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- [00:02]
A
Alrighty, Go for it.
- [00:07]
B
What is up everybody and welcome to the WAN show. I am coming at you live from a Microsoft Teams AI replace background. Just kidding, Luke. It's real. I can prove it. Oh yeah, look at that.
- [00:21]
C
Look at the effects. Look at the amazing effects.
- [00:24]
B
I am in beautiful Connecticut today where I've been attending a secret event that actually like has a live website. It was really cool. I got to meet some incredible creators. I met the one and only Alec from Technology Connections. I also met Michael Reeves for the first time. That was awesome. Got to catch up with Tom Scott. It's been an amazing, amazing couple of days. So I'll be talking about that a little bit. And I will also be talking about, oh, I don't know, maybe the fact that, sorry, GameStop has offered $56 billion for eBay even though GameStop does not have $56 billion. So I definitely have some thoughts on that. What else have we got this week, sir?
- [01:09]
C
Well, I, I mean I offer 57 billion, so. Okay, now it's a bidding war.
- [01:17]
B
Thank you, that's helpful.
- [01:18]
C
Yes, it's just as legitimate as an of an offer. Did you mention the Valve thing? I don't think so. Valve imported 50 tons of some something just being called game consoles. For now. We'll have to speculate on what that might be because there's at least a couple things and Toyota built a $10 billion private utopia tech city. What is, what does that even mean?
- [01:42]
B
And I gotta throw one more in here because our headline topic wasn't actually in our. Our 4. AMD is prepping full HDMI 2.1 implementation for Linux. This is super exciting for anyone who's a big gamer on Linux or who just loves resolution and high refresh rate displays over hdmi. AMD just keeps being chatted and I absolutely love it. Roll that intro. The show is brought to you today by Tell Zoho, MSI and Squarespace, along with our rap partner Dbrand, our chair partner Razer, and our laptop partner Razer. I gotta say, I am really missing my razor chair right now. There is negative lumbar support on the like couch that I'm sitting in right now. And it is, it is extremely uncomfortable. Can't wait to get back to it. But why don't we jump right into our first topic for today which has got to be the big news that AMD is prepping full HDMI 2.1 implementation. They submitted patches to add HDMI fixed rate link or FRL support to their open source Linux GPU drivers which is a huge step toward full HDMI 2.1 support on Linux. FRL is part of the HDMI 2.1 standard and enables the higher bandwidth that's needed for higher resolution and refresh rates. This is all notable because in 2024 the HDMI forum rejected AMD's earlier attempt to bring HDMI 2.1 to its open source drivers over, you guessed it, concerns about exposing proprietary details of the standard. Which ain't that the always way? Anytime someone tries to do something really cool and just do the work for somebody on Linux, some standards body or some company is like you. Yeah, no. Yeah, just no. No. An AMD driver engineer confirmed on the Pharonics forums that a full implementation is on the way pending compliance testing, and that display stream compression support will follow in a later patch. And this change and the timing of it are, let's just say, convenient and very interesting in light of one of our other headline topics, which is of course the the supposed what was it, 50 tons? Are these metric tons? Are these imperial tons? The 50 tons of steam consoles that Valve has apparently just imported? Because it was a major topic of discussion during the announcement of the Steam Machine that, hey, it's got kind of a modern GPU in it, couldn't help noticing it doesn't support HDMI 2.1. What's up with that? Well, if AMD's implementation lands and passes compliance and the timing of all of this works out, it could be that Steam OS devices could get HDMI 2.1 either at or closely near launch. We don't know if Valve's been involved in these patches at all, but just given how chatted they've been about all of this, nothing would really surprise me. Luke, do you want to jump right into the speculation around the very, very soon upcoming Steam Machine launch?
- [05:26]
C
Yeah, between April 30th and May 1st. Brah lynch, who was correct about the Steam controller import documents a couple weeks ago posted that the United States received a total of 50 tons of game consoles from Valve. It is unclear if this is the new Steam Machine, which would be the console, or the Steam frame, which is Valve's new VR headset, or possibly even just a bunch of Steam decks, though unlikely. But they were also game consoles when imported before, so it wouldn't it wouldn't be too weird. It's worth noting, 50 tons is not maybe actually as much as you might think. The Steam Machine was confirmed to weigh around six pounds, which would be about 20,000 units, which is probably not enough, even if you think it's not hyper compelling because if we look at like the Steam controller, which basically every review that I saw was like, it's a little expensive for what it is and then it just instantly sold out like it's Steam hardware, it's just going to fly. So yeah, I mean if this is the entirety of the initial wave of the Steam machines, I think they're just going to fly out immediately.
- [06:38]
B
Yeah, I. Is it our discussion question on this one or is it our discussion question on a different one? Yeah, I don't remember. But I'm going to move our discussion question one sec.
- [06:50]
C
Elijah included that the math to figure out that it was 20,000 units is accounting for shipping weight and sea can weight and things like that.
- [06:58]
B
Yeah. Okay. I guess my, my question here is. Ah, yes, this is actually our discussion question for the Steam Controller selling out in 30 minutes. And it was, you know, given Valve's history with, you know, the Steam Deck, was the day one sellout just unavoidable or should a company of Valve scale have been better prepared? And I guess I have the same question when we come to the Steam Machine. If, and this is a big if, because we don't know for sure, but if this is just 20,000 units of steam machines for the US market, is valve being kind of irresponsible in launching it with such limited inventory, or is it possible that this is just, you know, the first shipment and you know, the next five seacans coming in are going to mean that we're actually going to have a reasonable amount of launch inventory? Like if they launch this with just 20,000 units, is that just kind of asking for trouble from scalpers? Because Steam controllers are going to like
- [08:04]
C
hundreds of dollars if this is the Steam Machine, basically everyone on the Internet has been saying I'm not that interested for a long time. So like if you're, if you're choosing, yes, I still think it's low personally, but if you're choosing the stock for this, I can understand being a little bit concerned compared to the Steam Deck, even compared to the Steam Controller, people were very interested in the Steam Controller. They just said it was expensive and that Steam hardware. So you can just be like whatever, people are gonna pay for it anyways. But the Steam Machine, like most the press I saw on it, was saying it's not super compelling. Which I mean, I still think it's cool.
- [08:40]
B
Like if you're Valve, don't you have kind of a, don't you have kind of a responsibility to, to make your products available when you say they're available and stop acting like a small company.
- [08:51]
C
I think the Steam Deck, if I remember correctly, sold out pretty much immediately, but then had fairly rapid waves of restocks, did it not?
- [09:00]
B
Sorry. Oh yeah. Yes, yes, it was restocked pretty rapidly. So it was clear that they were kind of, they kind of had staged shipments that were sort of in various stages of being transported across the ocean at the time. It's also possible though, I'm just speculating on this, but it is a pretty common strategy that they would have if they had like one shipment in their warehouse and like one at the dock and one at the midpoint of the ocean and one that was just wrapping production. Sometimes what'll happen is if things go way better than expected, they'll actually take that one that is just wrapping production, throw it on a plane.
- [09:42]
C
Yeah.
- [09:42]
B
And it'll actually beat any of those other ones to the warehouse. So you can kind of, you can kind of massage the availability of things that way. Like we've, we've had to do that with some of the cables. We've had to air freight them rather than sea freight them just because the demand is so ridiculous. But I just, I don't know man. I, seeing what they did with the controller is not really giving me a ton of faith that Valve is adequately stocking this thing. And at a certain point I've actually had a Valve employee say to me like unironically, you know, something, something, something, but like, you know, we're a small company so blah, blah, blah, and I go, listen,
- [10:27]
C
revenue and profit wise, you're not a small company at all. As, as a hardware company, they don't ship that much hardware. And I, I think that side of their business is, is relatively small. But still, they, they, they could not be, as you're saying. Yeah, I think as well, it's, it's, it's like scalper bait. There's, there's tons of these controllers on like ebay and elsewhere. I, it's, it's tough because I wish that they did more to fight against that, but I don't necessarily know what they do. That doesn't make it.
- [11:04]
B
One of the things they could have done was they could have just not called it the exact same name as the original Steam controller, which is causing a lot of OG Steam controllers to be sold at scalper prices by, you know, to confused relatives or gift givers. Right now that's, that's true. That's a really frustrating situation that was completely avoidable that I raised with Valve when they did the unveiling, and I was like, hey, this is a really bad idea. I raised it again in the review. And then I just. I don't know, I was feeling kind of sassy and I sent them and I told you so as well. I was like, I basically linked them like a bunch of scalper ebay listings. And I was like, hey, so just a, you know, third time. This was super avoidable. And you guys didn't have to do this. You could have just named it in a way that wasn't confusing.
- [11:55]
C
Yeah. People are now calling it the Valve Steam Controller 2026 model.
- [12:02]
B
And if Valve had called it that, I wouldn't have even been that mad.
- [12:06]
C
Would have been a little bit better.
- [12:08]
B
But they just called it Steam Controller. Like, guys, so avoidable. And so I guess I'm just. I guess I'm just kind of. This is just kind of a run of avoidable issues from them. And I. And I hope that, like a. I hope we give Nintendo enough appreciation for what they did with the Switch 2 launch. They took the time, they delayed the launch, they built up inventory to make sure that if you wanted to switch to pretty much at launch, you could go and get one. And that's. That's something that is not necessarily good for their cash flow and to your point, can be a risky thing to do, but it's good for your customers. And I want Valve to stop behaving like a scrappy startup and act like a real company when it comes to their product launches. And I realize this is kind of rich coming from the guy who can't keep his cables in stock for more than flipping 20 minutes. Right. I get that. But come on, man. I definitely operate with constraints that Valve does not have. Just doesn't have.
- [13:20]
C
Yeah.
- [13:24]
B
With all of that said, hey, where are you at for Steam Machine? Like, I feel like in the initial launch window, people were super excited. The excitement kind of waned as we made our way into the Rampocalypse, and. And a lot of the pricing estimates for the Steam Machine started to go up. Valve clearly has gotten their hands on enough RAM to manufacture the thing because they haven't actually delayed the launch outside of Q2, which means it's coming in the next seven to eight weeks. Where's your bullishness right now?
- [13:58]
C
I still think it's super cool. I. I don't think the lack of interest due to Rampocalypse has anything to do with Steam Machine. I think a very, very significant amount of people are just not interested in Computers right now because they are in a lot of ways kind of boring. Like the most interesting news in computer land right now is people running away from Windows. It's not, it's not hardware. And then hardware is super, super, super expensive and it's just a terrible time to be into computers unfortunately. So I think that is what reduced the interest in the Steam Machine. Nothing to do with the actual Steam Machine itself really. I think so when you look at handhelds, people prefer the Steam Deck mostly over pretty much all the alternatives, even though the Steam Deck is pretty old and underperformant compared to alternatives at this point. And I think there will be a market of people that will really like a Steam Machine. People like Steam hardware. Another push forward for Linux, for SteamOS. I think both of these things are good. I wouldn't be surprised at all if the Steam Machine is at least part of the kick in the pants that pushed AMD to try again to push for the HDMI 2.1 thing. I think it just keeps progressing this same thing that we've been trying to push for for a while now, which is Linux for more people. And that's great. I think people will buy it. I Suspect if it's 20,000 units it's going to disappear immediate. I don't suspect it's going to be like oh my God, this like incredible value option that a bunch of people seem to think that it was going to be.
- [15:43]
B
Does it need to be?
- [15:45]
C
I don't think so.
- [15:45]
B
I wish it was too.
- [15:46]
C
I don't think it is.
- [15:47]
B
Does it need to be in the grand scheme of things? If what the Steam Machine can accomplish is it can is it can make PC gaming a more console like experience, something that's easier to get into even if the money barrier is still there. Something that requires less sort of technical know how. If it takes people out of their comfort zone and puts them into Linux, if it creates an install base for Linux that incentivizes developers to target this hardware platform. Like can we then, can we then forgive Valve for if the Steam Machine ultimately is not that affordable?
- [16:26]
C
I like there's some people in flow plane chat McBain said that the Steam Machine will need to be cheap. Decock said the deck hit a value proposition. I hear what you guys are saying. That's very true. The controller sure as heck didn't sold out in 30 minutes. I don't think the machine is as compelling as the controller. I don't think the machine is as compelling as the Deck. I think Valve knows both of these Things I think for the people who kind of want a home theater machine and it would be pretty cool to have a steamos powered home theater machine paired with the knowledge that is kind of weird and a little bit uncomfortable for me, but the knowledge that an incredible amount of people just buy pre builds. This is a cool Steam powered pre build that is trendy because It's Linux and SteamOS and it can play all your freaking Steam games and it's on your TV and your cool new Steam controller works with it and your Steam deck and your Steam machine are kind of in the same ecosystem. Neat. I still think it has all of those things. I don't think it's going to be super price competitive. I think for a lot of people it's going to price them out. Because any computer right now is basically going to price out a massive amount of people. It just is a fact at the moment. But especially if they're bringing in low volume, I think it's going to do well for them. And I welcome anything that is honestly going to keep spicing up the competition in the operating system space right now. Because even if Microsoft is waking up a little bit, I need them to wake up a lot.
- [18:02]
B
Yeah, I. This is going to sound crazy. Okay, bear with me for a second here. So far, I like the new leadership at Xbox.
- [18:19]
C
Yeah.
- [18:19]
B
One of the first things she did was slash the price of Game Pass. Yes. Removed day one access to cod, which is, you know, a big boatload of suck for people who bought Xbox, bought Game pass just for cod, but in my opinion, actually a boon for everyone who enjoys the variety of Game pass and appreciates that aspect of it more and wants the subscription to be more affordable. So I can actually, I can, I can get on board with that move, especially as someone who doesn't play cod. So, so take that, take that for what it is. I already like what they're doing with changes to the branding, changes to the messaging Xbox.
- [19:03]
C
Good.
- [19:04]
B
That, that whole this is an Xbox campaign where like a TV is an Xbox and iPads and Xbox, everything's an Xbox. I understood where they were. I understood what that meant. Right. I didn't know anyone streaming, but like, you know, how long was Microsoft going to beat that drum that the Xbox is not a game console? I mean, after the disastrous launch of the Xbox One with the Kinect module and then eventually unbundling the Kinect module and going, oh, okay, so it's not the center of your digital life or home media hub or you know, whatever. What it feels like to like how long were they going to keep trying that? And it seems like she's saying not anymore.
- [19:45]
C
She's also saying this isn't in the doc, but I want to bring this up anyways. I'm gonna share my screen. I don't think you can see it, but I'll speak to it. Microsoft gives up on Xbox Copilot AI New Xbox CEO Asha Sharma continues to make her mark.
- [20:03]
B
Here's where I'm going with this. Here's where I'm going with this. So far I like her and I think both you and I were really skeptical because we were just like, okay, so what she comes from like the AI side of the what her gaming street cred is functionally other than other
- [20:20]
C
than reducing the price of game pass. A lot of it right now is words. So I like, I like the words
- [20:25]
B
but they're good words.
- [20:26]
C
They're good words but I'm still kind
- [20:28]
B
of holding powerful words, holding judgment, tears streaming down their face. I like these words. They said these are the finest words that any man or woman alive has ever, has ever said.
- [20:41]
C
I don't know if I'll ever taste words like this again.
- [20:44]
B
So. So I like her. And I'm going to make a bold prediction right now. With Sony being unwilling to just shoulder the cost of selling consoles at a loss, they in an unprecedented move they raised the price of the PS5. Sony has never raised the price of a console before. You and you can make the argument that when they, when they did the the slim for the PS5 they if effectively raised the price and in some ways they like kind of did depending on what configuration you were buying. But they also like didn't Sony raised the price of a current generation PlayStation 5. Never been done before. Nintendo this is in the dock for this week. Nintendo is raising the price of the switch to that one. I don't know if it's never been done before but it certainly is not common. Valve has moved away. They are at least it looks like they have signaled a strong intent to move away from what they did with the Steam deck. With the Steam deck they got really aggressive and from what I've heard they weren't selling it at a loss. That's not my understanding but what they did do was they made a huge commitment to amd. They did that custom silicon and that enabled them, that was a big part of what enabled them to hit a hyper aggressive price point and really build an install base for this machine so that developers would have a reason to care about it. So so far, everyone except Microsoft is kind of on defense right now. Do you kind of. Are you kind of picking up what I'm throwing down right now?
- [22:22]
C
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Microsoft doesn't have much to defend right now.
- [22:27]
B
What if Microsoft is the one who comes in with Project Helix, which is the codename for the next gen Xbox, and does the like 299 and walks off stage? And to be clear, it's not going to be 299. Don't. Don't live in a diluted la la land where you think you're going to get a console.
- [22:50]
C
You said it.
- [22:52]
B
No, I know. I don't mean literally 299. Honestly, you know, against the backdrop of, of rising technology prices, I think if they walked on stage and even said 499 at this point, that would be a mic drop moment. I'm not sure how much hope I should have because Microsoft has actually also said prior to Asha Sharma's leadership that the next gen Xbox will be very expensive. But like Microsoft has also done a two tiered strategy already twice. So just because the X SKU is really expensive, that doesn't mean that there won't be a really compelling value option. We don't know that. So do you have Luke? Can you find. Check your pinky. Can you just look at. Check your pinky. Can you find even like a single tiny bone in your body, like a pinky sized bone that contains any hope for Xbox to be the savior of the next generation of consoles? Can you find that hope? He's trying, but he's trying, folks. Oh my God, the brow furrow. Oh, watching. I'm watching in real time as you, as you're trying so hard.
- [24:09]
C
Oh man, my, my gut says no. But you are saying one singular bone and I have, I have a lot of bones.
- [24:17]
B
Yeah. Can you bone this?
- [24:20]
C
I don't know. I can, I can hope. I seriously doubt though, if you look at Microsoft's path with Xbox for so long now, the answer from them is for sure no. But you know, she's also clearly down to try to change the path and change the strategy. So maybe they figure out. I think it really depends on like what are the goals that have been given to her. Is she supposed to make it so that Xbox isn't the laughing stock of consoles anymore in regards to like when you're saying like, oh, the other people are raising their prices and I'm sitting here being like, yeah, and Xbox is raising their price on what? Like they don't have to raise their Price. No one's buying their consoles. It doesn't matter. Like what is that? Was that random thing that outsold xboxes for Christmas?
- [25:13]
B
Oh, the Next Cube.
- [25:14]
C
Not the. Oh yeah, the. Yeah, NextCube or whatever it's called?
- [25:18]
B
Is that. Is that what it's called? Oh man. What is it called? Is it called Next Cube?
- [25:22]
C
Definitely not the Ouya Next Cube?
- [25:27]
B
No, no, not something else. What am I thinking?
- [25:31]
C
We don't even know the name of it, dude. And it outsold Xbox. That's. That's my point. So like is. Is from Next Playground. Next.
- [25:40]
B
Next Playground.
- [25:41]
C
Nex. Not Nex.
- [25:43]
B
Yeah.
- [25:43]
C
So you were.
- [25:43]
B
Yeah, close. They. They Xbox connected better than Microsoft was ever able to Xbox connect and managed to outsell the Xbox with a console that effectively requires a subscription. It's freaking wild that that thing is as found that market that it has and absolutely killed it the way that they have. Kudos to them.
