I thought you said that
you and Yvonne shower together to talk over stuff.
Yeah, we used to shower together a lot more.
That was back in the day.
And we still do when I didn't exercise,
but man, like at least every other day.
Like I, okay, I'm gonna out myself here.
I'm not like an everyday shower or bather.
There's also, in my opinion,
there are certain levels of gross that you can be
after doing like certain amounts of whatever activity
that I will just go through the full shower cycle
just like twice if I'm having a shower.
Like this is just, this needs more than one pass.
And if you take a bath, you can kind of just deal with it,
which is nice.
I don't know, I'm not down on baths.
But yeah, so we do use the shower occasionally,
but we were not using it a lot
in the lead up to the AC thing.
And honestly, I haven't used it much at the new place.
I would bath significantly more if I fit.
I don't even like remotely fit in my bathtub.
So I only use it for cold stuff.
I'm not a once a week bather either though.
Anytime I exercise, I'll bathe
and that's usually every other day.
So like, I have very few opportunities to take a shower.
Like if I need to like quickly clean up, yeah,
obviously I'll jump in the shower.
Okay, got another one here from Jamie.
Linus, if you were stuck on an island,
what's the one thing in your LTT backpack
that will ensure your survival?
An LTT screwdriver.
I mean, there's no one thing
that's gonna ensure your survival, you're boned.
In what situation?
Maybe a tent.
In what?
You're stranded on an island.
Oh.
How about a sleeping, how about a shelter?
There, it could fit a decent size shelter.
Your backpack can fit a lot of stuff.
Yeah, but he said I only get one thing.
You only get one thing in the backpack?
Yeah. That's it?
Well, yeah.
Okay, got another one here from Tong.
Got my first tech job paycheck today
and the first thing I bought was LTT merch.
Are you proud of me?
Not necessarily.
As a big fan of open source software,
does Floatplane contribute to open source software projects
or plan to open source anything?
Some of them, and yes, and also no.
I, hold on, I want to address
the am I proud of you thing yet.
I am an advocate for fiscal responsibility.
So if you had a good job before that,
and it's just a career change or whatever else
and you have plenty of money, then by all means, yeah.
I'm super proud of you
for getting your first tech job paycheck,
but you should only spend money on stuff
if you can afford it.
You shouldn't just take a check
and just immediately convert it into stuff.
So if it was financially no problem.
Yeah, then love it, woo!
But if it was a stretch for you,
then I would like to see you take care of things
like shelter and food and your basics, your basics first.
We don't sell anything essential,
I think is pretty fair to say.
I mean, I think clothing is pretty essential
and I think we can justify the cost of the clothing
just with how well it lasts, but.
Oh.
Sorry.
That's Luke's reminder to tell me
that the show has been going on for far too long
and we need to wrap it up.
That's not happening anytime soon, let's go.
Yeah, I removed my bedtime alarms for a land show.
Next up's from Matthew.
Luke, I love how you have shaped LTT
and that you hired Linus.
Just spent 1.5 hours on hold
to set up an account for garbage.
What is the worst on hold call you've ever had
or worst service call?
Oh, Luke's got some stories.
I'm trying to even think, I don't even remember who it was.
I know there's been some like data center stuff
that's been brutal.
I know that I have spent literally a day,
like not a working day, like literally a whole day
from the morning till night on hold,
but I'm trying to remember who it was
and I don't remember.
Linus, I used to be very against calling people.
I hated calling people
and Linus got me on the just call people thing.
Yeah, he'd be like, they didn't reply to my email.
So there is simply no way for me to find an answer
to this question.
There's a phone number on their website
or like a phone number in their email signature.
And now I'm- Pick up a fucking phone.
Now I'm like almost too far the other way
where I like, I hate emailing
if I have the possibility of just calling people.
So like, I can just get this done faster.
I could get an answer immediately
or I could just wait around
and see if my message got lost in the ether.
Oh, obviously, boop, boop, boop, boop.
Let's go.
There's also a big problem with read receipts
and like modern messaging stuff
where it's, I really can't trust
if someone actually read it or not.
Even if it says that they read it,
if it's an automatic thing and they didn't react to it,
I don't trust that they actually read it
because it might've just been opened on their phone
and they didn't mean to.
There was something very, very recently
that I am a hundred percent not going to go into details of
but I told you about where I was just like
harassing people on the phone
until I got far enough into the chain
and then I finally got what I needed.
It worked.
It worked.
It was not gonna work any other way.
Nope.
Spent a lot of time on the phone there.
I don't know.
I don't have a specific one,
but I know that I have looked at my phone
that was plugged in
because it would like ran out of battery
because it's on the phone for so long on a hold timer
or I don't know if it was on hold,
but it's like the next whatever's waiting for you.
That was over eight hours long.
Wow.
I have seen that before.
And then when they finally went to go pick it up,
something happened and it disconnected
and I had to call them and wait through the entire queue.
Again, it didn't resume.
That's wild.
Companies that have call-in lines like that
really have to do the callback thing.
Yeah.
You're in queue.
Do you want us to call you back when you're up?
Yes.
You press the button, it hangs up,
they call you when you're up.
And failing that,
they need to not have any human voice in the hold music.
Yes.
That ****ing pisses me off.
Yeah.
Like, did you know that our whatever hours of operation
are this and this to this?
That, oh, is that a...
Still...
Because at least if I can just put it next to me
and completely space out.
That's...
All right, fine.
Not great, but it's acceptable.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Thank God you don't have minutes.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
It's not my plan anyways.
Get on, Linus.
Yeah, chat's loving this.
Hey, how's it going?
We're still on hold.
Yeah.
See you later.
It's so incredibly annoying.
Never ever.
Especially once you're more than like five minutes deep.
If you're two hours into waiting,
like I don't want to pay attention to this.
Yes.
Play the stupid hold music constantly
so that I know the line hasn't dropped or whatever else.
I'll put it on whatever volume I need
to not really care that much.
And the second that stops for whatever reason,
I want to pick it up and have someone be there.
Yeah.
Next up.
This one's from a different Matthew.
Longtime fan here.
I don't think I've seen either of you talk about Lobe
or AI ghosts before on when.
Do you have any thoughts on this phenomenon?
I would be careful Googling this.
I did that earlier and it's good.
I don't personally find it that interesting.
I'd never heard of this before.
It's very spooky.
I don't know.
It's kind of like a Slender Man kind of vibe.
That's what I feel like too.
It's kind of, I don't know.
Nah.
I don't personally find it that interesting.
Moving on.
Next one's from Corey.
Hi guys.
In the labs, your video you commented
how it wasn't making any revenue yet.
In the labs video,
you commented how it wasn't making any revenue yet.
How will it or the new site make revenue
by supporting videos?
Or will the new site have some form of subscription?
Yes.
Affiliate revenue, subscriptions maybe.
Helping us produce better content on the video channels.
Helping us launch more video channels.
I think-
Some of it's going to be a little bit intangible.
Yeah, I'd love to see retailers license API access
to our data, for example,
to make their product pages more informative.
I don't know.
In the long term, there's all kinds of ideas,
but only time will tell.
I know that it's going to be a competitive advantage
to have this testing capacity.
That I know.
What we're competing for, what we're going to win,
who we're competing against, not sure.
Okay, next one's from Melissa.
One of my coworkers has an LTT water bottle
and accidentally cooked it in our industrial oven.
Did you know that it can withstand over 300 degrees
for four hours with no damage at all?
Even the lid was intact.
I would not recommend that.
The glass beading might also-
Yeah, the glass bead in the bottom.
Yeah, 300 might not be enough to melt glass.
I don't know.
I don't know.
It doesn't say Fahrenheit or Celsius.
I would assume Celsius.
Okay, well.
Cool.
Neat.
Don't do that intentionally.
Yeah, please.
Next one's from Carlos.
Love the backpack, takes you to work every day
and the tech pouch will be a great addition.
I can't wait for LTX if you can talk about it.
Linus, what creators have you spoken to
about coming to LTX?
I haven't gotten an approved list yet.
Some of them are, you know,
even once we say they're coming, stuff happens.
Things come up last minute, whether it's like-
They're creators, their schedules are crazy.
Yeah, family responsibility
or an impossible to say no to sponsor deal, you know,
whatever, you never know.
Stuff happens, you know, life is crazy.