- [26:04]
C
Yeah. And it's stomped. So like, is. Is the goal from higher than her that was given to her like her KPI for. For her, not even Microsoft, but for her was her KPI. Hey, we want to be taken seriously in the console space again. We want to sell some freaking consoles and get our name out there and be a big player again. Because we're honestly not right now. Or was it just revenue line go up? Because if it was just revenue line or profit line go up, maybe. Because if it was just that, she might be incentivized to focus on what she's technically been focusing on so far, at least publicly, which is Game Pass and pushing Game Pass even harder and
- [26:42]
B
getting Game Pass not including COD in Game Pass because that cost them a whole bunch of revenue.
- [26:47]
C
Yeah. So is it those things or is it make Xbox a console that people actually buy again? Because if it's this one, if it's, hey, we're going to try to invest in the future. We're going to try to get our market share back in the console space. We're going to do these things. We're going to double down on consoles continuing to exist because it felt like in the era of Metaverse VR, all that kind of stuff, Microsoft was just going like, no one's even going to have consoles anymore. Let's ditch them. But that seems to be going away. Yeah. What's up?
- [27:23]
B
Okay, okay, okay. Here's what I want to know this. I'm actually like hyper interested in your perspective on because I think that you almost have like two competing fragments of your soul in your body that are almost that have goals that are almost in. In perfect conflict with each other. Because on the one side, the. You were an Xbox kid, and when you see a green Xbox logo that makes a little lizard part of your brain light up and go, yeah, Xbox.
- [27:54]
C
Yep. Yeah, yeah, exactly right.
- [27:59]
B
Okay. Okay. Other side. Other side of your other fragment of your soul is PC gamer. Why would I game on anything that I didn't build with my own two hands or. Or Linus's children built me, built it for me or whatever. You know, some. Some variant of why would I play
- [28:17]
C
on a computer that wasn't. It didn't have child labor involved. What are we talking about?
- [28:22]
B
Good news, Luke. You don't have to. None of us do if we're being very honest.
- [28:27]
C
Yeah. Dang. Oh.
- [28:30]
B
Ooh. Okay, let's move on from that really, really fast. And. And. And. And rooting for the customizability and the DIY spirit of. Of PC gaming. And I think that part of you has really embraced the way that Microsoft is. Has. Is making the PC more Xbox. Like, and buying a single license of an Xbox game gives you the right to play on PC. And I suspect you're also pretty down for like, the Xbox full screen experience and how it makes your PC run slightly more efficiently and less like a Windows machine and more like a gaming machine. How do those two pieces of you reconcile with each other? When we know. When we know in our heart of hearts that the thing that makes a console generation successful more than any other, more than any other rule in the playbook, Exclusives is exclusive. Yeah. See, you knew exactly where I was going with it. That's what sells consoles. So how can Xbox be. Come back to its former glory without, like, Dead Rising and without Halo exclusives and without. Without all these things that made the 360 era the peak of Xbox? What would it look like for you?
- [29:49]
C
Yeah, it's tough. I. The exclusives one is interesting because Sony and Xbox both started pushing games to Steam. You can. There's a. There's a chart that I saw recently that was super interesting, which was like PlayStation exclusives and how they performed on Steam and like Helldivers was way up there and. But a lot of other things did pretty well. But, you know, Helldivers killed it. But a lot of people, like, that's a lot of PlayStation games on PC. People are still buying tons of PlayStations. So, like, I kind of feel like, you know, them. Them putting Microsoft exclusives on PlayStation might be the too far move in terms of exclusives, but I don't know 100%. I also don't know if this is just my brain trying to convince me this is true or if I actually believe it's true. But I don't know that putting games on PC ruins your console attractiveness. Now I would also have to dive deeper into the time.
- [30:52]
B
Do you want to dive first or can I counterpoint that first? Sure, it's up to you.
- [30:56]
C
Well, I was going to add really quick thing basically, but I don't know how PlayStation has done it. I don't know if there's like an exclusive window at the beginning and then they released it or not.
- [31:05]
B
That's exactly what I was going to bring up is that the PlayStation 5 generation has been one of shifting strategies for Sony. Yeah, at the beginning of the generation there was to my knowledge games that to anyone's knowledge were never going to come to another platform or at the very least there was literally no given timeline. Then Sony kind of started to do this thing where it turned out they were actually selling like, you know, a lot of PlayStation games on Steam and they started to talk about, you know, when the window is going to open and when you'll be able to buy these PlayStation games on other platforms. Now I don't think this has actually been confirmed formally and someone can correct me if I'm wrong. Hit me up in the chat guys. But from my understanding, Sony has now sort of started to look at these numbers in the gear up to PlayStation 6 and gone. Okay, well hold on a second. Maybe we need to dial back this exclusives on PC on Steam strategy because are we selling enough PlayStation fives right now? I would say we're not. That's, that's my understanding of kind of where, where it's at right now. So I see a future where there's a window where, where Xbox exclusives exist on Xbox exclusively for some period of time, a year, year and a half, two years even. And then they kind of open up the floodgates and go, okay, let's grab some more extra revenue. Now that this has moved as many consoles as it, as it will, I
- [32:50]
C
honestly think even six months is, would be completely fine. The world moves so fast. Now one thing that I want to throw out there is this chart from the Alina Insight newsletter. Alina Analytics Substack Copies sold top PlayStation Studios games by copies sold. You see, Helldivers 2 is way, way, way up here. This is sold on Steam. I don't have the stats for on PlayStation. As far as my understanding goes, this game sold gangbusters on PlayStation 2. Well, as well.
- [33:24]
B
Thank you.
- [33:25]
C
It was released simultaneously on PC and PlayStation 5. It did release on Xbox, but it was way delayed on Xbox.
- [33:33]
B
Okay.
- [33:34]
C
Oh, but closer to the window I was talking about, not a year or two years. It looks like it was released on PlayStation and PC in February and it was released on Xbox in August. Same year? No, not same year, next year. So it was a pretty big window.
- [33:49]
B
Okay, so like 18 months almost.
- [33:50]
C
That's huge.
- [33:52]
B
I mean, we're in pretty uncharted territory right now. Pun kind of intended here, where this whole thing with exclusive, but like not exclusive, but maybe timed, but maybe sometimes not timed. You know, I think it's. I think it's pretty, pretty obvious that Nintendo has, has drawn a clear line in the sand. They allow their IPs in other, you know, forms of media now. Like, you know, there's that, there's that mobile Mario Kart game. And you know what? Actually, I mean, their IPs have actually, I remember what was it Mario is missing was like a PC. A PC Nintendo IP game back from when, like I was a kid. So they, they allow their IPs on other platforms, but Nintendo seems pretty clear that if you want to play a Nintendo game, you will play it on a Switch console or they will come after you. Yeah. Is this. Did I imagine this? Maybe it was something else.
- [34:55]
C
No, it. I mean, it shows superness as the, as the image, but it says Platforms, Ms. DOS.
- [35:01]
B
Yeah.
- [35:01]
C
Macintosh Windows Ness. And Snooper super ness.
- [35:04]
B
I remember seeing it for sale at London Drugs.
- [35:06]
C
I've never heard of this before anyway.
- [35:09]
B
I never actually played it.
- [35:10]
C
I just like it so much.
- [35:13]
B
Oh, well, okay, maybe, maybe, maybe that was the one. Maybe that was what chased them off the PC in the first place. But. Okay, so you've laid out your ideal strategy, which is that Microsoft doubles down on the Xbox hardware being affordable. Right where. I don't know if you actually said that, but it was kind of.
- [35:32]
C
Yeah. I asked if they want consoles to. If they want their console to continue to exist in a meaningful way, they need to make a splashback because they're gonna have to win everyone that went to PlayStation 5 back, which is gonna be tough.
- [35:48]
B
Yeah.
- [35:48]
C
So they're gonna need to come in and swing in with something big.
- [35:51]
B
They.
- [35:51]
C
It would be real good for them if they had a Halo like game, which. What's the last, like Microsoft Studio game?
- [36:03]
B
Forza, I guess would be the last one standing.
- [36:06]
C
Forza Horizon 6 is coming.
- [36:09]
B
Yeah.
- [36:09]
C
It'll be too early for the console
- [36:11]
B
launch, but in terms of like blockbuster, first party, Microsoft game or even exclusive game. Like, I'm having a hard time even. Even thinking of any. Yeah. Lightning XCE and chats. Like, I don't know, Halo 2 remake again.
- [36:32]
C
Yeah, like, yikes, man. So I don't. I don't know what they have to like really bring people in and. And Halo has diminished pretty hard.
- [36:45]
B
Yeah, I don't.
- [36:46]
C
I honestly don't know if they're capable of bringing it back. Starfield was kind of bleh. Yeah, I'm not confident in Bethesda being able to release a good game.
- [36:59]
B
Don't worry, Activision Blizzard will do it.
- [37:03]
C
Yeah, okay. Sure. I don't know. They sure spent a lot of money buying some stuff.
- [37:11]
B
Okay. No key. Put together a comprehensive list for us. Here we go. Cool. Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 Gears of War Reloaded. I could say you look like. You look like. I know it didn't happen because I'm not in the room with you, but you look like someone farted and that's what you look like.
- [37:29]
C
I know it didn't happen because I'm not in the room with you is hilarious. He farts on Wedgeo so much and you guys have no idea.
- [37:40]
B
Age of Empires 2 Definitive Edition. Oh, is that helping? New Fable. You know, what a killer dude.
- [37:53]
C
The new Fable that doesn't have character physical changes based on karma status.
- [37:59]
B
What? Really?
- [38:00]
C
Yeah. Did you hear about that?
- [38:01]
B
How's it even Fable, right?
- [38:03]
C
Like, what are you doing? New Fable won't have.
- [38:07]
A
We made a different game and slash the name on it based on karma.
- [38:11]
B
This is one of those things that I just kind of. I look at and I go, look, I understand from a game developer standpoint and even from like a fan and community standpoint, you know, the sequel shouldn't just be like, slap a coat of paint on it, Force Awakens it and just make the same thing again, you know? But how can you not. Yeah, how can you. How can you take something that was like. Like a core standout differentiating feature of the original and just go, eh.
- [38:44]
C
Dude, when people tell me about Fable, when Fable was first coming out, that was the thing that they would tell you. That was it. It's an rpg and the actions that you do physically change your character based on karma status. It's like, oh, wow, Interesting. Boom. Pointed out. It's like Civ 7 forcing you to switch civs all the time. Amazing example of just like, what are you doing? Like, I honestly have no interest in ever launching Civ 7 again. That game is just cooked in my mind.
- [39:15]
B
Like, I don't even care about cosmetics. Like, you know this. I've never spent a dollar on cosmetics in my life. And just. Just out of silent protest towards horse armor and everything that followed it, I mean, you know this too. I played a bunch of Halo Infinite. I earned a bunch of helmets and armor, like, what skins? And I stubbornly played with the stock skin no matter what my rank was. I actually even did the same thing in Claire Obscure, where they're not even. They're not even purchasable. I just, I played with the stock outfits the whole game because I'm just like. I don't know whether I'm old school or whether I just, like, can't stand the idea of microtransactions and cosmetics in my game. I just, I don't. I don't want to even allow myself to assign a value to my character looking a little bit different. And I'm probably. Yeah, I'm probably. I've gone too far. And that. That's, that's like, that's totally fine. But even for someone like me who goes out of my way to proudly, publicly not care about cosmetics in Fable, there would have been times when I was like, this quest would be easier or this situation would be easier if I just murdered the crap out of everyone. And I didn't because I didn't want to like Senator Palpatine myself.
- [40:38]
C
Yeah.
- [40:39]
B
And I. And I wanted to. So. So tying the moral choice to your physical appearance in that way, it's super interesting. Impacted gameplay for me in a way that I think would actually be even more impactful in the era of in game cosmetics and in game outfits. And to not do that is like actual insanity. People are saying crazy to me, by
- [41:08]
C
the way, that apparently Firaxis has announced that they are going to maybe be walking the force. Changing of civs back or something. I don't know the details. No one linked an article, but multiple people said this look like. I don't know. People are saying it might be a different mode now. Yeah, they did. With the time of update. Something. Test of time. I don't know. But something may have changed or be changing or something like that. But honestly, like, I. I played one match of Civ 7 and every single Civ game that I remember playing Since I think Civ 4, you play it on launch and it's like, like, ooh, it's a little rough, but I see the bones. This will be cool. We'll come back in some updates. They release Some expansions, and it becomes really, really good. And then you wait, the next game comes out, and the same thing happens. Civ 7 was the first time that I played it and was like, the bones are rotten.
- [42:03]
B
Oh, here it is. PCGamer.com Rough Civ 7 players can once again play as a single civilization in a massive overhaul update that is tentatively coming in spring.
- [42:13]
C
So it's not here yet.
- [42:14]
B
These. These updates are similar in scope to an expansion, so there's hope.
- [42:19]
C
Luke, maybe I won't completely give up, but I will say, like, I specifically remember playing Civ 6 and being like, ooh, I don't like a lot of these systems. I don't like how this works. But, you know, they do this every time. I'll just wait, and then it'll get good. And then I like Civ 6 now. I didn't have that reaction playing Civ 7. And, you know, if they can pull it out, they don't have Luigi anymore, so that'll be rough.
- [42:44]
B
If they can put.
- [42:45]
C
Jeez, that'll be rough.
- [42:47]
B
They can pull it off. I think it would be considered a win, though.
- [42:50]
C
They lost their ace in a hole. They lost their.
- [42:53]
B
I don't want to talk about. I don't want to talk about Xbox forever. That was. That was crazy what you just said, and I'm glad I was talking over it. I want to play a fun game before we. Before we finally move on from, like, talking about Xbox. But Amaker in Floatplane Chat kind of inspired a little short conversation that I want to have with Chat here and said, if Microsoft bought Project Red and made the cyberpunk sequel an exclusive to Xbox, I would definitely go back. I think that's literally the only title I can think of that would bring me back to Xbox. And I actually want chat. I want you guys to kind of give me your line. Give me your bribe that it would take for Microsoft to. To. To win back.
- [43:41]
C
That's an interesting question.
- [43:42]
B
Yeah, like force you back to Xbox
- [43:45]
C
Witcher 4 and Cyberpunk 2087 or something both coming to the new Xbox console would be pretty. That'd be a pretty big pull.
- [43:56]
B
One of the. One of the things GTA 6. It's not happening. It's not relevant. I shouldn't say it's not relevant. It's very relevant.
- [44:02]
C
Honestly.
- [44:03]
B
Don't say any of the conversation. Yeah, give me something a little more realistic.
- [44:07]
C
I think something that's kind of funny about that argument to me is the thing that would bring you back to Xbox is them buying Another game studio and seeing how they've handled the ones that they have, like, I would prefer that just doesn't happen. I think, you know, okay, they have new leadership. I need to. I need to try to remember that and have some hope because she's been doing, you know, she's been saying good things and has done a good thing so far. Yeah, Peter, Just one more hit, bro. Yeah. I don't know. I don't know, man.
- [44:42]
B
Oh, man. Elijah says Elder Scroll 6 being exclusive might cat OS is like Portal 3. Okay. We all know that's never happening.
- [44:53]
C
People. Got me, man. Titanfall 3, Titanfall 3. If they actually made a genuinely good Successor to Titanfall 2, that. That would be my hook. 100%. I would be done. I'd be cooked immediately because that's the. In my opinion, Titanfall 2 is. I don't know how nobody freaking played it because EA is dumb and never marketed it. But you look at reviews on Steam, overwhelmingly positive. Everyone loved it. The community is super strong. That's the, like Halo. That's their Halo. If they market Titanfall 3 properly and they get the IP somehow and they get some of the spirit that actually made Titanfall 2 and they make a genuinely good successor to it, that game would.
- [45:33]
B
The combat is so fun.
- [45:35]
C
It's so fun.
- [45:36]
B
That game is just. And it's one of those things where it's like, you know, how wine connoisseurs will talk about the body and the aroma and the whatever. You know, we can be the same about games, right? Where we start to kind of pick them apart and we talk about the innovative mechanics and the stunning visuals and blah, blah, blah. But at the end of the day, does any of it matter unless it's fun? Titanfall 2, I could say a lot of really sort of pretentious things that are really good about it, but at the end of the day, it's fun.
- [46:12]
C
Sometimes you're in a mech and it's never not fun.
- [46:15]
B
The weight and the like, the momentum of this mech, you can, like, feel it. I was never even like a mech warrior kid, but it was like, me neither satisfied.
- [46:23]
C
And it was great.
- [46:24]
B
And, and, and those combat sequences made sense. You had big weapons and you fought big stuff and then you kind of. It's kind of like, like Power 90s Power Rangers, man. Where then that didn't mean that you could just solve every problem with your big mech. Sometimes you had to fight on the ground and like, cool, like Mirror's Edge, like Parkour and like running and sliding and like really satisfying gun combat too. It's just such a fun, fun game. Okay. Okay. I think, I think we're starting to lay a groundwork here, Luke. So they need to actually somehow turn around Bethesda and make a good Elder Scrolls game.
- [47:01]
C
That would be massive as well.
- [47:03]
B
They need to, they need to do Titanfall 2. You know, COD is going to be COD, right. So you know, but I don't, I don't think, I don't think at this point you can make COD Xbox exclusive. I don't think there's any putting closing that Pandora's box again.
- [47:20]
C
Yeah, I don't think they should, to be honest. Just keep. Like if I'm trying to think, if I'm trying to fully put my Microsoft hat on, I don't think they should do that with cod.
- [47:32]
B
I don't think so either. Yeah, take. Taking COD off PC would be crazy work at this point.
- [47:37]
C
Obsidian based New Vegas sequel, I don't think they can do. I don't think they even should do a new Vegas sequel, to be honest. I think just doing an Obsidian based Fallout though could be pretty sick. If they, if they get Bethesda to just really actually make a good game again and they focus on. On Elder Scrolls 6 and just leave them there. Yeah, and take. Get Obsidian to wake up and make things and make Fallout, that'd be awesome. They somehow get the IP and actually do right by it with Titanfall. That would be amazing because honestly, I don't think they can make Halo. I feel like Halo's like aged out. I don't know how you fix it. I think may maybe if you get off of Spartans or something. Like if you, if you focus on
- [48:32]
B
what is even Halo without Spartans though. Like, come on.
- [48:35]
C
Yeah, if you somehow focus on like
- [48:37]
B
planets too, you know, like what are we even, what are we even talking about?
- [48:42]
C
Yeah, I'm not sure. Yeah, people said odst. There's odst.
- [48:46]
B
We should move on. Mad Scribe says, hey, Steam controller has a reservation queue now. So if you want one, that's probably the way to do it. If you don't want to get scalped on that. And man, don't pay $300 for a steam controller. It's a good controller. At a hundred dollars it was kind of hard for me to wholeheartedly recommend. At 300 it is impossible for me to recommend. I don't go, go sign up for the queue. Give Valve your money. Not predatory scalpers. I don't know why I have to say this. If we all just got together and never paid a scalper for anything. They wouldn't exist anymore and it would be a better world. Don't do that. But let's, let's, let's, let's move on. We should probably get some sponsors done. Hey, Dan, I can't see your. Your thing or why don't I jump into the CW announcements first. We actually have a pretty loaded up week for cw. Some of you have noticed this already, but to celebrate our new website, dbrand. Luke, do you want to share your screen?