But what I've asked the team to do is check in with people
and say, hey, can I at least say
that you want to try to come?
And if you aren't able to make it,
no hard feelings or whatever,
but we want to at least be able to start to talk
about people and I'm not there yet, soon.
Apparently Brett from UFD Tech announced today
that he's going to LTX.
Okay, I mean, I didn't know, but there you go.
Someone in chat said it, I don't know.
No one told me he was confirmed.
So I guess creators might start talking
about it on their own.
Okay, next up is-
His mom is definitely coming.
My dad is, let's go.
Next up is from Riley.
Hey Linus, do you have any plans for your company
in terms of handing it down to your kids in the future?
If so, can you share any ideas?
I wouldn't want it to just turn into nepotism central here.
I don't think that's healthy for the work environment.
How would you go about employing one of them?
Man.
See, that's tough because I could imagine myself saying,
you know, junior, you're going to start at the bottom
and darn it, you're going to stay there
until you prove yourself.
But I could also see myself kind of, you know,
every parent wants to create an advantage for the children.
They want them to succeed, right?
So, you know, if my son or daughter came to me
and was like, you know, dad, I've got this great idea
for a channel, I-
You would want to give them a shot?
Yeah, yeah.
Maybe I'd want to give them a shot at it, you know?
Like I...
But then there's a risk there, right?
Like, where's the line between giving them a shot
and, you know, essentially hiring people
to babysit them.
I always liked-
Keep them out of my hair, you know?
I've told these stories before,
but my dad was very often one of the coaches
on a variety of sports teams that I played on.
And the initial reaction of all the kids on the team,
if they haven't played with you before,
is like, oh, this is going to be stupid
because you're just going to get
all the advantageous positions
and you're going to get more play time than everyone
and all this kind of stuff.
And within a couple of weeks, usually,
they had totally flipped and they were like,
oh man, I'm like so sorry,
because my dad would be way harder on me than anybody else,
which was absolutely the way to go.
We agreed on it.
Like there was, I mean, we agreed.
It's not like he was going to do it in any other way
to be completely clear,
but like I agreed with him on it and all this kind of stuff
because I hated it when all the kids would be like,
oh, like your dad's a coach.
You're going to get everything handed to you.
I would rather earn it and then them respect me.
So like, I liked that.
The other one was one time,
my brother reffed a hockey game that I was in
and the other team thought it was going to be BS.
And then I like hit somebody and my brother ran up to me
and grabbed the back of my jersey and tossed me across.
This is when he was like, max jacked.
He literally threw me and I went like flying through the air
and then everyone was like, all right, nevermind.
I think it's fine.
But yeah, I don't know.
I think you almost have to be like more watchful, more harsh
but then at the same time, it's not like.
The point isn't to just like beat them into submission.
That too.
Yeah.
Like you want to create an environment
where they can do their best.
Give them the opportunity,
but don't just like make them auto win.
I think that's the way to go.
Cause they're like, there's this whole thing
where wealth survives a maximum of,
I think it's like three or four generations
or something like that.
Because what the characteristics that create wealth
are not perpetuated by being wealthy.
So it's like cyclical.
Yeah.
And so we got to figure out,
how to make our kids have the same characteristics
that have made me and Yvonne successful.
And it sure wasn't growing up
with silver spoons in our mouths.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Like our kids have it way easier than we did
by a long shot.
We see it and we like don't know how to fix it
because obviously,
we would like to enjoy our success a little.
I don't want to have a newspaper route
after my full-time job during the day
and have my kids fall asleep in the back of the car
while I deliver papers or whatever,
just so that they see that.
Cause I just don't want to.
It's tough.
This has been a thing that's been very interesting
to observe from the outside is like how you deal with that.
Cause I know all those concepts
have always been very important to you.
Yeah.
But then it's like,
what's the limit on not enjoying your own success?
And like, what do you do?
Just lie to your kids?
Yeah, we could just not leave the money.
We've talked about it.
Yeah.
Is there realistically a benefit in that?
I don't know.
Are their lives actually better?
Maybe.
I'm not saying like,
I'm not actually fighting the other side.
I'm just.
I don't know.
And it's not even necessarily the kids that are the problem.
It could be the grandkids.
Like maybe our, yeah, I don't know.
Yeah.
Your inheritance is backpacks and screwdrivers.
Good luck, have fun.
Yeah.
Oh man.
You want another?
Yeah.
All right.
This is an anonymous one.
Hello and good weekend, Luke and Linus.
Is there being any progress on getting the official Honeywell
PTM 7950 thermal pad to LTT store?
A little bit.
You don't have to read the exact words.
You can like.
Honeywell are all rights reserved.
Um, yes,
but we're not sure what it's going to look like yet.
I don't think we had any luck getting in touch with
Honeywell directly,
but I think we're in touch with a supplier.
So yeah, we'd love, we'd love to carry it.
I think we're,
I think we were also chatting with the rack studs folks
about carrying rack studs.
Just like, I don't know.
Can the store just like carry good products?
I think so.
I don't see why not.
This one's from a scenario.
Oh yeah.
We'll get the dimensions for the tech pouch at some point.
I yelled at Nick and now they're on the website.
Oh, they are.
Hey, sorry.
I sent him a respectful professional message.
Of course you did.
That's Dan for you.
Size guide.
Got him.
Nice.
There we go.
Boop.
Enjoy.
Okay.
I'm interested in the new tech pouch,
but I don't see dimensions.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
We already did that one.
They're there now.
Let's go.
Okay.
Yeah, sorry.
Joseph, Linus,
the firmware on your Z-Wave stick,
the 700 series has a bug which creates
crazy amounts of traffic, making the network unusable.
Any more home automation videos coming?
I wonder if that's part of my problem.
I haven't specifically done that.
I will have to look into that.
More home automation videos coming?
Yeah, undoubtedly at some point, but not for a while.
I'm waiting on Inovelli to release their new
millimeter wave presence detection switches.
Hopefully that'll solve a lot of my problems.
So this is a float plane message actually,
but I want to address it.
Someone mentioned after the goat video,
have you gained any traction
with Linus opening a land center?
So one of the problems there is that
that wouldn't solve this particular problem
because so many, and we've talked about this too,
so many modern games don't support local play at all.
A lot of games are multiplayer only.
There's not very much like local scrimmage.
There's not very much co-op.
There's not as even as much single player I find.
There's a lot of multiplayer only games coming out.
And like Tarkov, for instance,
you can do something that is super privateery
and you can, there's like a single player version of it
that you can acquire, but it's like very not above board.
And that version doesn't support co-op
and it's like definitely illegal.
So it's, I don't know.
It doesn't really solve the problem.
With all of that said,
I am planning to open up a badminton center.
So this is, that's something I think
I haven't really talked about yet.
And it will be designed in such a way
that it will be powered up and networked up.
And the goal is to make WAN, wail WAN,
a regular occurrence.
So I-
We've talked about this vaguely.
Yeah, I think I've never really just come out and said it.
Progress is excellent on the building.
And it is loaded for bear in terms of networking and power.
I think we'll be able to do 250, 300 person lands there
pretty easily.
And the requirements that I laid out for Chase
and anyone working on events is,
I want this thing pretty much preloaded onto pallets
or like pretty much to the point where in three hours-
Oh, okay, yeah.
We can roll it out.
So like- Set up and take down really fast.
I'm talking network switches for the tables
that at the end of the event,
you just unplug them from the computers, wrap them up,
stack them.
So when it's time to redeploy them,
you just go plonk, plonk from the wall.
Do you think you could have certain folding tables
where it's like built into the table?
So you don't even have to,
you just unplug it and fold the table and put it away?
I mean, maybe, yeah.
I don't see why we couldn't wire it up like that.
I mean, basically I said, look,
I don't want it to interfere with our ability
to run this place as a badminton center.
But if we book off times occasionally,
I would like this to be unroll,
roll back up about three hours,
I think is the goal that I set for them
with a handful of people.
And I think it's doable because the entire building
is gonna have all of the connection points
for land and power to the point where
if you've got just like a couple of bins
of these California standard like power breakout boxes
and you kind of roll them over,
you can just go ka thunk, ka thunk, ka thunk.
Well, there's your power.
You've got just like a big cart of tables.
You just kind of roll down the middle and go,
okay, table, table, table, table, table.