- [49:46]
C
Yeah, let me get there.
- [49:48]
B
Dbrand Products select dbrand products are now available on lttstore.com with exclusive colorways Ghost and Green Circuit that look absolutely flipping amazing. And the best part is that unlike if you order these products from dBrand's website, you will actually get both the Ghost Circuit skin and the green Circuit skin for the product that you select. So we've got skins for Switch 2 as well as for Steam Deck for key modern phones. I've actually gotten a ton of comments. Where is it? Where's my phone? There it is. I've gotten a ton of comments on my Green Circuit skin here. It's got just like very OG classic circuit board vibes. And then we've got the, the white one. The Ghost Circuit has like a super cool kind of prismatic. You'll have to find maybe another shot to. Dan has some shots on his computer that show how it kind of catches the light. Dan, do you want to just. Do you want to show those and just go back to. Yeah, you can kind of see it on the, on kind of the bottom there. What else you got? Hit me. Yeah, you can see it kind of at the bottom of the phone there. Yes. Super cool. Dude was up in float plane. Chaz says. I knew you were using a skin that wasn't a thing before. You ignored me for a reason. I understand. I'm not mad at you anymore. I'm glad we're good. I'm glad we're good. D was up anyway, freaking excited about this partnership. So now if you wanted to get a dbrand case for, for your device, then you can also pick up some awesome stuff from lttstore.com at the same time. And I've got a couple of things that you can, that you can pick up that are new for this week. We're launching our LTT Precision Multi Bit Standard kit. So a little while ago we rebranded the Precision Kit Pro. And that was in preparation for this because we now have two tiers of our Precision Multi bit screwdrivers. This one is designed for everyday repairs, upgrades and tinkering. It covers the most useful precision bits in one compact package. Has the same premium LTT build quality with an anodized aluminum handle, magnetic bit retention, a stainless steel internal shaft, and an end cap that spins suspiciously well for something meant to be a screwdriver. A it builds on the best selling precision pro and it packs the most useful bits. A removable crossbar for stubborn screws. That's new. And a magnetic organizer case into one compact everyday kit. So the main difference here, guys, is that. Hold on, I'm actually trying to think how many, how many bits are included.
- [52:42]
C
So this one has 31 and the big one has 61.
- [52:46]
B
And then Luke, if you zoom in, you can actually see there's a hole through the driver now that you can use that torque bar on. And so it doesn't have the internal bit storage in the driver anymore. But some people actually prefer this style anyway. So we've got that launching this week. And then finally we're adding new colors to the blank T shirt lineup. We're getting a seasonal refresh with grape, jade gray and cafe. Excuse me, coffee. Same lightweight fabric, refined fit and all the overthinking that went into making a genuinely good blank tee. And also available in tall because finding basics that actually fit shouldn't feel like a side quest. Love that, love that tagline. So guys, you can check out the new blank tees. I think that's it for creator warehouse stuff. Oh, okay. This is interesting. We have a new mailing list. We're offering a single use 10% off LTT store coupon for people who sign up to be notified on all future drops. We have 85 plus more products still launching this year and you can be among the first to know. The coupon is valid for the next seven days and you can sign up at lttstore.com pages/welcome. Oh, I guess we should jump into a few comms. We believe that when you throw money at your screen when you're watching your favorite creators or podcasts or whatever else it is that you should get more than just the self satisfaction of supporting a show that you like. You should get quality products in the mail. So we did away with super chats and Twitch bits and all that other stuff and we consolidated all the contributions to the show into checkout messages. All you got to do to send a checkout message is what Luke's doing. He is presumably adding something to his cart. There he goes. He's adding something to his cart and he's going to show you guys the interface. Once you're in the checkout, you will see the box to type up a little checkout message. There it is. You can choose your color, you can make your name show up if you wanted to. I don't know. If you want your name to show up on screen, you can make it anonymous. And then when you guys are done typing up your message while we're live, it'll go to producer Dan. There he is. Who will respond to it or curate it for me and Luke to respond to. And we'll show you guys how that works. Do you have a couple checkout messages for us, Dan?
- [55:12]
A
I do, yes. I've got a few here. Hello, lld Live leaks and damage control. How many times have you blamed a company for a product not working when it's because of you and you will not admit it?
- [55:28]
B
I've definitely blamed companies for things not working because. And it turned out to be user error. I can't, I, I am open to a time that I have done that and not followed up.
- [55:47]
C
Can you think of, can you think of the most maybe interesting one when it was, it wasn't Jimmy Fallon show, that one just actually didn't work. Can you, can you think of maybe the most interesting one where it was user error and you ended up figuring out later?
- [56:04]
B
Let me think. I'd say that happens a lot more like live on WAN show where I'll be like, oh, I can't get my, you know, my iPhone to do this because I'm not fact checking everything for WAN chat.
- [56:15]
C
Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's true.
- [56:17]
B
I don't fact check everything in my life anyway. Oh, yeah, of course. Of course chat's gonna go there. Billet Labs, question mark. I mean, my, my issue with Billet Labs was not that the temperatures weren't good, though. The reason that I was dismissive of the product is for all the reasons that it failed anyway, which is that it was expensive. It didn't fit in any case that existed or would ever exist.
- [56:43]
C
Based on your technical thing, you were saying that you didn't. Because you guys did use it wrong, right? You used it on the wrong card or something.
- [56:49]
B
Yeah, we used it on the. So. So they told us it might work on this gpu, but it's designed for this other one. And I put it on the GPU that it didn't work on and the temperature sucked. But by that time I had already had to modify my motherboard to get it to fit. I had already determined that it was not actually like good to put in any case, anywhere ever. I had already, from my experience as a water cooling product, product manager, I had already determined that there was never going to be a follow up to this thing because I don't think people even like remember this video at this point. They're just like mad. Right? So part of the pitch for it was like, hey, if your GPU changes but you keep your cpu, you don't have to throw away the whole thing. You could like, you could like have like a GPU replacement. Yeah, they never made that because that was never.
- [57:43]
C
All I was trying to bring up was that I think we did talk on wan show about how you technically didn't use the, the fully appropriate card. So it wasn't, it wasn't that you didn't address that.
- [57:53]
B
Oh yeah, no, we. Oh, we totally addressed that. It just wasn't the problem with the product. The problem with the product was that it was a bad product and it didn't matter how, how it performed because there's a. You can only, you can only get water cooling to ambient temperature. Right? And water cooling CPUs and GPUs has been mostly an optimization problem for like many years at this point. We saw this when we did water cooling through the ages. So no amount of, of narrowing, of reducing that sort of that narrow performance band was going to make this totally senseless product make any sense. So. And I've been completely validated on that. They did one production run and then never made it again, in spite of all of the attention that it got. Like millions upon millions upon millions of impressions for this product.
- [58:44]
C
I mean, I still don't think it was handled properly, but.
- [58:46]
B
No, no, it wasn't. No question, no question. But it was doomed from the start.
- [58:52]
C
Sure. But I don't think we need to go over it all again.
- [58:57]
A
How about another one?
- [58:59]
B
What else we got? Anyone got anything?
- [59:03]
C
There was. Wasn't there some time you said something about a drive like the PlayStation or something and.
- [59:10]
B
Oh yeah, but we did a whole video.
- [59:13]
C
No, I'm not, no, no, no. The core question, because we got way off track here. The core question was what do you think was the most interesting time that something went wrong because of user error and then, you know, we addressed it or whatever because it's going to happen many, many times. We've been making content for way 20 years. So what do you think is the most interesting one? I don't need you to like defend something. It's just. What do you think was the most interesting one.
- [59:40]
B
I mean, I don't think the PlayStation
- [59:43]
C
one might not be a good example. I was just trying to throw options out there. When I'm, when I'm thinking interesting, I'm thinking like it was, you know, the reason why the user error happened might have been because they did something in a, in a very interesting but non standard way. So it kind of like was intriguing when you figured out that it was user error and it ended up making the product cooler. Potentially not temperature wise, like interest wise.
- [60:08]
B
I mean it wasn't user error. But I think my favorite product that I was ever completely wrong about was probably the Logitech G cloud. I just completely underestimated what a great experience that product would be for the right, for the right user. And it's still not something that I find myself using. Like there's one in our warehouse. I, I don't use it, but when I did take it home and use it for a while, I was like, oh, I get it now. Because it was like so light and the battery life was so great and I had been so, so dismissive of that. I think that's probably, I think that's probably the coolest product that I've ever been like totally, totally wrong about. Can you think of any, like, are there any that you were just like, yeah, this thing is useless and stupid.
- [61:10]
C
But like, I mean we've disagreed on things many a time over the years, but that makes sense. I can't really think of like. Again, that isn't really at the core of the, the question. So I think, I think we just move on to the next one.
- [61:31]
B
Sure. Yeah. And you know what? Realistically, there's probably something that I've gotten wrong that I just don't even know yet. Like if, if anyone. That's why I kind of wanted to go to chat because if there was something that you guys saw that, that, that we kind of, that we got, that we got wrong that I have not acknowledged yet, then I'm, I'm happy to. I'd like to
- [61:56]
C
bring back Kickfirted. Kickstarter is not like the same anymore. It still exists, but it's, it's a totally different world. It's honestly I'm assuming more like a marketing probably better now. Yeah, it used to be like the freaking wild west and now there's. There's a lot of companies that like, are Kickstarter companies kind of like they, they almost exclusively like, they, they barely even have their own websites. They basically just function through Kickstarter Kickstarter is where they launch every product. Product that they make. Like, these are, these are totally a thing. Which is, which is cool. It just makes it less interesting in a kick farted stance for people that don't know what we're talking about. We used to have a series called Kick Farted. I don't think there was a. I think there's maybe like three of them.
- [62:43]
B
We did like two episodes or three or something like that. Yeah, yeah.
- [62:46]
C
But it was. We would, we would back a Kickstarter and the idea was that we'd actually hope that it did ship, which was another flaw with the plan because sometimes they just wouldn't end up shipping at all. But we would back a Kickstarter, hope that it would ship. And then, you know, our bet basically was that it was going to be junk.
- [63:06]
B
Yeah. If it's good, then it's a review of a cool product. And then if it's bad, then it was Kick Farted. But it turns out the overlap between ideas that were good enough to eventually get manufactured, but so bad that they were completely dead on arrival and just
- [63:25]
C
worse when they trashing basically is.
- [63:28]
B
Yeah, it's like really, really, really small.
- [63:31]
C
Yeah, yeah, yeah. It was fun to make those. I had. They were, they were fun to shoot, they were fun to write for. It was actually kind of fun testing those types of products. But yeah, it's just the, like, limited inventory of what types of things you can actually do that with just sort of kind of ran out. I'm sure there's been examples since then, but we haven't paid enough attention that you would have to. To be able to do that over time.
- [64:00]
B
And I don't think really anyone has like Kickstarter was. Had this like super, super powerful moment of, of relevance. And I, I think it's kind of in the past now.
- [64:18]
C
Yeah. I mean, there are still things that just go freaking gangbusters on Kickstarter.
- [64:22]
B
Oh, dude. I mean, I'm holding one.
- [64:25]
C
Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's a good example. Like Kickstarter is still a really big deal. It's just not, you know, it's not in the news like every freaking week. Like it was before. Like. Yeah, this Slay the Spire Downfall board game campaign. It's. It's a, It's a board game that raised $7.6 million.
- [64:53]
B
Wow. But then, I mean, that's like, that's an established IP too.
- [64:58]
C
But that's what I'm saying. That's a lot of Kickstarter now.
- [65:00]
B
Yeah. Just using it as. Using it as marketing slash, as a, as a cash flow exercise, like we've got a product coming. It's the one that I was alluding to that in order for us to manufacture enough of them, probably the best way to raise that money, outside of like, you know, taking private equity or venture capital or whatever, outside of taking outside capital, would probably be to essentially crowdfund the costs of the first production run by announcing it early and like doing a Kickstarter campaign. I don't think that we would bother to use the Kickstarter platform if it was us. Like I gotta imagine there's like a Shopify plugin for that.
- [65:48]
C
Right, but just pre orders, basically.
- [65:54]
B
I mean, essentially. But part of the fun of Kickstarter is that it's at like different tiers. So if you get in really, really early, it's at like a crazy good price or it comes with extra. It comes with a hat that's like, yeah, I backed it first. Or like building these kind of, these bundles.
- [66:09]
C
We have the ability to do that.
- [66:11]
B
Yeah, yeah, I think we could do that.
- [66:13]
C
Remember the wave system that we had for the backpack?
- [66:16]
B
Yeah, I remember.
- [66:17]
C
Pretty sure you could just use that to like change it as it goes.
- [66:22]
B
Master of none says, aren't there strict rules regarding the use of crowdfunding capital? I don't believe you're allowed to spend that money. No, no, no, but we would be spending the money to make the product, so that would be fine. So that, that's what I meant by like raising money to do the first production run. It would be to make the products that people are buying. You're just, you're selling it at a discount so that you can, so that you can scale it up faster so that you can get the money in ahead of time so that you can produce it all, all in one go. Rather than doing a small production run and then selling that and then using that cash to buy twice as many and then selling that and then using that cash to buy twice as many, which is like a many months long process.
- [67:06]
C
Yeah, like I'm going through the technology section on Kickstarter right now and.
- [67:12]
B
Yeah, bring it up. Let's see.
- [67:13]
C
I don't.
- [67:14]
B
I can see your screen share.
- [67:15]
C
Oh, really Cool. There's like a kalimba.
- [67:19]
B
What's a kalimba?
- [67:20]
C
It's a musical. You, you push down the like metal prong.
- [67:23]
A
It goes boing.
- [67:24]
C
Yeah. Okay, so okay, there's a 3D printing modular arm system. Neat. I mean, I'm assuming you're just.
- [67:33]
A
I want to see the kalimba actually, because it looks like an electronic Colombo.
- [67:37]
C
It is sick. Yeah.
- [67:39]
B
Okay. Yeah. I mean, half a million USD, sure.
- [67:42]
C
Yeah. But are like, is Linus tech tips gonna make a video about an electronic Kalimba? Probably not. So that's not. It's not really like, topic relevant for. For us.
- [67:53]
B
If it makes Dan happy, it's relevant for us. Luke, come on.
- [67:56]
A
Is that a granular delay? What is all this cool audio crap on?
- [68:00]
C
It seems like there's a decent amount of interesting audio stuff. Floor washing robot. I don't know, man. RC tank. Like, a lot of this isn't stuff that I would see and be like, oh, yeah, kick farted.
- [68:18]
B
Cool.
- [68:19]
C
Maybe some AI glasses.
- [68:21]
A
This all looks like relatively competent, but
- [68:24]
C
then there's so many AI glasses coming out that I feel like we'd be better off just making videos about AI glasses in general. Yeah. Like, it doesn't really scream that it needs a kick fart it. There's a keyboard.
- [68:37]
B
Look at this lens. That is comical sticking off of that phone lens.
- [68:40]
C
Yeah. Okay, so it's just like. I don't know, man. I don't see Kickfarter making sense here.
- [68:47]
B
McBain says LMG doesn't need Kickstarter, just use pre orders. So pre orders have always been kind of an uncomfortable thing for me.
- [68:56]
C
And isn't it kind of the same deal?
- [68:59]
B
Oh, it's totally the same deal, but we've. We've always shied away from it. Like, if you recall, like even the screwdriver in the backpack where we made major bets, we. We basically were like, you should never preorder. You know, I don't know for sure that you'll like it. You should wait for third party evaluations. this point, I am. I am starting to recognize that at the scale that we're operating at and at the experience that our team has, I'm a lot more confident taking people's money ahead of time for something that is on track, that is. Is hitting all of its milestones. And the project, which is. No. Is not the battery bank, it's actually a different one. The project is coming along really, really well, to the point where if I know that this thing is going to absolutely be super, super exciting for people and they're going to absolutely freaking love it. And if there's some. Something else that we could do, or even nothing else that we could do, I was thinking like, we could do like a satisfaction guaranteed policy or something like that. But I don't think for sanitary reasons, this would be a good product for us to Take a bunch of returns for anyway, so that could get complicated. I don't know. I'll have to think about it. Some more.
- [70:23]
C
Interesting question from McBain. Why not enable pre orders for the cables? You've already shipped a ton.
- [70:30]
B
Okay. All right. Yeah. And you know what? I could do that. I could. I could take. Realistically, I could probably have, like, millions of dollars sitting in the LMG coffers right now who want to wait for a cable. But riddle me this, right, right now, McBain, you're probably a little irritated that you'd like to buy this cable and you can't get it.
- [70:55]
C
But what if it takes six months?
- [70:57]
B
What if I had your money? Then how irritated are you? And that's always. That's always been the challenge for me. Like, we're our manufacturer literally in the process of building more capacity just for us, because the demand for this thing is. Is completely beyond the expectations that we had and that they had. And so, I don't know, like, we're. We're in uncharted territory here. I don't know how long it's going to take us to. To be able to meet the demand that is there for these. These freaking cables. And so I. I don't know how to. I don't know, man. Yeah, so. So it comes back to me saying the same, taking the same principled stance I had before, which is, I really don't want to have your money and be in a position where, you know, there could be a mismatch between what I'm promising and what you're expecting, both in terms of timeline and in terms of product quality. Right. So I. Yeah, and someone had a good suggestion. I missed. Whose. I missed the username for it. But it was, you know, you could just take, like, a little bit of pre order. What about a little bit of pre order? So we actually did that. Remember when there was, like, a second wave that, like, went up for sale? That was someone else in the company making a decision that we were going to take pre orders on the cables we were going to make out of the extra cable stock that we had that was, like, sitting staged, ready to go. People still lost their minds waiting for those, and it causes a whole bunch of tickets to customer service who otherwise just wouldn't have to deal with that. And. And what I said when I kind of lecturing, not one person, but, like, the team that made that decision on, like, why I had decided we weren't going to do that was, guys,
- [73:01]
A
why
- [73:01]
B
did we make this decision? Did it lead to a better experience for our customer. Yes or no?
- [73:06]
C
Is it just a communications problem?
- [73:09]
B
Yeah, well, that's part of it, but communication's hard. You can put as much communication on a webpage as you want. People won't read. It doesn't matter. So. So did this make. Did this make the experience better for our customer? Yes or no? It. No or neutral? Basically. Was the response like, okay, did this make us more money? Right. Like, that motivates businesses, right? Businesses make decisions to make more money. And the answer, again, is no, because we were going to sell those cables the second that they reached our dock, regardless of whether we took people's money ahead of time or whether we take people's money when they arrive. So, again, the answer is no. So all we're doing is we're putting a little bit of cash in our bank account from our customers today, and we're holding it. So why don't we let them keep it?
- [73:57]
C
Because the backpacks. I don't remember if people were upset or not, but as the waves went on, we would just tell people the estimated shipping time. From my interpretation of the story that you just told is we didn't tell people that there would be a different shipping time.
- [74:17]
B
We did, but maybe we could have done it, like, even more in your face. But even then, you still get with the wave system, we still had people who were upset about that and who just felt it was really ridiculous. I get that. I get that. And so I've always had, you know, sitting next to shout out Corbin from ncix. All right, I worked in customer service sometimes in the early days, not because it was necessarily in my job description, but because when we had, like, holiday rushes and big sale events or big launches and stuff like that, customer service would get overwhelmed, and they would just kind of call on random people who knew our system well enough and were technical enough. And I happened to be one of them. So, you know, sometimes I would work in customer service, and I would. I would sit there, I'd sit in the bullpen, and, you know, I'd hear the exasperated voice of Mr. Corbin explaining to someone for the. For the. For the 13th time on this call that, hey, when you ordered this, it said, Ships in seven, eight to 11 days. Or, you know, whatever. It says special order ships in eight to 11 days. We shipped it on the 10th day. Shipping's not magic. It's still going to be a little while. That doesn't mean delivered in that number of days. And the site was so clear. It said ships in or, like, like whatever, whatever the word was. But people, they don't read. And now that's customer service's problem and it causes, it causes stress and frustration. And what if we just avoided all of that?
- [75:53]
C
I don't want to out the company, but I bought a thing I was going to say recently, it's not even recently anymore, a while ago. And I was emailing them monthly asking for updates because they weren't giving me any updates. And their website didn't say anything about delays or anything I think it might have said. I ended up looking at the website and I couldn't find it. But I think at the time that I ordered it, it might have said that it might take a month. And we, we passed the three month point of. Again, they never sent any form of update. I kept reaching out to them and they, they emailed back. I think it was like yesterday or something. And we're like, yeah, oh, this is like right now. Yeah. They're like, yeah, we're shipping, we're shipping it Monday. I'm like, cool, thanks. It's been, it's, by the time it gets here, it will have been like three and a half months for one thing. That didn't warn me of that at all. It's very annoying at this point. I think it's the longest I've waited for something that I've ordered that didn't have like a very specific, you know, this product is not ready yet. It will release at whatever time because there are, there are definitely things that I'm trying to think,
- [77:07]
B
you know, like
- [77:07]
C
a shirt that was made for some events.
- [77:11]
B
It's a Trump phone, right?
- [77:12]
C
Oh my goodness. No, it's not a Trump phone. It's fitness equipment. I just don't want to call it
- [77:17]
B
the brand because fitness equipment, whatever. What are we supposed to be doing right now? Oh my gosh. Was that one comm. Okay, hit me with another Dan.
- [77:28]
A
Sure. I am looking this year to upgrade my TV from a 77 inch OLED to something in the 98 to 100 inch range. Currently looking at the TCL X11L or wait for what Sony Truergb brings. Will I go Rhett going away from OLED?
- [77:48]
B
Okay, so you're clearly a mad baller because you're upgrading a 77 inch OLED.
- [77:55]
C
So first up, the biggest thing that's piqued my interest on that is you have the throw distance for this to make any sense.
- [78:01]
B
Yeah. First up, congratulations tv. You have, you have achieved much and, and my, and hats off to you. Second of all right, now is kind of where I hate to be that guy, right? Because I think that for, for a long time I have beat the drum of if you wait, if you're always waiting for the next thing, then you will never just get to enjoy anything because you'll always be waiting for the one that's right around the corner. That's better, right? However, the time is now, May, which is exactly when the new models are starting to trickle into stores that were like first unveiled at CES this year. And as we head into Back to school and especially Black Friday, there will be deals. Now, as someone who's upgrading a 77 inch OLED, you sound like you might be the sort of person who doesn't care about getting a deal if that's the case. I haven't actually tried the X11L series yet. What I have done is I have used TCL's like last, last generation, kind of similar class of TV in the form of the. That 115 inch that is still in my theater room in spite of everything else that exists. And TCL at their very high end makes a very fine TV. I haven't seen the X11L yet. I'm hoping too soon. The other thing that I'll say, and this is probably going to complicate your decision more than help it, is that I have seen Sony's RGB backlit LED LCDs and they are absolute fire. They are so cool. It was in a pretty controlled environment and I didn't actually get a chance to look side by side with an oled. Oh, actually. Oh yeah, No, I didn't get a chance to look side by side with an oled. But if I was a betting man and I didn't have a budget, which you might not, I would say that true RGB is going to be pretty killer and take this all for what it is. Right? Like Sony sponsored our trip to go check it out. So full disclosure, everything. And you know, we saw it within the confines of, of their controlled environment. So take that all for what it is. But it looks really good. It looks really, really good.
- [80:40]
A
Okay, moving on to some more topics.
- [80:43]
B
All right, Luke, do you want to pick one or two?
- [80:46]
C
Sure. Let's see what we got here. Oh yeah. Let's go over this charade.
- [80:55]
B
Yeah. Oh, I knew it. I knew it. I was hoping you were going to pick that.
- [80:58]
C
Nice. Yeah. GameStop offers 56 billion in value for ebay, but struggles to explain how it'll gather up all that value on May 4th GameStop. Because they try to use the force to make this happen. I don't know, whatever. GameStop made an entirely unsolicited $56 billion offer to buy eBay at $125 a share. The offer letter stipulated that the amount will be paid half in cash, half in GameStop stock. GameStop's operational strategic plan was that its roughly 1600 US retail stores would become ebay drop off Intake fulfillment and live commerce hubs, which actually sounds kind of smart. With CEO Ryan Cohen promising $2 billion a year in cost cuts, including 1.2 billion from eBay's marketing budget alone. The bid seemed weird because the market valuation of GameStop is around $11 billion, while eBay is roughly worth $48 billion.
- [82:01]
B
Is this, is this like me, you know, offering to. I've got my. I've got my float plane shirt on here. Okay. Is this like me offering to buy YouTube?
- [82:13]
C
You know, like, this isn't even a merger scale. Isn't even close, to be honest.
- [82:19]
B
But you get what I mean, right?
- [82:20]
C
I think they're a lot closer, but
- [82:22]
B
they're the smaller company and they're not even offering a merger of peers. They're like, we're gonna acquire. What are you even talking about anyway? Sorry.
- [82:30]
C
Maybe if it's Floatplane trying to buy YouTube's toe. Yeah, I mean, there's a lot of funny stuff with this. I, I think it's literally just a stunt. But we'll. We'll. We'll get into that. About nine.
- [82:43]
B
Why? Why? Can't feel so compelled to spoil the punchlines for things. Luke.
- [82:47]
C
Can't help but there's so many good reasons why, and people got to absorb it as we go through about 9 billion of the. Which has me interested in if GameStop's valuation includes their cash. But anyways, about 9 billion of the cash for the offer would come from GameStop's war chest, with the rest being raised through a debt instrument from TD Securities. A subsidiary of TD bank provided a highly confident letter indicating a potential commitment to provide approximately 20 billion of the cash half of the offer in debt financing. What? Okay, I'm a little bit lost here, but anyways, yeah, it feels like Sam Altman being like, yeah, I'll buy all the ram. It's like that level of like. I don't think they actually technically have to do it, but they, They've said that they probably will. Cohen went on CNBC's Squawk Box where the hosts flagged that the value of all of GameStop stock is just over $11 billion. And half of the stock. Half of the stock, Half of the
- [83:55]
B
acquisition offer would require about $28 billion. Yeah.
- [83:59]
C
Basically, there isn't enough equity or enough cash to make this make sense. And half stock, half cash also doesn't really make any sense. And if we go check out GameStop stock and we look at the last five days, I mean, it even went down.
- [84:18]
B
So it's worth less today than it was basically a month ago.
- [84:21]
C
It's up. Yeah, it's down 4%. Because people saw this and were like, yikes. Which is kind of funny. Yeah. The. The CEO apparently just kept on saying, when asked, like, how does this make any sense? Like, where are you getting all that value from? He just kept saying, half cash, half stock, and then saying, it's on the website. Go check it out. There it gets explained on the website. Yeah. Amazing.
- [84:49]
B
I missed this part. He eventually told the host, I don't understand your question. It's like, dude, okay, sorry, carry on.
- [84:58]
C
He was framing the I don't understand your question as if there was enough stock and cash available. Therefore, the question didn't make any sense. But clearly there isn't. Fantastic.
- [85:12]
B
Yeah.
- [85:12]
C
Morgan Stanley analysts then piled on with a research note, calling GameStop and eBay fundamentally different businesses with no real overlap, and noted that if the deal somehow closed, it would be the largest leveraged buyout in history. Then, on May 6, Cohen created a new ebay. This is my favorite part. He created a. Cohen, the CEO of GameStop, created a new eBay account under the username Ryan50.50. You know, 50 cash, 50 stock. Presumably a. Not. Oh, yep, there it is. Presumably a nod to the half cash, half stock split. And then started listing personal items in his words to help fund the eBay acquisition, including, if I remember correctly, some socks and other things Frank Sid said.
- [86:01]
A
I don't know.
- [86:02]
C
Frank C. Of the Video Game History foundation, then flagged on Blue sky that several of Cohen's listings appeared to come from the Game Informer vault, which housed decades of rare gaming memorabilia that GameStop kept after shutting the Game Informer magazine down.
- [86:20]
B
Okay.
- [86:21]
C
Then, late that same night, eBay suspended Cohen's account, citing concerns that his activity was. Was putting the ebay community at risk. As far as my understanding goes, they have reinstated his account. I don't think that's in here. Analysts have pointed out that the whole thing likely comes down to Ryan Cohen trying to trigger a performance gate in his compensation package, which would unlock 35 billion in potential stock options if he increases the company's market value to $100 billion and achieves 10 billion in cumulative EBITDA.
- [86:59]
B
You know what's funny is that is so much better analysis, I guess, of what he's doing. See, I thought this was as simple as GameStop. Hasn't been in headlines enough lately. I need GameStop in the headlines so that people, like, pump it as a meme stock again. I, like, I was thinking, like, 3D chess. That's like. That's like 4D chess. So I don't need to reach a revenue target. I just go out and I borrow enough money to buy a company that already has that much revenue. It's brilliant.
- [87:40]
C
I don't think. I think if anything leaking that, like, that was the goal might have been part of the 3D chess, because I don't think this was ever gonna happen.
- [87:50]
B
Well, no, it was. It was never gonna happen. But, like, maybe he's delete. I mean, we have no idea how much ketamine the average CEO is on, right? So, like, maybe in his mind. Serious,
- [88:07]
C
you should just. You should cold call Taryn and ask him.
- [88:12]
A
Oh, hey, Linus, you need a plug or what?
- [88:15]
C
We're concerned that you're not taking enough ketamine.
- [88:18]
B
All right, I'll ask him.
- [88:20]
C
We're looking at. We're looking at LMG's trajectory, and we're thinking you might need to take more ketamine.
- [88:25]
A
I forgot where I worked. And that he would actually do that.
- [88:29]
C
Oh, I knew he was gonna do it.
- [88:31]
B
What have I done?
- [88:33]
C
Hey, how's it going?
- [88:34]
B
Hey, you're live on the WAN show. Hold on, I'm just trying to figure out where the speaker hole on my phone is here. Can you guys hear him? Okay, yes.
- [88:42]
C
Yeah, he's coming through.
- [88:43]
B
Okay, you guys got him? So we're just having a conversation right now about sort of like CEOs and. And their typical ketamine consumption. And we were just wondering, like, how much ketamine do you consume?
- [89:01]
C
I've had no ketamine so far.
- [89:03]
B
I have asked doctors for ketamine and they said no. Really? Did they explain why they said no? I mean, I. If this is getting too personal, then feel free to. To. To. Nope. Out. But, like, is this for recreational use or is there a medical condition? I'm like, recreational, and then that's when they. Hang on. Okay, all right, understood. That's actually really. Oh, you know what? Chad's got a question for you. Denrick asks, did you tell them that you've been diagnosed with CEO?
- [89:36]
C
Oh, no, I haven't.
- [89:38]
B
Is That a real condition? Well, that's what we think because. Because of how, how people are CEOs and are being treated with ketamine, we assume that that was a causation relationship rather than just a correlation. Can I ask questions as well? Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. This is an open. This is a safe space. Oh, when I'm at work, does it seem like I'm under things? Thank you everyone. Tarant, CEO of Linus Media Group. Bye, Taran. I'll see you next week. Wow, what a great, what a great conversation. That was tremendous. Should we go ahead and maybe do whatever it is that Dan wants to. Wants us to do?
- [90:24]
C
Dan is currently flagging two more.
- [90:27]
B
Let's see.
- [90:28]
C
Dan is currently fighting two more topics.
- [90:30]
A
Yeah, let's, let's do some more topics.
- [90:32]
C
We can do this other weird one. This is good news. Toyota built a $10 billion private utopia tech City Last week, Ars Technica got an inside tour of Toyota's woven city, the $10 billion private city of the future. Sounds very Disney. The company has been in Japan. Japan has built in Japan. Yeah, there we go. That makes a lot more sense. And the picture they painted was a mix was mixed at best. Toyota Chairman Akio Toyota first announced Woven City at CES 2020 as part of a pivot from carmaker to mobility company. And the first 100 residents hand picked alpha testers that Toyota calls weavers moved in six months ago. Despite the city branding, only about 10% of the planned 175 acre site is actually built so far. Although these things take time, residents act as alpha and beta testers for a rotating slate of Toyota tech. Interesting. Toyota's stated rationale for the heavy surveillance
- [91:36]
B
is yeah, this is where things get
- [91:38]
C
a little dystopian, with the Woven City CTO telling ours that onboard car sensors can't reliably spot a kid darting out from behind a truck. So street level cameras everywhere is part of how Toyota plans to hit its zero accidents goal. In practice, the camera density is striking, with ours counting eight at a single intersection and a half dozen even in small coffee shops. All feeding into Toyota's AI Vision engineering, which can track people across cameras based on their clothing. Toyota built a consent system called data fabric that lets residents opt in or out per service. And 98% of weavers, I'm paraphrasing because they were handpicked, have agreed to camera equipped robots in their apartments. I guess we all have robot vacuums. Not all of us, but a lot of people do. Mine's been broken for a Year, but it is what it is. The company's longer term plan is to refine the AI Vision engine inside Woven City and then sell it to actual municipalities. Toyota also confirmed that Chairman Accio Toyota has been uploaded to the city's cloud as Accio Toyota AI, a chatbot trained on a decade of his speeches and writings. Really? Wow.
- [93:12]
B
I think this has got to be.
- [93:16]
C
Wow.
- [93:18]
B
We have no idea what to spend our copious amounts of money on.
- [93:24]
C
Wow.
- [93:25]
B
So let's do this. And this is coming from someone who just attended an event that was held in an abandoned power plant because a billionaire saw that it was like kind of an eyesore for his neighbors and decided to buy it to turn it into a park.
- [93:54]
C
Wow. Very nice.
- [93:56]
B
Yeah, this is like, this is actually peak. My, my, my steak is too juicy. My, my family is too perfect. My money, my money bushels are overflowing. I simply have no idea what to do with it. This is like, you know, I don't
- [94:19]
C
think that reminds me a lot of
- [94:20]
B
what, what was the Disney thing? What was the Disney thing? The like city, Disney City thing.
- [94:25]
C
So the town of Tomorrow, Florida, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah.
- [94:30]
B
This feels like, like modern. That Epcot. That's the one. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
- [94:38]
C
That Epcot have like insane surveillance.
- [94:41]
B
I don't know if, I don't know if our corporate overlords had imagined that
- [94:45]
C
yet because this to me feels like. I know what you're saying. We don't know what to spend our money on. I don't think that's true at all, to be honest. I don't get that read from this in the slightest.
- [94:54]
B
Really?
- [94:55]
C
No. Not even a little bit. I get flocked from this. I get Toyota attempting to make technology to sell the governments, which is literally what they're saying. They're planning on selling this to municipalities. They want to be flock. They want to have AI enabled cameras all over the place tracking everyone, measuring everything and then selling it to governments and probably also companies for advertisement and everything else. I. This, Yeah, I don't get the same read as you on this.
- [95:24]
A
So.
- [95:24]
B
So basically it sounds like because we're neither of us is what they're saying it's for. They're saying it's for, you know, connected cities for like, you know, reducing.
- [95:34]
C
No, they're saying it's like for what I said.
- [95:37]
B
Well, no, I mean they didn't say anything about crime. They said, you know, like car accidents.
- [95:42]
C
Yeah, but they said they're going to sell it to municipalities.
- [95:45]
B
No, no, I, I, no, I got that part but like Flock is, is, is, is for surveillance and, and like suspect tracking municipalities. No, I know, I know, but the part is that I said. They didn't say that though. They did. So they haven't said the quiet part out loud. What they're saying is we're a mobility company and this is about mobility and making it like, so that every car has a brain on board it that is being fed data from these AI enabled cameras so that it would never like accidentally hit a kid who's like darting out from between two cars or, you know, chasing a ball or whatever. So your theory then is that whether Toyota intends it or not, this will be, this will be sold as a, as a, as just a mass surveillance tool.
- [96:36]
C
Yeah, I mean, because it, the, the whole cars angle doesn't make sense when there's cameras inside of coffee shops and inside of your home.
- [96:42]
B
So I read the Ars article and they go into a little bit more depth about how, you know, Toyota's culture and Japanese culture and, and like privacy are, are sort of really central to this and what their plan is for anonymizing things. Like that's, that's part of why the individual tracking is based on the clothing that you're wearing. It does not use facial identification, for instance. However, I think that anyone as technical as anybody at Toyota working on this project or anyone from Ars Technica or anyone in our audience is going to know that there's, it's like, just because you're not using facial tracking doesn't mean that you can't pin this down to an individual. Especially if you've got a large enough set of data monitoring like a fixed number of local residents. Right. Like whether we're talking about the outfits that they normally wear or whether we're talking about gait analysis looking at how they walk. Right. Like it's, there's a lot of ways,
- [97:46]
C
like an actually pretty wild amount of ways to identify people.
- [97:49]
B
Tell me this. Okay, this is a hypothetical. To be very, very clear, tell me this. If Toyota could solve privacy for this, if their pitch that this is a mobility solution that does not store in any accessible way, this is a huge if I know, does not store in any accessible way personally identifiable information. And it is purely a machine vision system that sends feedback to cars and bikes and these smart equipped vehicles to prevent accidents. Is this something that you could see having any kind of future?
- [98:33]
C
I'm going to be, I need to understand. I know I'm going to be super annoying for a second. One thing is you said they, if Even if they don't store the data and stuff. The problem is there's other types of attacks. So like it will be a privacy nightmare because everything could solve it if.
- [98:53]
B
If. I know this is an if if,
- [98:55]
C
but the problem is that if is impossible.
- [98:58]
B
I know, but try to try, try to try to play if it is
- [99:02]
C
the world's perfect, given by some deity not of the earth data.
- [99:10]
B
That's what we're assuming.
- [99:11]
C
That is completely unhackable. That is, that's what we're completely, literally impossible. Then. Yeah, I mean, I don't, I don't know if I really care.