If you know what the layout is
and you've kind of done it a few times,
I think we could get this down to the point
where we could on a Friday night say, okay,
thanks for watching.
See you again next time.
Same bad time, same bad channel.
For those of you who are gonna be at Whaleland,
we'll see you guys in half an hour.
That'd be sick.
And we just.
Dude, the after party comes back in a real big way.
Yeah. Basically.
Yeah, I'm super excited.
That's another random thing I found.
The overlay for the after party.
For the after party, the gaming overlay.
Apparently Jake updated your Z-Wave stick, by the way.
Oh, thanks, Jake.
Legendary Dust on Floatplane says,
Honeywell is hard to get ahold of.
They won't return my emails
and I'm trying to buy aircraft parts for the US Air Force.
Oh my goodness.
Okay, then.
Have they tried calling them?
Yeah, I don't know. It's a good question.
Very topical.
All right, hit me.
This one's from Brian.
Long time viewer, LTT store whale.
Thanks for adding another item I have purchased now.
When will we see the RGB PC case pin back in stock?
I don't know.
Limited thing?
I think that was part of the limited run the last time.
The reason that we did it as a limited run
was that we didn't get that one sampled
and we were worried it would suck.
So we ordered very limited quantities of it.
It wasn't an intentional limited edition thing.
So with that in mind,
I don't see why we wouldn't restock it,
but I don't have any kind of ETA on that.
You'd have to, I don't know.
Nick would know.
His department.
Okay, next up is from Lewis.
Hi, Luke.
On a previous WAN show,
you mentioned you would make inverted chicken cordon bleu
to impress people.
What kind of people, Luke?
Isn't that just like ham and cheese on top of-
How many X chromosomes did they have?
They have a chicken breast.
Two.
So, in the, yeah, I would-
How successful was it, Luke?
Actually, extremely.
How do you define success, Luke?
I'm not going into that,
but I will say it was 100% successful
and it had a decent sample size.
So it was chicken breast in a frying pan.
A little bit of olive oil.
You would put, oh man, it's been so long.
Okay.
Basil on top of the chicken breast
with prosciutto ham on top of that.
And then provolone cheese on top of that.
And you would try,
the difficulty was keeping it all together.
So part of the reason why this was successful
is because it was visually interesting.
So you could keep them entertained.
So you'd need to let the basil sit there for a second
so it kind of cook in.
And then when you put the ham on,
you wanted to kind of press it around the perimeter
of the chicken so it would kind of sear
into the chicken slightly so that it would hold together.
And then you need to use two spatulas to flip it over
once you put the cheese on
so you could cook the cheese on the top as well.
And then it was basically chicken cordon bleu,
just not inside, it's on top.
Call it inverted.
It was great.
And very successful, you say.
Yeah.
I don't want to know.
You do know.
Oh God.
Everyone knows.
Your mom knows.
Yeah.
It wasn't a secret.
Everyone's young at a certain point in time
and they're on the market.
Nope, I was never young.
I am now happily off the market.
This is not a problem.
I was never young.
I've always been old and boring.
I gotta talk to my mom.
Oh no.
All right, next one's from Greg.
Hey Linus, my company works with the fireworks.
They're happening again this year,
the same weekend as LTX.
Thought you'd want to consider giving people
a heads up Saturday downtown will suck.
Plan ahead.
Oh yeah, good point.
Oh.
I would hope by the time we're rolling around
to fireworks time, everyone who's gonna be at the BYOC
would already be there.
The whale land could like step out
and watch the fireworks for a second
and then go back inside.
Yeah, that'd be sick.
That'd be wicked.
I don't think it'd be for a second though
because if you need to be on like Spanish banks
or whatever to see them,
I don't think it's gonna be that close.
Okay, I don't know where they were.
Yeah.
All right, this next one's from AJ.
LMG holds a lot of valuable parts
and you often joke about taking stuff from the office
during extreme upgrades.
Has anything really valuable gone missing
or has anyone anonymously been caught doing that?
The Pippin Exmark console disappeared.
Yes.
I don't know what happened to it.
I genuinely do not have it.
Yeah.
Also-
And it actually sucks
because that thing was really cool.
I lent Luke this DVD.
That was not a part of work.