- [99:20]
B
Well, for me, if it can never
- [99:22]
C
be, if it is completely uncorruptible and is only ever used for good and is completely unhackable, then it's like.
- [99:30]
B
Okay, so I'm actually going to argue against my point now.
- [99:34]
C
Okay.
- [99:35]
B
And I'm going to say it has no future because then nobody would want, would be too expensive to implement purely to save a handful of lives. I mean, think about how many intersections you drive through in a typical city that obviously need better signage. But because that would cost a few hundred dollars, it's not going to get implemented. So this as like Toyota imagining this mobility future where everything, every object in a city is tracked. I think even if they could solve it. But this is why I wanted to have the conversation, right? Because you know, it has to kind of boil down to like, if their pitch is right, is there a future? And I still think the answer is no. Yeah, yeah, because I'd love to be wrong.
- [100:18]
C
And you know, people, people can say what they want, but ultimately when it comes down to municipal budgets, what are people going to vote for? I mean, looking at like Langley right now, for example, we're, we're doing some weird stuff.
- [100:37]
B
Hey, Luke. Okay, hold on a second though. Hold on. Yeah, hold on. Let's, let's back up a little bit here because I actually might be about to argue against myself again.
- [100:46]
C
That's fun.
- [100:47]
B
What if we, what if we didn't do this with cameras? Like what if we could do this with a point cloud device? Like what if we could do this with lidar? You'd still be able to. Oh man. No, because you'd still be able to see a blob coming out of this square blob at this time every day and going to the other square blob at that time every day. Yeah, nevermind. I talked myself out of it again because like to me, like the, you know, the cameras and the data analysis and no matter how much compute and no matter how cheap cameras are going to get, they're always good, they're always going to have some.
- [101:19]
C
You also just can't get around it. Like if, if surveillance is being done, it, it can be hacked and it, you know, on a technical level it can be hacked. On a social level, it will almost certainly be corrupted. There's like, there's every example of, you know, police officers using tracking equipment to track their girlfriends to see if they're cheating or, or, or yeah, following ex girlfriends and ex wives and whatnot. There's every example of all these different things where if it's a social system, it can and almost certainly will be corrupted and if it's a technical system, it can be hacked. And those things just seem to effectively be laws of the universe. So it's tough when you have a system like this because you just know both of those things are true.
- [102:03]
B
I'm going to throw another wrench into the gears, yet another wrench because I think this is just a really interesting conversation. It's not interesting enough for me to have spent my $10 billion to, you know, prove that it's not going to work or whatever. I'm so, but I'm glad Toyota did it because. Yeah, yeah, sure, I, I, I have a 10 billion offer, 10 billion dollar offer in to buy the city, 10 billion dollar loan. But, but TD, TD seems like their game for this sort of thing.
- [102:38]
C
So they totally told me they do it.
- [102:41]
B
So yeah, let me, let me throw this out out and go, okay, but hear me out. As our methods for tracking these things get more and more ubiquitous and more and more precise and more and more. Absolutely everybody has them on their person at any given moment. How different would the point cloud system be? I mean make a strong, you can make a strong argument that the camera system is, is different but like it, how different would it be? Hit me up.
- [103:21]
C
I mean that's already a problem, right? I think we talked on a fairly recent WAN show about a crime scene where Google got, what is the right term for it, subpoenaed or something for information on what devices were in the area at the time in this like big window.
- [103:38]
B
So they were poking around in the
- [103:39]
C
phones of people and we know from,
- [103:41]
B
there was no reason to suspect them.
- [103:43]
C
We know from the Snowden era, I don't know if he's still doing public stuff, but we know from when he was like a big deal in the news that when he was roaming around, you know, he's throwing phones in freezers and stuff like that to try to Faraday cage them because they were already a problem. So it's like, it's. Yeah, I mean, that's definitely part of it, but it's, I don't know, adding more fuel to the fire because the phones aren't perfect. You could decide to leave it at home. I remember when we talked about that story of the. Yeah, someone said geofencing warrant. When we talked about the story of the geofencing warrant, it was kind of like, astonishing to me that you would bring your cell phone to a crime scene. It's like, yeah, I mean, you can obviously be tracked. What are you doing?
- [104:28]
B
Well, that's the thing with criminals, Luke.
- [104:30]
C
Yeah. Yeah. So, yeah, it's tough. It's tough. It's also. Ultimately our opinion on it isn't really going to matter. I think, like, every single person I've ever heard of who has talked about Flock in any way has been like, wow, this is obviously bad and evil and a terrible system. And they're all over the place. So I don't know.
- [105:01]
B
All right, well, it's good news. Wan show. So we're not going to linger on this any further. Why don't we instead talk about our sponsors for today's show? The show is brought to you today by Tello. Do you want a wireless service that doesn't drive you crazy? Tello me about it. That. That is literally in the script. I had to say that Tello Mobile offers flexible and affordable phone plans with prices up to $25 per month without any compromise to call quality. Because Tello is on America's fastest 5G network. They offer flexibility in the way that you build your plan so you can save a little money if you and your family know you need minutes or data. If you already have a phone and a number, Tela makes it simple to port them over. And every plan comes with great freebies like hotspotting, Wi fi and international calling, international roaming and more. International roaming was such a, like, game changer for me. Dude, I love international roaming. Plus, one of the best things about Tello is they still have real people that you can talk to if you ever need support specifically with your phone plan. Guys, you cannot call them to help figure out what to get your mom for Mother's Day. That's not what they do. You can check out Telos unlimited plans at the link in the video description. The show is also brought to you by Zoho. Zoho's opmanager Nexus is a full stack Observability platform that lets you and your IT team see everything that's happening to your IT system in one place. It is built to work with the tools that you and your team already use and fits right into the Manage Engine ecosystem. It's backed with strong data encryption, adhering to industry and regional compliance rules so your data stays protected. And if your team prefers to operate with the flexibility of the cloud, or if they need the full control of an on premise setup, the OpManager Nexus works with both. Super cool. It's easy to deploy and has customizable dashboards so each member of your team gets the reports and information that is most applicable to them. And Zoho has multiple data centers around the world with everything backed up regionally to help with reliability. That's an especially relevant thing for them to call out right now with some data centers experiencing some bomb related maintenance. Anyway, opmanager Nexus stop guessing and start knowing with full stack visibility we'll have it linked in the video description.
- [107:24]
A
All right, some float plane announcements. Do we have any of those?
- [107:29]
B
We probably do. I assume we do. All right, we got some float plane announcements. We received an anonymous report that one of the two why is when late competitors thinks that the other is not trying so hard. I wonder who it could be. I try. I try hard. What do you mean? What do you mean? You don't think I'm trying hard?
- [107:48]
C
Nope. I think you try hard to cheat. I think you try hard to push Sammy to cheat for you.
- [107:54]
B
No, I actually don't. So to spice it up, Luke promised that if this week's why is wan late video got 2000 likes he will ride a unicycle to when to answer the question once and for all, what is easier? Linus getting to set on time or Luke learning to ride a unicircle. Unicycle. Unicycle to get to the wan show.
- [108:18]
C
Which I cannot do.
- [108:21]
B
Yeah.
- [108:22]
C
And will not succeed at.
- [108:23]
B
I. I don't know if you will ever be able to do that. No.
- [108:26]
A
Probably.
- [108:26]
B
No offense, but not with that mindset you're not. Not like I don't think I have that agile of. And you're very top heavy. Yeah, I. Diane, I don't mean this in like. I don't mean this in like an offensive way. I just mean it in like an objective observation way that I. I don't. You didn't put that. You put a lot of points in strength and not that many in dexterity. Like you got some in there I think. But like unicycle Dexterity Ford Explorer of the person.
- [108:57]
C
Yeah, I'm not sure. I'm not sure.
- [109:00]
B
Explorer, please. Excursion is more like it. Okay.
- [109:06]
C
In other news, I don't think that's quite accurate, to be completely honest.
- [109:09]
B
No, an Excursion's not a. That's not. That's a powerful vehicle, sir.
- [109:13]
C
No, I just. Yeah, but does it tip over when
- [109:15]
A
you turn around a corner?
- [109:19]
B
Okay, you know what? That's fair. Map and float plane chat says unicycle not that hard to learn. And charcoal says he has to ride a unicycle, not ride it.
- [109:30]
C
Well, I haven't even been on a bike in many years, apparently.
- [109:38]
A
I read this online, so take it with a grain of salt. You don't forget.
- [109:43]
B
Well, like a unicycle. But he never learned a unicycle.
- [109:47]
A
No, he. He said he hasn't ridden a bicycle in a long time.
- [109:49]
B
Oh. But, yeah. Thank you, Dan. That's very helpful. You're welcome.
- [109:53]
A
I appreciate your compliments.
- [109:57]
B
Yeah. Okay, so this will be interesting. We also have. How many likes is the video at now? Oh, my goodness. It's at 1400 likes with zero dislikes.
- [110:11]
C
Yeah,
- [110:13]
B
it got like 16 likes in the time it took me to refresh this page.
- [110:17]
C
Yeah, you can be the first one to dislike it.
- [110:20]
B
No, I'm going to like it right now. Okay, now it has 1461. Hold on, I'm going to refresh it again. You didn't.
- [110:29]
A
No, I.
- [110:30]
B
How dare you.
- [110:30]
C
I downloaded. How dare you. I downloaded. I was the first person to downvote it. Let's go.
- [110:36]
B
Unbelievable.
- [110:37]
C
Let's go.
- [110:38]
B
All right, Luca, you'll have to do screen cap for this. In other news, we also have badges now designed by the one and only Ashley from the Creator Warehouse team. Floatplane now supports badges so you can flex your vanity cosmetics. Right now we only have length of active subscription, but we're looking to add more cool things. Like if you were subscribed during big events like Scrapyard wars or what tier of Suburan, and even badges to recommend to recognize super active members of the community. We should make it a crystal. It should just be. Dan, can you send that over to Ashley? It should just be like a gem. Because I don't. I can't think of a more ludicrously, oh my God, get a life active member of our community than Crystal Fier 88. Don't take this the wrong way, Crystal. Just. Wow. Anywho. Anywho. Some badges can be added retroactively, so be sure to join if you have some suggestions. You can go ahead. Leave them in the comments. Someone said Langley house cats and the vessel logo for og so, yeah, we're definitely working on some stuff. Crystal, I don't. I don't. I don't mean this. I don't. I don't mean this in. In any way other than you spend a lot of your life on lmg. It's great. I'll see you at the next. I'll see it. The next whale. We also have a video of the damage that Sammy did to that monitor that he brought on to WAN show last week. I don't know if Luke is launching that or if it's already launched. And we promised to improve floatplane, and we're looking to provide more benefits for subscribers at lmg GG Floatplane. So now's a great time to join. Can't wait to see you there. All right. PK7 says get a life. Respectfully. But we do enjoy having you here. For real. Yeah. Yeah, dude, it's great. It's great. No, I mean, we do. We do. We. We enjoy Crystal's company. We legitimately do.
- [112:45]
C
Oh, my goodness. Okay, well, I know. No, no, no. I found. I. I'm ignoring you entirely. I found the part of the video where the monitor gets impaled.
- [112:56]
A
Ashley is very confused. What exactly am I messaging?
- [113:02]
B
Just. Just the. The one for. For engagement. For, like, hyper engagement. It should be, like a gem. It should be. It should be a Crystal.
- [113:12]
A
Do we have more than one Ashley?
- [113:16]
B
Yeah, Ashley, w. We. We actually have. Yeah, we.
- [113:19]
A
Ashley.
- [113:20]
B
Way to go. Way to go. Dan. That moment when you really do need a company directory because it has gotten where you can't know. Everybody didn't check. Yeah, don't you actually. Didn't you, like, work on it?
- [113:33]
A
Yeah, sort of.
- [113:35]
B
Dan, what the heck?
- [113:36]
A
I don't update it. That's. That's HR doesn't maintain it.
- [113:41]
B
Okay. All right. That's good. Love it. Oh, hey, Polarize asks, are you guys participating in the Blink pentathlon? I haven't put anything into it yet other than some prizing. So Chewy messaged me earlier this week, and he was all like, hey, you mentioned on WAN show that you, like, want to do prizing for Boink Pentathlon. And I was like, yeah, sure. Can we do that? And he was like, okay, are you good with a thousand dollars worth of LTT Store gift cards? And I was like, sure. So we're doing 10100 LTT store gift cards as part of the prizing for the Boink pentathlon. Over on the LinusTechTips.com forum. If you don't. If you're not familiar with it, Boink is a distributed computing project that helps contribute to science so you can use idle cycles from your computer to help make the world a better place. It's pretty cool and you should go check it out. Maybe Dan could throw a link in the. In the video description.
- [114:39]
A
Yes, sorry, I was just sending a group message to all the Ashley's that I work with.
- [114:43]
B
All right, cool.
- [114:44]
C
Nice. By the way, dbrand sent out a thing during the show. I think probably when we announced it. I don't know if they were watching or not, but I just noticed this in my email. The subject is now available on a worse website and then they have like a stock going down emoji. If you open it, it says now available on lttstore.com.
- [115:09]
B
you know, without spoiling anything. I may get my opportunity to fire back, but I'm not going to spoil anything. These guys.
- [115:25]
C
God, I love D Rant. Okay, we're out of control.
- [115:29]
B
Completely out of control.
- [115:32]
C
Yeah. What's next?
- [115:34]
B
All right, let's have a look here. Let's have a look here. We already talked about the Steam controller being sold out after 30 minutes. Yeah, you can join a queuing system to make sure. Oh, to make sure that you get one from them at MSRP rather than at scalper prices.
- [115:50]
C
Scalpers are lame. Don't buy it from scalpers.
- [115:53]
B
The last bit is Valve released the CAD files for the external shell of the Steam controller and the Steam controller puck under a Creative Commons license, which is super cool. If you, for whatever reason, wanted to like, make accessories that it, you know, like a little cradle for it to sit in or anything cool like that. And you always love to see it. Okay, this is cool. TCL unveiled a 0.01Hz laptop display earlier this week. This is so cool. It's designed to extend battery life by drastically reducing how often the screen redraws static content. It was showcased at SID Display Week in Los Angeles in a 14 inch 1920 by 1200 laptop. So this panel can refresh as slowly as one frame every 100 seconds, far below the 1 Hz screens that have previously been developed by companies like intel and lg. The coolest part though, and this is where it gets real, is that the display is divided into 12 zones that can independently shift between 120Hz and 0.01Hz, allowing you to have high refresh rate in areas like an active video window. While the rest of the screen remains nearly static, not being updated, TCL estimates that the technology, or TCL csot specifically estimates that the technology can add over an hour of video playback time. And the LCD panel uses the company's proprietary oxide TFT backplane. Our discussion question is, is 12 zone refresh switching, switching enough for a seamless UI or will the lack of granularity cause noticeable artifacts? I mean, I think the answer to that is probably just going to come down to driver and operating system management so that you just. If you have a window, like an active video window or something like that that slightly overlaps one of the control zones, it' to activate everything that's around it. So just. Yeah, as long as you're not using the entire screen, there will be some savings and I'm here for it. More battery life and devices is like, honestly been like kind of life changing over the last couple generations of laptops. For me, whether I've been using a MacBook Neo or whether I've been using like a Strix Halo or man, like Panther Lake is freaking incredible for battery life life. I just, now that I dock at work, I just. Not that kind. Never think about the battery life of my laptop pretty much because it'll work for like an entire weekend without me having.
- [118:36]
C
Is you're so distracted docking.
- [118:38]
B
Yeah, buddy.
- [118:39]
C
I mean, you need your laptop battery life anymore.
- [118:42]
B
That's right.
- [118:42]
C
Moved on to.
- [118:43]
B
That's right.
- [118:43]
C
Bigger and better things.
- [118:46]
B
Especially better. Better is key. Safer even. Safe harbor.
- [118:53]
A
I felt wrong. It's sticky.
- [118:56]
B
Jeebus. Hey, why don't we talk about. Why don't we talk about something that I actually missed last week? This was announced last week, I believe, but on May 1, Ask.com was officially shut down. I know, I know this is supposed to be good news when. And this is truly tragic, but formerly Ask Jeeves the butler is no more. And I don't know. I don't know. This actually, this actually kind of, kind of hit me in a more than I expected it to like. I don't know. Luke, do you remember the early days of using search engines, like back when altavista was king and also Ask Jeeves.
- [119:44]
C
I always really liked Ask Jeeves.
- [119:47]
B
Yeah. So Ask Jeeves claim to fame was that it was, I believe, the first natural language search engine. Because you know how you can kind of switch. You can put on your like, I am an advanced search wizard hat and you can use like Boolean operators and you can. And you can sort of go into like power user mode using a search engine, rather than just asking it a natural language question. That was like how they all just worked back in the day, except for Ask Jeeves. They had this. This cute butler mascot and you would just type in a natural language question and it was like, actually pretty good. A little bit of history in our notes here. It launched in 1996 out of Berkeley with a now familiar pitch. Type a full question in plain English and get an answer. IAC bought it for over a billion dollars in 2005, dropped Jeeves in 2006, rebranding to Ask.com, but never seriously caught up to Google or even Yahoo, despite multiple relaunches.
- [120:56]
C
Dropping the Jeeves was a mistake, in my opinion. I don't think they were ever going to catch up, but I think they should have. If they wanted to make. Make, you know, a zone for themselves, they should have, I think, laid into the Jeeves side of things even more.
- [121:12]
B
Especially in a world where, like, I feel like one of the things that's almost holding back the. The relation, the. The emotions that people feel towards their. Their AI chatbots is the lack of a. Of a. Of an avatar, like. Like a Jeeves. I think, if anything, the timing for Jeeves could be better than ever.
- [121:35]
C
If Jeeves was powered by AI, almost agentic search. So you should. You could tell it to go look for something and it might actually even take a bit, but it goes and, like, tries to gather things for you
- [121:45]
B
or even does something for you for it. Yeah, like, it goes and it tries to find, you know, the. Which vpn. Hey, Jeeves, which regional VPN do I have to use in order to get the best price on this ticket?
- [121:59]
C
It.
- [122:00]
B
Please make sure you're using an IP other than mine to search, because, like, I'm sure you've run into this, Luke, where the second time you look at something, the price goes up, right? And it doesn't matter, like, you know, which region you pretend to be from or, like, what computer you like, somehow they follow you. And they know. Oh, yeah, they've looked at it twice. They're gonna book it. Like, I'd. I'd be so down for that.
- [122:25]
C
Yeah.
- [122:25]
B
Yeah. BTER says you're saying you don't like Cortana. No, I mean, what I didn't like about Cortana was that it was just useless.
- [122:36]
C
It just sucked, honestly, the idea. I was really excited when Cortana was first announced.
- [122:42]
B
Yeah, me too.
- [122:43]
C
And then it was just terrible. The problem wasn't the packaging. The problem was the product. The packaging was actually fantastic. The little circle was good. The Cortana voice was like, obviously fantastic. And then just garbage product.
- [123:00]
B
Yeah. Once again, just the timing for the branding and the usefulness of the products just didn't quite line up. Okay, this is going to be a controversial take. Are you ready?
- [123:16]
C
No. What happened to good news? Wan show?
- [123:19]
B
No, no.
- [123:20]
C
Know it doesn't feel like it's been in full force. This show.
- [123:23]
B
The good news. No, no. Oh, dude. There's lots of good news coming. There's good news all right. Okay. Nintendo is joining its competition in raising the price of their consoles.
- [123:34]
C
There's lots of good news coming. You'll pay more for consoles.
- [123:37]
B
No, no, this is the good news part. The good news is that Nintendo is giving several months of warning before the change in price goes into effect. So basically, here's a quote. In light of changes in market conditions, Nintendo has revised the MSRP of the Switch 2 around the world and the Switch 1, along with playing cards and the Nintendo online membership in Japan. The price of the Switch 2 is going to go up around $50 globally. Complete pricing is in the Nintendo link if you want to show it. That's a smaller increase than both Sony and Microsoft put in place for their 2020 hardware. So, like hardware that theoretically they paid the development cost on a long time ago. Outside of Japan though, consumers. Even though it's a $50 increase compared to the much higher ones from Sony and Microsoft, consumers will have until September 1st to buy one at the current price. As far as price increases go, giving people. What do we got here? Yeah, we've got over three months to save up and buy a Switch to. If we want it at the current price, that is. I mean, is that worth nothing? It's not like Nintendo chose for component costs to go up.
- [124:56]
C
Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. Why is the online subscription going up?
- [125:01]
B
Is that. I think that's only in Japan though, right? The note say Japan.
- [125:08]
C
Yeah. Maybe that doesn't line up though. Open price.
- [125:19]
B
I don't know what open price means.
- [125:21]
C
It's one interesting thing from this is that the European and American pricing is matching up now. The current price was cheaper in the US by 20 bucks. And they're now aligning Canada are. You know, we still sell. So it is what it is. Yeah. Interesting. If they were gonna do it. I appreciate the heads up.
- [125:47]
B
Yeah, I mean that. I guess that's, that's. That's the most silver lining thing that I can.
- [125:52]
C
It's not the silver lining show, Linus.
- [125:55]
B
It's a good news show, but the Good news is that they gave us warning. And so I need to make sure I talk about it on wan show so that if you really wanted to switch to, then you can get it now still for the original price before it goes up. That's the good news, Luke, because if we didn't talk about this and someone got blindsided by it on September 2nd, that's on us. No, we got to give people a
- [126:22]
C
shot not shouldering that responsibility.
- [126:25]
B
We can't. We. We got to bring. We got to bring the people. We got to bring the people the news they need to know. Okay. This is important news because, like, 50 bucks is. 50 bucks is 50 bucks, man. Like, if you were gonna do it anyway.
- [126:40]
C
True.
- [126:40]
B
Then if. No, I mean, if you were gonna buy one anyway, then I'm sure you'd rather buy it for $50 less. That's like. That is like half a Nintendo game, dude.
- [126:50]
C
All this informs me is if you were thinking about selling your Switch too, that you should wait a little bit.
- [126:57]
B
True, true. Yeah, True, true. Do you. Is there anything that would compel you to buy a Switch 2 yet? At this point?
- [127:04]
C
I have one.
- [127:06]
B
Sorry. Compel you to use it, and I'm upset about it.
- [127:09]
C
I still haven't busted out Donkey Kong. I've been busy with other things. But that.
- [127:14]
B
Did you buy it, though, like you owned it already?
- [127:16]
C
I bought it mostly for Emma because she was a really big fan of the, like, old school Nintendo era Donkey Kong games.
- [127:23]
B
Yeah. Okay.
- [127:25]
C
But I mean, I was. I would say I was interested in it. We. My family was real big into the yellow cartridge Donkey Kong 64 game. That game was sick. But I didn't really play many of the other ones. And other than that, I haven't personally heard of a Nintendo game that has been super attractive yet. There hasn't been a. Yeah, I don't think so. Modern Pokemon games are not that interesting to me. I haven't seen a. I. I could see a, like, Breath of the Wild style Zelda game coming out and being like, nice. I'm happy.
- [128:02]
B
Now, the. The conspiracy theory is that Star Fox was. Or Foxmick, whatever his name is, was shoehorned into the Mario Galaxy movie because there's a game coming. Ended up being true. So the Star Fox announcements just came out.
- [128:18]
C
Oh, I didn't even know that was a thing, but it just makes sense.
- [128:20]
B
Sense. Yeah.
- [128:21]
C
I didn't know any part of that story.
- [128:24]
B
Yeah. Without people knowing anything else, just Star Fox being in that movie was like, okay, this is an IP that Nintendo has not made a game about. Not made a game within like a very long time.
- [128:38]
C
Dude. I never played the original Star Fox, but I. I think I would be interested in picking this up. Oh, it looks kind of sweet actually.
- [128:47]
B
Original Star Star Fox was like revolutionary and a game that I just could not get into. I was a pilot. Wings kid. A hundred percent.
- [128:59]
C
Yeah.
- [129:00]
B
No Star Fox for me.
- [129:02]
C
You'd love the new one. The gameplay is incredibly tight and satisfying. Have you played it? Have people? It was there like a. Somewhere that you could play this.
- [129:15]
B
Wait, it's a star Fox 64 remake. Remake?
- [129:21]
C
Oh, that's really, honestly disappointing.
- [129:27]
B
Okay. Oh, no. Nintendo says it's based on the classic. Hold on a second. Oh, wait. Based on the classic space shooter star Fox 64, but with redesigned characters and upgraded visuals. Alrighty then. Well, that was a cool conversation while it lasted. All right, so this went from.
- [129:50]
C
That makes me excited to have had a switch to. To. Considering it's probably gonna be full fat price or close.
- [129:56]
B
I'm gonna do better. I'm gonna do better.
- [129:59]
C
All right.
- [130:00]
B
On Monday, Blackberries stock jumped 13%. Yes, that BlackBerry.
- [130:08]
C
Is it still a Canadian company? Yes. Really?
- [130:12]
B
13% in pre market trading after a Wall Street Journal feature reminded everyone that BlackBerry, a decade after ditching phones does in fact still exist and is profitable again. What the driver of the new profit pun intended is QNX, a real time operating system that BlackBerry acquired in 2010 that. I was reading a couple articles about this. I kind of went down the rabbit hole because I was like, What? So that BlackBerry acquired in 2010 and that just was like kind of quietly doing their own thing, being mostly ignored by BlackBerry. But that now accounts for about half of the company's revenue and is embedded in roughly 275 million cars on the road today. So this is separate from the like, you know, Android Automotive or like whatever operating system this is running the interface with in your car. This is running things like collision warnings, blind spot monitoring. So like when, when the LED lights up on your mirror, QNX is doing that safety adaptive cruise lane keep assist. They knew they were going to lose the infotainment war like a decade ago, so they've pivoted deeper and deeper into like real time safety critical features.
- [131:35]
C
Yeah, sweet.
- [131:37]
B
BlackBerry's Q4 revenue and this blew my mind. Hit $156 million, up 10% year over year with QNX itself bringing in 78.7 million, up 20%. Although it is worth noting that the stock is still down about 96% from its 2008 peak when it topped 83 billion.
- [131:59]
C
They're on top of the world. That's kind of whatever.
- [132:02]
B
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. But still interesting. I mean, that's pretty cool. What a turnaround story. The fact that they are making money again is pretty.
- [132:11]
C
What is the rest of their money? Where are they making the rest of the 70, whatever million dollars?
- [132:17]
B
I don't know. For a while they were in like secure messaging
- [132:22]
C
communications. Okay.
- [132:24]
B
Yeah. All I really cared about was this Q and X thing and like, sorry, who are these guys? Where did this come from? How Is this worth $78.7 million a quarter?
- [132:36]
C
Okay.
- [132:36]
B
Yeah, it just blew my mind.
- [132:38]
C
Yeah, they do like sovereign on prem infrastructure for like, governments, NATO stuff. Yeah.
- [132:46]
B
Okay. I mean, BlackBerry was known for that. They were known for security.
- [132:50]
C
Yeah. All right.
- [132:52]
B
And I just, I thought. I thought it was pretty cool that BlackBerry's back, baby. More like backberry. Okay, I got another one. I got another one. You're gonna like. A scientific team in China mounted a prototype 10 megawatt nuclear power unit unit to a truck. This thing is designed to act as a portable power bank. That's what I expected to last several decades without requiring a recharge. So to put it in context, 10 megawatts is about the power of a medium sized AI data center. And this could be just like on the back of a truck. Applications include. Sorry.
- [133:36]
C
Pretty wild.
- [133:37]
B
Yeah. Applications include powering remote regions, emergency power restoration during disasters, and propelling maritime vehicles. Imagine that for a second. Luke, we have nuclear sub at home. Like, what, are you kidding me? The team has spoken about similar systems for use at the microwatt level for health care applications like pacemakers. Oh. Apparently they're also being considered for space systems. There is growing private interest in nuclear with Amazon investing in modular reactors while Google builds a small reactor in Tennessee. Amazon, Google, Meta, and Microsoft have all joined the World Nuclear Association. I could see that being a really cool outcome of the AI boom and crash is. And if all these tech companies use all of their buckets and buckets and buckets of money to build a bunch of clean nuclear power and then the market crashes and they don't need it anymore. And then we would just have a lot of really clean power infrastructure. To be clear, as long as it's heavily regulated, I don't think that's going to happen. That's not going to happen. But can a girl dream, Luke?
- [134:57]
C
Then we're cool. You can dream if it's heavy. Heavily regulated dreaming.
- [135:04]
B
Oh, yeah. To be very clear, to be very Clear. I would like nuclear power to be done with all of the regulation and all of the safety checks. But I just. I thought the size of this. The size to output ratio of this thing is so cool. So cool. 10 million watts on something that is portable enough to be transported with a truck.
- [135:31]
C
Pretty freaking believable. Yeah. By truck. Like, did you look at pictures? Do they mean like semi truck? What's the scale that we're talking about?
- [135:40]
B
We're talk. We're talking semi truck.
- [135:41]
C
Yeah, thought so. I mean, that's still insane. Like, that's not. I'm not talking, like, I'm just trying to understand.
- [135:46]
B
In the back of your F150 or whatever.
- [135:48]
C
Yeah, yeah. Strap it in. Okay.
- [135:53]
B
Yeah, buddy. All right. Okay, hold on, hold on. I can do. I can do more. I can do more. Okay, this is cool. Do you want to bring up the LTT Labs website?
- [136:05]
C
That's.
- [136:06]
A
You're cheating. Yeah, that's cheating.
- [136:08]
C
That is cheating.
- [136:09]
B
Lucas. Lucas uploaded yet another really cool article this week.
- [136:15]
C
That freaking banger dude, that I read
- [136:18]
B
top to bottom, because I was all like, yeah, yeah, what is up with that? So the question that he set out to answer is what's up with power supply series? Like, say, for example, the NZXT C Core Gold series, where you've got what is seemingly one power design or one power supply design that's rated for anywhere from. I believe it goes from 750 watts to 850 watts to 1000 watts. But as you can see if you look at them clearly, all using the same PCB and functionally, a lot of the same design.
- [137:00]
C
Yeah, there are minor changes, but yeah, yeah, there are.
- [137:04]
B
And Lucas dives into all of them, explaining which changes impact which characteristics of the power supply and what they mean for these different units and their ability to provide different amounts of power in a sustained fashion. And I just thought it was a really cool read because it was something that I had, like, had half a thought about in the past, but never really even gotten as far as forming the full thought, let alone asking somebody the answer to the question. And he just did such a good job of getting right out ahead of me and completely answering it and asking it all in one go with great pictures that illustrate the differences. And yeah, I just thought it was a. I thought it was a really cool article, and I read the crap out of it. I loved it.
- [137:51]
C
There's also been. There's been a lot of really good stuff on the articles front recently. The IBOT article, which I think we've Maybe already called on Wencho's fantastic popular Linux gaming distros. We kind of.
- [138:03]
B
We're adapting that into a video, by the way.
- [138:05]
C
Yeah.
- [138:05]
B
So I'm working on writing for it now. I actually wrote one of the funniest. I'm. I'm the writer for it, and I wrote one of the funniest intros that I think I've ever written.
- [138:13]
C
Nice. Yeah.
- [138:14]
B
Do you want to. Want a preview? You can just say no. You can just say you don't care about work. That's fine. You can do that.
- [138:23]
C
What do you, what do you mean by preview? Do you mean, like, you have a clip of it?
- [138:26]
B
No, I mean, like, I, I can read.
- [138:28]
C
You're gonna read it? Sure, yeah, sure. Okay.
- [138:30]
B
Okay. So. So I'm going to have. I'm. It'll just. I. I always love the comedic value of one actor playing multiple characters. So it might just be me playing both of the characters, or I might have someone else be the, like the, the husband. But we're going to do like, like an altar scene, like for a wedding, and we're going to start with, like, the, the officiant saying, do you, Joe Gamer, take Linux to be your lawfully wedded operating system? To have until. And then we're gonna cut. So we're gonna have me standing in front of like, a crappy plate of, like, church pews or something, and I'm gonna stand up, I'm gonna be like, I object. She's no operating system. She's a colonel. And then we're gonna have like a crowd gasp, like, sound effects thing. And then I'm gonna like, pull back the, the, the, the penguin suit, and we're gonna have, like a Colonel Sanders mask. And then we're. And then we're just going to like, we're going to do like a hard cut. Because that is the dumbest joke of all time. Just be. Okay, jokes aside, what if it's just
- [139:34]
C
the bride is, like, obscured by the veil, and then when you yell it's a colonel, and they turn to the screen, it's just a penguin being like,
- [139:45]
B
oh, I was going to have the bride be someone in a penguin costume.
- [139:48]
C
I know, but you, you peel back the penguin costume like they're, they're already. Maybe I'm being the Linux guy.
- [139:55]
A
I don't know.
- [139:56]
C
Whatever. Don't worry about it.
- [139:58]
B
So. Okay. But jokes aside, there is a common misconception that Linux is an operating system, when in truth, it's just one part of a fully functioning operating system. Specifically, it's the kernel with a K. Not that one. The part that's responsible for managing resources and communications between the operating system and your physical hardware. So. So it's just kind of like, it's just like a super goofy opportunity to, you know, have a fun costume and have a really memorable way to. Without being all actually and insufferable about it. Remind people that Linux is not in fact an operating system, it is a kernel. And that's one of the big challenges that it faces, both in terms of support from game developers and also in terms of choosing the right one. And that's how we're ultimately going to get into the meat of the video, which is what are the performance differences for gamers between the various Linux distros that are out there? And that was. If you guys want spoilers for the answer, the article is already up on LTTLabs.com and you can go check it out.
- [141:04]
A
Let's. Let's get our last sponsors out of the way.
- [141:08]
B
Oh yeah, we can do that, sure. The show is brought to you today by msi. If you're looking to get into PC gaming or if your current system is a bit outdated, check out MSI's Aegis R desktop computer. You can get a 14th gen Intel Core i7 and RTX 4080 Super. So whether it's Cyber Cadet, Pinball or Cyberpunk, this game's gonna look great. Wait, how old is this? Is this current? Did someone copy, I don't know, talking points in here?
- [141:38]
A
I have no idea.
- [141:40]
B
Are they. Are they clearing out 14th gens and 4080 supers? Well, guess we're doing a make good on this one. The show is brought to you by Squarespace. There is an incredible.
- [141:54]
C
No, no, they are. They are, I think.
- [141:57]
B
What?
- [141:57]
C
No, yeah, I think they are. I brought up their website. Yeah, Aegis R14th powered by Intel Core 14th gen processors.
- [142:04]
B
Okay. Okay, I'm gonna keep going then. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So whether it's Cyber Cadet, Pinball or Cyberpunk, the game's gonna look great. Each computer comes with MSI's B, an MSI B760 chipset motherboard, and up to 64 gigs of DDR5. And they're all liquid cooled with a 240 millimeter core liquid RGB cooler, helping keep the system stable for those long gaming nights. The RGB is controlled with the press of a button thanks to MSI's LED button, allowing you to cycle through multiple options. And MSI is one of the few players in the game that's still gonna throw in a keyboard and mouse with the system. If you want to grab your new computer Today, check out MSI's Aegis R using our link in the video description. The show is also brought to you by Squarespace. There is a wild number of brands that don't have their own website. They just say, hey, buy this from AliExpress or go get our products on Amazon. And sometimes not having a website can make it seem like you're just doing a lazy dropship product. So if your brand and your business is one of quality, maybe it's time to put your money where your mouth is and invest in your image with a website that reflects that. And Squarespace is here to help. They can do this with tools like Design Intelligence that will have you answer a couple of prompts and will create something that matches your brand in just a couple of minutes. Or you can start by choosing from a long list of templates and you can go from there and make it a more manually crafted site. If you have a domain in mind, Squarespace will let you know if it's available or if they can help port an example existing domain to their platform or or they can help port an existing domain to their platform.
- [143:46]
A
Excuse me.
- [143:47]
B
We've used Squarespace for many years for our linusmediagroup.com website and I gotta say, for me going off brand talking points for a second here, the best thing about it is just the ease of use. It is. It's just so easy to manage. You don't have to be technical to do it. Anyone can do it and just update the website on a whim. You don't have to wait around for the right team to like give you access to it. It's just you make a quick change and it's done. I love it. So build yourself a website that really stands out today and get 10 off your first purchase by visiting squarespace.com wan all right, you want to pick one?
- [144:23]
C
Sure. Let me. Dell and Lenovo Answer Linux vendor Firmware Services Call for sponsors LVFS provides seamless system and component firmware updating under Linux with the FUPD client and web portal. Fwupd.org is used by all major Linux distributions. The project has shipped more than 145 million firmware updates so far. Dell and Lenovo are the first two premier sponsors and will be supporting LVFS with at least 100,000 US annually. Other sponsors include Framework Investment Disclosure, Investment Disclosure, that Guy, the Open Source Firmware Foundation, Red Hat, and the Linux Foundation.
- [145:15]
B
This is Huge and awesome.
- [145:19]
C
Very cool. Good info.
- [145:21]
B
This is the kind of thing that is just going to give these guys more resources to do what. What they already would have done. And that's one of those things that I just. I believe so strongly is that giving people who would have done it anyway better tools and more resources is. And, ah, man. I don't. I hate to make a definitive statement on this, but I think it might be the best way to get an incredible result that is better for everybody involved when you've got passionate people that cared enough to do it already anyway. And then you can give them the comfort and peace of mind and security to do that without having to worry about where they're going to get their next meal or their day job or whatever. You are just going to get such a passionately, thoughtfully crafted end result. And I just. I love to see people. I love to see people rewarded for the hard work that they're doing for open source.
- [146:22]
A
This is.
- [146:22]
B
This is really exciting.
- [146:25]
C
Holy crap. What the heck? Do we need audio for this?
- [146:32]
B
Oh, dude. That's what you found? Okay. Luke was looking for the next topic. Yeah, this one's cool.