That is not inventory.
Eight years ago and I said,
hey, this is not only my favorite show,
but also it's kind of rare
and it has some sentimental value for me as well
and could I please get it back
once you're done watching it?
And not only did I not get it back
when he was done watching it,
I had to follow it up earlier this week
and he was like, no, I don't have it.
But then he was like, oh, maybe I do have it.
I said I would look for it.
And then he found it and now I finally got it back
and I consider that to be a long enough time period
that it's completely unacceptable.
He stole it essentially.
He stole it and waited for me to forget.
Oh, Pippin Atmark, sorry, did I say Exmark?
Sorry, Pippin Atmark was the console.
That is a true story.
I did just get this back from him
right before the show today.
I don't think necessarily all the details are perfect though.
The main ones, the main ones.
By the way, this is a great show.
It's streaming on CBC Gem.
It's very funny.
Okay, I guess I got it.
Where I worked, parts were locked in an inventory cage
or closets, hint, hint at Luke.
Yeah, it would be a little unreasonable,
I think, to do that here.
Yeah, I don't think it's realistic.
The building is that inventory cage effectively.
And we have good people here.
We've actually had shockingly little go missing
over the years.
I wouldn't even be surprised if we found
that stupid Atmark lying around somewhere at some point.
I'm just not too worried about it.
I don't know where it would even be.
I don't know.
Kind of sucks because they're not like-
It could have been thrown away.
The server that we used for 10 gamers, one CPU
got accidentally thrown away,
which I was extremely angry about.
It wasn't stolen.
It was just, it was chucked into the outside,
that trailer that we used for hauling junk to the dump.
And I found it in there completely destroyed.
Oh my God.
And I was like, what the actual happened here?
Because it was worth thousands of dollars, right?
And some miscommunication had taken place
and it got thrown away.
Oh my God.
Yeah.
That hurts.
Okay.
This next one's from another anonymous.
Where did the WAN show intro animation come from?
Ed made it.
Yeah.
He's made all of them, as far as I know.
And the last of the curated I have is from Brian.
Hey Linus and Luke,
have you ever considered open-sourcing
any of the software projects for floatplane and labs?
We just talked about this.
TBD.
Yeah.
TBD.
Okay.
We've got a few potentials.
I'll have a look at these.
Yeah, go through it.
What's y'all's favorite non-Canadian food asks Eduardo.
Favorite non Canadian, I mean, man,
pretty much all of my favorite foods are not like,
what the hell's Canadian food?
All we really have is like poutine.
Yeah, it's stupid.
And like half the time you get poutine here,
it's not made right.
Like it's too, the gravy's too cold to melt the cheese.
And you're sitting here going, this is basic.
It's got, I don't know, man,
like curry, like any kind of like Malaysian curry or like,
like yeah, Southeast Asian curry, Indian curry.
I love curry, like burritos.
Give me a burrito any day.
I love nachos.
Man, authentic Mexican.
Every time I go down to LA,
like the first thing I do is find some hole in the wall
Mexican restaurant now, because it's so good.
Yeah.
So good.
Yeah, we have, we have some Mexican places up here.
Most of them are like fast food style.
Like Chipotle style, which is not really going to be it.
And the like one or two sit downs that we have really.
They suck.
They are not on the same level at all.
Now you could go to any like just random Mexican place
in like LA.
It's like, it's the same as,
it's the same as how you can get, you know,
Indian food in Vancouver and it's like overpriced
and it's fusion and blah, blah, blah.
Or you can get Indian food in Surrey where there's a huge
like East Indian community and it's like,
it's cheap and plentiful and delicious.
You're just like, yeah,
because that's where the people who eat this all the time
and actually know what it's supposed to taste like are.
Yeah.
So, yeah, it really, it really depends.
Yep.
All right, I'm doing this now.
Now it's your job.
Okay, so now I just, if I hit reject, does it go back?
Okay, if someone can clear them from the reject pile
after I press that, then that would be cool.
Luke, what would you say gives you the most fulfilment
in your professional life?
Asks Luke, oh wait, it's not,
oh, it's for both of us from Luke.
I thought it was to Luke.
Sure, well, cool.
It's not that easy, is it?