- [146:36]
C
There's a subject called Cool LTT render by I Eat Pizza 88 on Reddit. And I was like, oh, that'll be kind of neat. And then I looked at it and I was like, what?
- [146:46]
B
Get ready to have your mind blown.
- [146:47]
A
Everyone playing elsewhere. So I need you to mute that first.
- [146:50]
C
Okay. Hold on. Is it just the show? Do you know?
- [146:54]
A
I can just.
- [146:55]
C
I think it's the show. I think it's the show. Is it gone now?
- [146:58]
A
Yes.
- [146:58]
C
Got it. It was the show.
- [146:59]
A
We'll do C and enable that button. Okay. I don't know if Linus will be able to hear this, but hopefully we will.
- [147:06]
B
That's fine.
- [147:07]
C
I've.
- [147:07]
B
I've heard it.
- [147:10]
A
I got nothing.
- [147:12]
C
I accidentally paused it immediately, I guess. My bad.
- [147:14]
A
Wow.
- [147:16]
C
I wonder if there's. Hold on, hold on one sec. Hold on one sec.
- [147:18]
A
No, no, no, no.
- [147:19]
B
It's working. Okay. We're holding on.
- [147:20]
C
We're Easter eggs in here. What's in here?
- [147:27]
B
I do not have enough resolution to read that.
- [147:29]
C
Projects Sexy Segue. Sexy Segway Tech House. Top secret AMD tech upgrade Shoots. There's. So there's some Easter eggs in there. Okay, click play.
- [147:50]
A
Is this copyrighted music? Did we check?
- [147:53]
B
Well, I guess it is what it is.
- [147:55]
C
At this point, we didn't check at all, So.
- [148:02]
B
Cool.
- [148:03]
A
Got dying.
- [148:05]
C
We're not dying. Wow, that's actually, like, just fantastic.
- [148:18]
B
How Cool is that? And they said, they said all Blender, all hand done, no AI. And I'm trying to, I'm trying to. Hold on, I'm trying to remember. Did. Was this their. Was this their first full animation in Blender? Let me double check. I seem to recall they said something about that, but my wi fi is not that fast, especially when I'm streaming. Personal project. Yep, my first personal project in Blender. That's so cool. The 2D and the sound design was done in after effects and, and they, they said they used zero AI. If you want to see how it was made, let me know. I plan on doing a breakdown at some point. How flipping cool is that?
- [149:08]
C
I didn't, I didn't see this because they embedded the video directly to Reddit, but they also have a YouTube channel that they posted it on, Harun, so check that out. It doesn't have that many views. So go, go there and say hi here as well. I'm sure if there is updates, it might be on the Reddit, but it will definitely be on their YouTube channel. So, so, so go there. Get subscribed.
- [149:29]
B
I. It's just, it's so. It's so cool to see the kinds of things that, that people will just create spontaneously like that. Like that's. It's. And like, no offense, you know, but I'm amazed at how good it is. Like, it's.
- [149:51]
C
Oh, it's incredible. It's.
- [149:52]
B
It's not that I don't. What, what was his name again? It's not that I don't believe in you, sir. It's not that I don't believe in you. I eat pizza 88. It's just that you just. You made it way better than I would have ever thought that you could make it as your first Blender project. It's. It's. I would never know that you weren't a pro watching this. Yeah, so cool. Like it looks like a real ad.
- [150:23]
C
Speaking of so cool, if you own any. Samsung's valuation reached $1 trillion on Wednesday as shares of the South Korean tech giant surged more than 10%. We are partially, maybe losing Linus. I'm just going to keep going. On Wednesday, Samsung stock surged 15%. Oh, okay. Crossing $1 trillion and make it the second Asian company past that mark after TSMC. The rally followed Samsung's record Q1 earnings last week, where operating profit jumped more than Eightfold. And Q1 alone topped the company's entire 2025 profit. Geez. Driven by AI memory demand, Samsung's profit engine is high bandwidth memory, or HBM, where it currently trails SK Hynix at about 25% market share, but recently started mass producing HBM4, the latest generation expected to power Nvidia's upcoming Vera Rubin AI architecture. Discussion Question what impact, if any, do you think this will have on Samsung's consumer products? I don't think it will have any. Samsung has always been very excited to be in everything ever. It's kind of funky to walk around Korea. I haven't been there in a long time, but it's kind of funky to walk around Korea and just see all the. The different things labeled with Samsung. There's Samsung tanks, military division. Military. Yeah. There's Samsung toilets, there's Samsung insurance, there's Samsung whatever the heck you could possibly imagine. I don't think they're ever going to give that up. But like. And what I mean by that is I don't think they're going to do a micron where they just like shut down their consumer division. I don't see that happening personally because they like being everywhere. But they do have the weight to just scale. So I do. I do suspect they'll probably do that. Where they were saying here they. They started mass producing HBM4, it's like, yeah, I see them doing stuff like that. Increasing production, hiring more people, expanding even further. They like, are South Korea. So yeah, I wouldn't. I wouldn't be too surprised if they just kept going so that.
- [152:31]
B
I'm back, baby.
- [152:32]
C
I don't know if that fits into good news. Wan show either.
- [152:37]
A
Samsung space.
- [152:40]
B
It's good news for Samsung.
- [152:43]
A
I can't do it. I can't do it. No one can.
- [152:46]
C
Oh, and that's an amazing reference. If you're wondering what Dan and I are referencing. That's one of the Red Alert games.
- [152:53]
A
I think it's two.
- [152:54]
C
Oh, man.
- [152:55]
A
Oh, that's the wrong one.
- [152:56]
C
I don't know if I want to show it on screen, but it's like,
- [152:59]
A
what the hell is this?
- [153:00]
C
I will go to the last place not corrupted by capitalism space.
- [153:09]
A
Thank you.
- [153:09]
C
It's amazing. You can tell he's fighting off laughter at the end there. It's. Oh, it's Command and Conquer, not Red Alert. My bad. I always mix the two.
- [153:18]
A
It is a core part of my being.
- [153:22]
C
Oh, yeah, it's amazing.
- [153:24]
A
A section.
- [153:25]
B
Did I drop me?
- [153:26]
C
You did. You are back now.
- [153:28]
B
How far did I get?
- [153:30]
C
Nowhere at all. You were. You were all right.
- [153:34]
B
I hate it here. Sick. Oh, we're back.
- [153:36]
A
Orange bars, green bars. Yeah, we can keep going.
- [153:39]
C
Okay.
- [153:39]
B
All right, here's my good news spin on our last story. Just a few hours after the evening of May 5, when a large chunk of Germany's Internet went down, it was restored. Ah, good news. The Internet was restored is good news.
- [153:58]
C
Yeah, this is our. Oh, sorry. Okay, I understand. I don't think that's how that works.
- [154:04]
B
Yeah, that's fine. The outage ran from 9:57pm, so 21:57 to a little after one in the morning the next morning, knocking offline major sites like Amazon, DHL, Steam, eBay and German news outlets. Only domains that were had that were pushed out, faulty DNS SEC signatures were affected. Denek, which is the registry that manages the company's.de domains and who apparently pushed these faulty DNSSEC signatures, hasn't published an official root cause yet, though some commentators have pointed to a botched zone signing. Key rollover over the registry, says that it will release more details once the investigation wraps up. Our discussion question here is do events like this make you worried about the many unknown single points of failure that there are for vital digital infrastructure? And I mean, I think the answer is, is a resounding and obvious yes. Yes, it does. Like, I'd never even heard of these guys and all of a sudden, like, you know, Steam's not accessible for an entire country. Are you kidding me? What the heck?
- [155:17]
C
Honestly, my gut reaction was no, but the only reason why my gut reaction was no is because, like, man. Yeah. There's so much more. It's crazy. I mean, one of. One of the wild things that we've been seeing lately is the, the cable cutting. Boats, ships, maybe. I should say.
- [155:35]
B
Yeah.
- [155:36]
C
With undersea cables. I think, I think China literally just did this to Taiwan. Like very recently. We saw a lot in the Ukraine and Russian war. Was that even allegedly? I didn't think the Chinese Taiwan one was allegedly. I think they just. I thought they just did it.
- [155:55]
B
Let me check. Taiwan detained and prosecuted Chinese crews for deliberately severing underseas communication cables. BBC source sentenced to three years in prison it just says Chinese national though.
- [156:16]
C
Yeah. So maybe.
- [156:17]
B
I don't know if they've been able to prove that the Chinese government did it.
- [156:20]
C
I just wanted, I mean, deeply enough into it, but I thought it was like literally a ship designed to do this that they were like testing and then it worked, but I. I don't know. But either way, there's. Man, the Internet as we know it is such a. A crazy combination of building blocks of different systems and organizations and People and individuals and open source software and closed source software and. And a massive variety of companies. And the fact that it all works is. It all works and has insane uptime as a, like, generalized system is the
- [156:55]
B
fact that I'm talking to you right now is a miracle, mind blowing. Like, we should never stop believing that. We should never take it for granted because it's the. The deeper you go into it, I feel like it's. It's like one of those. It's like one of those. Those like, IQ curves. What is it like, like dumb smart smart Dumb smarter. Like, whatever, but basically like, yeah, how. How amazed you are by the Internet. Like, if you're super dumb, you're like super, super amazed. And then if you're kind of like midwit, then you might not be that amazed. And then if you're super smart, you're probably really amazed because there. There's like. There's so much like professional grade duct tape. No, I know it's called a bell curve, but it's like. It's like a. Like a midwit
- [157:48]
A
meme
- [157:51]
B
bell curve.
- [157:52]
C
I watched a video last night where Destin from. Yeah, I was talking to two of the astronauts on the iss and I kind of like.
- [158:04]
B
No, it's not.
- [158:04]
C
Mentally paused partway through just to, like, marvel. And I understand it's not new technology, not by a decent amount, but I paused for a second just to marvel at the fact that they were having a video call. It's just like, yeah. Damn, dude, that's crazy. Yeah, it's. It's a wondrous thing.
- [158:27]
B
So there's a. There's a version of the midwit meme where the, like, cloaked genius is at both ends of the distribution and then the, like, dumb guy is in the middle.
- [158:37]
C
I knew what you mean.
- [158:38]
B
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Or. Oh, no, it's the. It's so. It's based on the midwit meme. Yeah, yeah. Sydney broke it has got it. It's the one where the guys on both ends have the same outward opinion, but the middle is, like, furious. But in this case, it's like the outside is, like, amazed and the middle is like me. Yeah. Cool. All right, dude, that's it for topics. We're ready to jump into Wano after dark. What. What all you got for us, Mr. Besser?
- [159:08]
A
Well, give me a second to change everything over.
- [159:15]
B
We know you have a life crystal. I just know. I just know you can take it. You can handle better bit. A little bit of ribbing. I don't mean it that way, but like. Okay, I'm, I'm stop now.
- [159:28]
C
This is also a really cool video. It's from the studio. I know. David. David ML had a.
- [159:33]
A
That's got to be one of the
- [159:34]
C
best to do with. I'm just flowering over you guys. David ML had a lot to do with this. Are there really seven keys to the Internet? This if you want to look into more of like man, how the heck does this thing keep working? This is honestly a, a, a great video. It was stunning to me that this only got 180,000 views. This is a really good video. It's really interesting. Look into how some of this stuff works. Yeah.
- [160:01]
A
Anyways, Internet is a crazy thing. Hi Wan team. Getting the ABCs of gaming for my 10 day newborn boy, Smiley.
- [160:10]
B
Oh, congrats.
- [160:11]
A
Linus. What is your best tech tip for young, younger babies? When should someone start them out on it, in your opinion? Thanks.
- [160:20]
B
I think you should basically delay it as long as you can because they're gonna get plenty of screen time and plenty of, you know, gaming time. And when they start asking for it is basically when you should start even beginning to ask yourself, you know, should they have any in, in my opinion, I mean there's always going to be times when, let's face it, being a parent is not always easy and sometimes you actually just do need a break. Kids TV 1, 2, 3. Taught my firstborn the Alphabet and how to count and phonics. It's a YouTube channel. I'm not proud of it, but I'm not ashamed by it. As for, as for getting them into tech, I don't think it's really like, like time based, but it's like motivation based. So my, my kids had access to all the tech that they could possibly want, but they didn't really start like learning 3D printing and modeling until the girls wanted to make toys and my eldest wanted to make some money and start a like a side hustle selling 3D printed stuff. It's going to, it's going to happen organically and, or, or it might just not. Here's the thing. You can't make your kids be interested in the same stuff that you are. Just doesn't work that way. Do it in front of them. That's a big thing. They will naturally be interested in whatever it is that you're doing. So if you're always like fixing up bicycles or if you're always working on computers and you make a point of involving them, that's your best shot at them adopting like a healthy relationship with, you know, whatever it is that is your hobby that you want to do with them.
- [162:08]
A
Hey Linus, if Project Helix is a Steam machine like device and Windows is improved, how well do you think it will do against the Steam machine?
- [162:19]
B
Oh, I mean, I feel like Luke has immediate thoughts on this. I could see it. I could see it in his face.
- [162:27]
C
I actually don't think they compete that much.
- [162:30]
B
Yeah,
- [162:33]
C
yeah, I think they're in different markets. I think Microsoft has to compete with SteamOS but on a PC level, I think the people interested in a Steam machine are interested in having Steam on their TV be and if Helix is going to matter basically at all, it's going to have to have some timed exclusives or whatever else. Maybe those games work on Windows
- [163:06]
B
and
- [163:06]
C
maybe they sort of work on Linux or maybe they do work on Linux but with some tinkering or whatever, wherever that line ends up being. But yeah, I think they're different devices. I think they're different target audiences. And as like cool as it is, as you know, Windows is growing or, sorry, Linux is growing and installation size. What am I trying to say? Not market cap, market share. In market share of people that are using things like Steam and whatnot. It's still a tiny slice of the pie. So like Steam machine doing well is not going to be the reason why Helix doesn't make like I would bet everything on that Helix might not make it because no one has really cared that much about Microsoft consoles in a really long time because they've been not good. So it needs to like be really good and be really compelling, have good freaking games for once. What are you doing? And then also be priced well. And if they can accomplish those things, then it will matter and if they can't, it won't. That's it.
- [164:11]
A
Hey dll, you've said before you generally have a good sense of how a video will perform pre launch. Have there been any that genuinely surprised you by doing way better than expected?
- [164:23]
B
Oh, you're gonna say you're saying better than expected. I thought you were going a different direction with that and I had one completely ready for you. The video keyboard that we uploaded earlier this week. The, the Flux keyboard, like vastly underperformed compared to my expectations. And actually I guess follow up, the, the TV with no smart features. The, the Scepter TV video way over performed. We got just over half a million views on this keyboard that like has an entire screen under it so that you can change languages on the fly or do it's kind of like a stream deck, but an entire keyboard. You can put any icons you want that control anything, any hotkeys that you want in basically any software that you launch. It's supported by Windows, Mac OS and even Linux. It was like really cool. Raised almost $4 million on Kickstarter. Super neat. Yeah, no one cared. And then we did a video on like a Scepter TV that was more like a. Like a writers meeting. Like, hey, yeah, what the heck? Why aren't there more like dumb TVs? Does anyone still make dumb TV? So. Lol scepter does. Haha. Okay, let's get one. We'll like, maybe just like, you know, unbox it and watch it a little bit and see if it's any good. Like 2 million views. Like. Okay, well, I don't know what the rules are anymore, so good luck everybody. Torpedo Bench says I'm not surprised to hear the screen keyboard underperformed the video. Watched like an ad. That is. That is like super interesting feedback. And I have. I'm gonna. I'm gonna have to watch it again and see if I can figure out like what you mean by that because I. I have no idea what you're talking about. We. Not only is it not an ad, but they didn't even send it to us. Like I didn't even buy one. I borrowed it from someone who backed the Kickstarter. So I don't really. Yeah, okay, I'm gonna have to. I'm. I'm gonna have to figure out what that means exactly. I mean, yeah, we're always. We're always open to feedback, but I just don't really know how to have a not ad. Not look like an ad. No, I totally understand. It wasn't an ad. It just had ad vibes. Interesting. I mean, okay, current year sucks. Says even when pointing out the downsides to the keyboard, you sounded super positive. I mean, I thought it was really cool. Sorry. Charcoal says it was scripted in a similar way to your sponsored content. It wasn't scripted. It was actually unscripted. I just thought it was really cool. I scripted the intro. Only the intro before we like roller animated intro was scripted.
- [167:38]
C
That's so funny.
- [167:41]
B
So maybe I. So you guys think my unscripted sounds like scripted and my not ads sound like ads? So should I just do all scripted ads? Raken Claw says you're supposed to be cynical and dismissive. Like no, I'm not going to do that. The keyboard's cool. I. This is. Man, it's not only. It's not only like, like one person as well, saying like, it felt like an ad. There's a number of people in floatplane chat that are like, yeah, I like. I felt like it had kind of like an ad vibe too. That's so weird to me. Turn your socks. To be clear, I didn't hate the video. No, no. I'm not saying you hate the video. And it's fine if you hate the video. Like, it literally are. The best videos on the channel still have a 1% dislike ratio. You know, somebody dislikes something no matter how quote unquote, universally loved. It is. And this is a scary comment from Birdie Num nums. They mistook your enthusiasm for marketing. That's kind of sad. A terrifying world to live in where you're not allowed to be.
- [168:52]
C
Is that like TikTok undisclosed ad brain going on?
- [168:55]
B
I wonder. I do wonder that. That's exactly what I was thinking. Huh?
- [169:15]
C
Can you unsay that, please? Because I hate it. I mean, I think it's. I've heard. I don't have TikTok. I've heard that's a thing. I've heard that there's a lot of undisclosed advertisements on TikTok. TikTok. I can't save from firsthand experience. But, like, maybe, maybe that's what's going on. Maybe you've been trained that if anyone's speaking that way about basically anything, that it's an ad. That is funny. I haven't watched it yet, but it's funny that it was unscripted, not an ad. They didn't even send the product. Etc.
- [169:49]
B
Literally everything people hated about it. The opposite wasn't what it was.
- [169:55]
C
That's very funny.
- [170:00]
B
Wow.
- [170:06]
C
It's called. It's called. This video raised. I'm talking to Dan. This video raised 3.8 million on Kickstarter. It's dollar sign 3.8m. You got it. Okay.
- [170:16]
B
Like, there's definitely things I think we could have done better. We tried to do that cool thing with the packaging where the thumbnail is actually the first frame of the video. So it just like starts right away way because I really wanted people to, like, see the keyboard in action. But I think maybe we could have chosen a better video. I just liked the idea of like playing a video of a keyboard unboxing while I unbox a video keyboard was just. And you know what? Oh, I wonder if this is something because I shot the intro afterward, like after we'd already gotten it working and I was already like, super excited about it. So Maybe, maybe that's what's going on for like an. For like an intro. Maybe I seem too excited for something that I like hadn't really like explained or shown yet.
- [171:04]
C
Super stupid server dude. Fantastic name in Philippine chat said I get. I got those ad vibes too and I don't watch Tick tock.