I've had a really fun time as my team has expanded
and the things that we work on have expanded.
I've really liked, I don't know.
I like making things that people use.
And like, no, I'm not directly making it,
but I like working with a team
who makes things that people use.
So like, I like that internal people
use the inventory system.
I like that Linus Media Group is the, you know,
the largest member of Floatplane and we use the platform.
I like that people are going to be using the labs website.
I like that people use blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
And I like that the path that we're going on
is more of that.
I've always liked that.
One of the reasons why,
when I first got into software engineering,
I wanted to work with,
I wanted to make like controller boards
and stuff like that was because like,
people are literally going to literally use this thing.
And I think that's cool.
So I've always liked that.
I think that's probably mine.
Yeah, I think that's,
I think that combined with seeing people follow,
not follow, because they take
completely different paths from me,
but seeing people be inspired by what we do
and get into computer engineering.
Software engineering, electronics engineering,
like seeing what we're doing,
just like sharing this love of it,
create a new generation of people
who are going to pursue these career paths
and create the next wave of cool technology
for us to geek out over is,
I love that it's kind of a perpetual motion machine,
what we're making.
Definitely, yeah.
It's a good one.
Michael says, been waiting on these shirts.
Also, I really enjoy watching
some of the more thematic artistic builds
like the NerdForge PC.
Do you have a favorite?
Well, the NerdForge PC, obviously,
that thing is so cool.
Actually, we've done some other really cool stuff.
The copper tubing build was really amazing.
I loved Alex's sleeper builds.
Like that Xbox one was super cool.
Favorite builds.
I mean, the original desk PC was a classic,
but I don't know that it's a favorite.
Anonymous says Friday when shows a ritual at this point.
Fun fact, lttstore.com merch is all over the place
at Zoox, a self-driving car company.
Not to have go AI tangent, Luke,
what are your thoughts on robo taxis?
Oh yeah, I saw this.
I think they're absolutely the future of taxis,
like no doubt.
I also don't think we're necessarily 100% there yet,
but I totally think that's the way that's gonna go.
Thought that for a long time too.
Yeah.
I think I'm replying to the right message yet.
Oh wait, oh shoot, no, I replied to the wrong one.
Oh no.
Jody, I don't have any thoughts on
for systems cooling yet, the solid state cooling.
I haven't been hands-on yet, but hopefully soon.
I think we're in touch with them.
Asa asks, last year I had asked about the possibility
of the lab developing a DAW benchmark,
a digital audio workstation benchmark.
You said it'll happen likely, is it still in the works?
It will happen.
I don't know that I would say it is in the works,
but it is absolutely something that we want to do.
It just hasn't been the highest priority.
And you know, that's the thing, right?
Is something that is like always B tier, never gets done.
And I don't know how we get past that on this one,
cause you're not the first to request it
and you won't be the last.
And anonymous asks, what technology is in its relative
infancy, like RISC-V or graphene processors or whatever,
that you're excited to see in the hands of consumers?
AR.
I think AR is not even infancy yet.
I think it's still in the womb.
I'm so sketched for AR.
All the conversation around AR right now
is saturation of ads.
I'm not kidding.
Like that's actually what it is.
I'm hoping for useful AR.
Yeah.
Saturation of your ad.
Yeah.
Well.
LCD store!
Yeah.
Okay, that I don't know.
I don't know if I want to be a part of that.
Subscribe to Flowplay!
Great.
And I think that's it for the show today.
We'll see you again next week.
Same bad time, same bad channel.
Bye!
I don't know.
This is hilarious.
Um, uh, no, it doesn't matter.
Uh, the, uh, the, the Slav is messaging me, um, just past, uh, just
past the class and is excited.
Telling me a little story at the end of the session, the instructor goes,
okay, let's take an end of session photo.
Uh, let me just take my glasses off me.
Pops his blue light shades on instructor Ivan.
Why did you put your shades on me?
Because when you're this cool, the sun shines above you 24 seven.
That's why.
And you know, he would actually talk like that.
Yeah, this is cool though.
Um, the, the money that we raised when we, uh, matched his donation with the,
the GPU collection auction and everything like that, this is a part of the, um,
the like children's Ukraine, uh, like shelter thing that, that was made.
So it's just the picture.