- [171:19]
B
And then meanwhile, like, like nobody's mad about the sponsored video we did on LG's HTA 9 competitor. The their like wireless surround thing which by the way totally unsponsored right now, but is really cool. But. Huh. For the first time in positive wan show era, I think you're gonna have to take away my bird den. I. Yeah, I don't know how.
- [171:49]
C
Torpedo Bench said wild guess.
- [171:51]
B
I don't know how to process this. I'm going to think about it. I'm going to fester.
- [171:54]
C
I feel like considering how many people have this feedback, I feel like that's worth trying to work on and figure out. Torpedo Bench said wild guess. You seemed almost too informed rather than discovering it along with the viewer. I don't know if it's interesting.
- [172:09]
A
He is left in shame.
- [172:10]
C
He's gone. That is interesting again. I haven't watched this one. Maybe I'm part of the problem. But.
- [172:15]
B
But.
- [172:15]
A
Oh, he's gone completely. Slide over to Luke. Yeah, I'm just getting logged in. I'll do another what's up thing.
- [172:24]
C
Chat, talk to Luke. How's it going? You must speak to me. I can maybe do merch messages if there's any ready. And also for me, I have to
- [172:35]
A
reconnect him and do things that makes sense.
- [172:38]
B
Engage with our community.
- [172:40]
C
No.
- [172:40]
A
Oh, I mean, here's one. What's up, boys? Luke, what workout equipment, if any, do you have at home? Looking good.
- [172:48]
C
Looking good. I mean, I'm way out of shape. Interestingly enough, the first time I've gone to the gym in a really long time was actually last night. I am.
- [172:54]
A
How'd it go?
- [172:55]
C
Incredibly sore right now, dude. Oh my God. I did the.
- [172:59]
A
So you're not just waddling for no reason?
- [173:01]
C
No, no, no. I did, I did my, my chest routine. So I did the whole skull crushers thing and everything. I was fairly surprised at how much I still had like lateral raises was one that I was expecting to lose a lot of performance in. And I still, I was still doing 30 pound sets of 12 lateral raises which I was decently happy with. Um, I had been out for a very long time. I had so like, basically, honestly, for surprisingly close to a year. I think it's like 10 months. I've basically been out. There was. There was. There was a massive Renault at my house. There was a bunch of moving stuff that was happening, and I couldn't get spare time to go to the gym for a really long time. And then health thing happened, and then minor injuries because I wasn't going to gym for a long time. And then I tried to start doing things again, and I have a lot of small issues that if I'm not constantly maintaining them, they're problems. And now I've mostly moved through that, and I'm going back to going to the gym. And, yeah, now I'm just. Now I'm just very. I'm very, very. I'm very sore. I. I tried to. Man, there was. There was a guy there. I haven't been in so long, right? And it's just a little community gym that I go to. Nothing too special. So I walk in, and I used to recognize, like, almost everybody. And I walk in, and I recognize, like, the front desk guy, and he was a little bit surprised to see me, and I was like, yeah, I'm back. And that was cool. And then I walk inside, and not a single person working out do I recognize. Partway through my workout, however, this dude walks in, and I recognized him, and he's freaking stacked. He's, like, way bigger than I that I remember him being. And I was like, wow, cool. And then part way through working out, I work up a little bit of courage, and I. And I walk up to him, and I start trying to talk to him. And I was gonna say, basically, like, hey, man. Like, I. You know, I used to come to this gym all the time, and I don't know if you recognize me, but I remember you from back then. And, like, it's. I really, like, appreciate that you're still coming. It's like. Like, inspiration for me to see that you're still here, because nobody else is. And I get, like, halfway into it.
- [175:04]
B
I'm here.
- [175:05]
C
I get halfway into it, and he's like, oh, I'm so sorry. No English. I'm like, damn it. Like, oh, no. Yeah. But, yeah. So I don't know. What workout equipment do I have at home? I ordered a weight bench, and it has taken over three months and isn't here yet. But theoretically, I'll have a weight bench.
- [175:31]
B
In fairness, they did say that you were gonna have to wait for it.
- [175:38]
C
Jeez.
- [175:40]
B
And then going home, I came back just to do that.
- [175:43]
C
I have a couple dumbbells. I'm probably going to be trying to get some adjustable dumbbells and. With adjustable dumbbells and away bench, you can do like an incredible amount of stuff. There's this thing that I've been looking into. I don't know if I want to talk about it yet, but it's. It's, it's. It's a pulley attachment. So you know when you go to the gym and you, you have the, the, the like 6 axis pulley thing that's usually in the middle of the gym. That's not the right name for it. Darn it. I don't remember. Anyways, you have the, the, the pulley machines. It. You can attach it. I think it attaches through magnet or you can latch it in, but you can attach it to basically anything. And then it has a electronic pulley attachment. Yeah, I think that's right.
- [176:20]
B
Right.
- [176:21]
C
And then you, you, you just dial it to a setting and then you have a pulling machine basically anywhere. I don't remember what it's called. No. Wow. Not a Smith machine. Nope. That's. If I may have described that extremely poorly. Voltra. I think that's right. Ultra pulley cable. That's what I'm thinking. Cable, not pulley. Yeah, I've seen these. How much are they? I don't even know. My laptop just froze. There we go. They might be super crazy expensive. Oh my God. I'm not buying one of those. All right, sick. Sounds good. You want one pulley and you spend $2,100 on it.
- [177:09]
B
What?
- [177:11]
C
It's a really cool idea. It can go up to like put it on a tree, 200 pounds or something. You can attach it to like practically anything. And then you can have a pulley machine anywhere. But my God, the Price Gym attached
- [177:24]
A
to a pulley machine. Have a pulley machine on your pulley machine.
- [177:30]
C
Ultimate bundle, $6,000. It comes with two.
- [177:34]
A
You do both arms at the same time. That's way more efficient. If you have that kind of money you need.
- [177:41]
C
Honestly, not buying that is just losing money if we think about it.
- [177:44]
A
That sounds like financial advice.
- [177:47]
C
Yeah.
- [177:49]
B
Refocus, you butthead. Sorry, My, my, my camera will not refocus right now and I don't know why.
- [177:55]
A
Let me see if I can force it to.
- [177:57]
B
You can't do anything. It's the camera.
- [177:59]
A
Yeah, I can wait.
- [178:01]
B
You can. How did you do that?
- [178:03]
A
Now it's in focus. You had autofocus disabled.
- [178:06]
B
I did, yeah. How would I do that?
- [178:08]
A
I don't know. Yeah, I can focus on the background. Everybody's Saying is fake.
- [178:14]
B
I didn't touch. I didn't. I didn't touch the settings. The only thing that happened was my stupid, horrible media tech WI fi cut out. I didn't touch anything weird.
- [178:26]
A
It's your fault. Okay, more.
- [178:28]
B
How did you change the focus on my camera? That is magic. No, I see you doing it, Dan. You don't have to prove you can do it. How did you do it? It.
- [178:39]
A
I clicked on focus.
- [178:42]
B
Yeah, but like how the software that
- [178:45]
A
I use for the video call that we're doing here lets me adjust a bunch of settings.
- [178:52]
B
Yes, apparently. But explain further. I'm sure I'm not the only one that's like, this is cool.
- [178:58]
A
I mean, we're not associated with them, but it's called Video Ninja.
- [179:01]
B
Yeah, that's fine. I don't care.
- [179:03]
A
And there's a producer section. You can have multiple people. You can do a whole bunch of stuff. Stuff. It lets me see all sorts of stats, like round trip latency buffer settings, your webcams exposure and stuff. What is it set to? 155.8. So I can do this. You know, I can adjust your white balance, your color. It really depends. Say you don't know what you're doing and you have the wrong audio device or.
- [179:26]
B
Yeah.
- [179:27]
A
Or something like that. I can also change your audio device. I can request that you change it to a certain thing.
- [179:34]
B
Yeah, I'm just. I don't recall at any point, like,
- [179:37]
A
I've never had to do it.
- [179:39]
B
I gave, I gave this application access to my camera, but I guess I never really thought about that that meant access to my camera. Yeah, I thought that meant access to the video feed. I had no idea that there was even like any kind of like common API for webcam that would like. I, I'm sorry, I just never thought about this before. Yeah.
- [180:04]
A
And I mean, I said earlier, like, oh, you've got 32 cores on your computer.
- [180:09]
B
Yeah, yeah, that I figured there was like kind of an obvious way for you to check, but in terms of like also actually changing settings on the camera, like, what?
- [180:16]
A
I've doxed you as well. I've got your, your external ip. I've got like.
- [180:21]
B
Yeah, yeah, yeah. All that. I mean, I assume again, video call,
- [180:25]
A
like, I mean, maybe, but that's exposed to me. Yeah. I don't know. It's great. I love it.
- [180:32]
B
What else can you change? On my camera, I can change the
- [180:36]
A
aspect ratio, I can change the brightness, color, temperature.
- [180:41]
B
Wow.
- [180:42]
A
Height, frame rate.
- [180:44]
B
Let's make you make me taller.
- [180:47]
A
Let's give you 21 frames a second. Well, that's.
- [180:50]
B
This is.
- [180:51]
A
This is great. I'm glad that I did this for the end of the show.
- [180:55]
B
Very cool. All right, why don't we jump into another comm?
- [181:03]
A
Sure. I'll just leave you yellow then. That works. Hi.
- [181:07]
B
LLD Simpsons did it.
- [181:09]
A
I dived out of a plane at 15,000ft for charity last month. I raised 1200 quid. Have any of you ever been skydiving? Also, any Recommendations for a UPS for a new UGreen IDX6011Pro2NAS? Can we say all these numbers?
- [181:25]
C
No. Always been interested, but never enough to bother going through with it. I guess. I suspect I will at some point.
- [181:37]
B
As for the UPS, I don't know. Get whichever one is the APC basic one or CyberPower basic one. That is the capacity that you need. If you're not a data center, then that's all you really need to know is get one of those and that'll probably be fine. That's a. That's a super cool experience, though. I've. I've never skydived. I'm not 100 sure that I want to do it at all. I'll. I would. Nah, I am still thinking about it. Yvonne doesn't want to, though. And that's a major thing for me is we like, doing things together. Luke, are you. Are you on board to skydive?
- [182:21]
C
Yeah.
- [182:23]
B
Yeah. Okay. I think about it then. I've never had anyone to like, really push me. Pun intended.
- [182:31]
C
That's the thing is my. My desire level on it has never been quite that high, but I've always been down. So it just hasn't really happened yet. But I'm like, pretty confident it will eventually. Actually. I. At one point in time I was like, I'm gonna do it, but I want to go like the whole way and I want to get, like, certified and I can do solo jumps and stuff. And then I looked into the time and the expense and was like, I'm not gonna do it. Yeah.
- [182:56]
B
And the tandem jump is not as appealing to me as going by myself.
- [183:00]
C
Yeah.
- [183:01]
B
So the fact that I would do it once and it would be the like, kind of. Yeah. For babies version. To be clear, I still would expect it to be extremely thrilling, but I would just like. I would wanna, like, like, you know, do it myself. By the way, Rod jumped in and so I'm just going to go ahead and say.
- [183:18]
A
He.
- [183:18]
B
He says, go Eaton for your. For your UPS and get an. Get a lithium, whatever it is. Are there affordable FEP4. Yeah. Yeah. No, Eaton does have consumer. Really consumer friendly products. Yep.
- [183:33]
C
That's cool.
- [183:34]
B
All right.
- [183:34]
C
I actually.
- [183:34]
B
Thanks, Rod. Thanks for jumping in with that.
- [183:37]
C
Oh, they totally do. They look cool too. What?
- [183:40]
B
Yep.
- [183:41]
A
Yeah, we got a lot of eating stuff. It's good. It's good things.
- [183:46]
C
Rod. Tips.
- [183:51]
B
Did you cook chicken for it first?
- [183:56]
A
Okay, let's touch it to some merch. Hey, Dll, my wife and I know it's the weekend when the WAN show is on. What do you do when with your significant other that makes it feel like the weekend is here?
- [184:12]
B
I host the WAN show with him.
- [184:17]
C
Oh.
- [184:19]
A
What about Luke?
- [184:24]
B
Too easy. Too easy.
- [184:26]
C
That was good.
- [184:29]
A
Hey, Dan, Luke and Linus. Question for Linus. What if your most. Quote unquote, if they just do this. Take for a company where you think they'd be super successful. Quote, unquote, if they just do this. Thank you all.
- [184:43]
B
Oh, okay. If they just do this, they'd be super successful. Okay. So this has to be a company that I've heard of. So they have to already be at least reasonably successful. If anyone else wants to jump in with no, they.
- [184:56]
C
They could be. They could be failing, but previously successful.
- [185:01]
B
Like we could use this as our. We haven't talked about. Oh, did you say Microsoft?
- [185:05]
C
I said Ubisoft.
- [185:06]
B
Oh, okay. Let's. Should we use this as our excuse to talk about Microsoft? We haven't really. We haven't really dunked on Microsoft yet. This show. If they just actually put half of the resources into making Windows better that they do, into stuffing it full of ads and AI, I think they'd be really successful. To be clear, they could keep doing what they're doing now and still be really successful. Successful. I'm just saying that if they did this thing, they would be really successful. I'm not saying they would be unsuccessful if they didn't.
- [185:36]
C
They also, and like this one, I actually don't want to harp on too much because they might maybe be making the right steps to doing it right now, but they got to figure out what the heck they're going to do with their massive assortment of legendary studios that they have under their belt. Belt. When they are not like the publisher of the moment right now. It doesn't really make a lot of sense. They. They have so much potential there. They have so such a wealth of IP and it feels like a lot of mismanagement. I don't remember the name of the game, but some game came out, did super well, got rated really well, and then the whole team got laid Off. And I remember just thinking like, like I understand
- [186:24]
A
the fact that you can't remember the name of the game and it happens so often that you're like, which one was?
- [186:29]
B
It is awful.
- [186:31]
C
And it happens a lot with Microsoft. And the weird thing to me is I understand what I've heard the strategy is, is that if they don't necessarily, I think it was hi Fi Rush. Yeah, if they don't necessarily have something to work on like immediately and they can't ship something like soon, then it looks bad on the books now. So they just get rid of them. But the insanity to me is that with the amount of IPs that they have, like holy crap, guys, just put them on something else. They clearly made good game. They don't have to make good game version two. They could go make other good game. Like that's. It's okay. You could put these people on anything else. You have so many different IPs that they could be working on.
- [187:13]
B
On.
- [187:13]
C
If you don't have an idea for them right now, or if you think hi fi rush 2 would be too soon or something like that, have them go help another team for a while or something and then split them back off. Who knows? But like just constantly cycling out good talent is not a strategy that is effective. And if you know that you have a team that can deliver, just deleting them for short term game gain does not feel like a Microsoft strategy that feels like a tiny has no money dead around the corner studio strategy that is failing and can't keep up. And if you want to make yourself look like that, go ahead, I guess. But you're trying to be big guy in the room Microsoft and buy every freaking gaming company out there, act like it. Follow through, find the good teams that are doing well and assign them to something that they can do. And if they can't, if you don't have another thing that they can do, put them on temporary assignment. But don't lose that talent. Oh my God. It's like groups like Microsoft that have all this IP and all these employees and all this kind of stuff are getting just slaughtered by indies right now. And not even like, you know, you can't properly call Larry in AAA Studio. Or at least you couldn't. Maybe they're getting closer to that, that. But you could, you couldn't. When they dropped Baldur's Gate 3 and they just slaughtered everyone. And a lot of that is from my understanding from Larion is they've just over the years grown this pool of just incredibly Talented people that have just progressively made better RPGs over and over and over again over time. Just every time Larion has released a game, it's just gotten better, which is just insane. And you have the capability. You can accomplish that. You can do that. And in a lot of these situations, you have some of those people keep them anyways.
- [189:15]
B
I like, oh, hi, Josh's. If movie studios could just faithfully adapt a video game to a movie, they would be successful, you know, or tv or a TV series or whatever. Like, it's. It's blowing my mind that they're remaking Harry Potter when there's so many other beloved IPs that you could just, you know, go and license and, like, do that with. You don't stop remaking the same old thing. With that said, I think keeping remaking the same old thing does appear to be a license to print money. So don't. Don't put me in charge of movie studio anytime soon. I would have done something crazy like have people who love Star wars make Star wars movies. Movies.
- [189:58]
C
That's nuts. I don't know.
- [189:59]
B
I know I'm basically. Basically an idiot.
- [190:06]
A
Hi, Dll just fixed a thumbstick while with my wife in the hospital for a chronic condition. What games would you recommend for people laid up in the hospital?
- [190:19]
B
Oh, wow.
- [190:22]
A
Shouldn't the doctors really be fixing the thumbstick sticks?
- [190:27]
B
That's very funny, Dan.
- [190:28]
A
No, it's not. Shut up.
- [190:30]
C
So wait, they. They want to play a game in the hospital and they can't use their thumbs? Am I understanding this correctly?
- [190:34]
A
No. Probably the controller thumb stick broke, and now they want to be able to
- [190:39]
C
play games and they're stuck up in a hospital?
- [190:41]
A
Yes. What's a. What's a good sitting in bed all the time?
- [190:45]
C
I mean, are they saying system? I think they mean, like a system. Like a Steam game.
- [190:50]
A
No, games. Games.
- [190:51]
B
Games. Yeah. I would really. I think I'd be. The last time I was stuck, like, in a bed and couldn't move. My game was Breath of the Wild. And a big part of what I liked about. Maybe that's part of why I liked the open world of it so much, was that I was, like, stuck in bed.
- [191:08]
C
Well, it's escapism, right? So I would go to, like, the classic recommendations of, like, Baldur's Gate 3, Expedition 33, Breath of the Wild, something like that, where it's an RPG that you can get yourself immersed into and feel like you're the character so you can kind of escape the area that you are mentally and Go have some fun.
- [191:29]
B
Yeah.
- [191:33]
A
Hi, Lyral, like and Dominus. I know you like the pebble watch, Linus, but have you ever tried the Instinct series of garments? MIP screen with basic features and incredible battery life? Long live buttons?
- [191:49]
B
No, But I definitely owe it a shot because people said of my Garmin short circuit that I, like, picked the worst one, apparently, or, like, the worst one for me. So I'm like, okay, all right, all right, all right, all right, Garmin fans. I will. I will. I will give it another shot.
- [192:04]
A
Why does that keep happening to you?
- [192:08]
B
Oh, like upsetting fandoms.
- [192:11]
A
Just picking the wrong thing.
- [192:13]
B
Oh, I. I don't. I don't know.
- [192:16]
A
It seems.
- [192:17]
C
I feel like the.
- [192:18]
A
Maybe it shouldn't happen this often.
- [192:21]
C
Yeah. Maybe the universe, like, like, bends around it, you help so many. Pixel becomes the wrong thing.
- [192:29]
A
That's right.
- [192:29]
B
Yeah.
- [192:30]
A
I mean, you help so many people find the perfect system or the perfect product for them that all of the. The, like, negative karma comes back around. It's like, you know, you're giving your health to other people.
- [192:44]
C
Yeah.
- [192:45]
A
I don't know. In a mystic mood this evening.
- [192:48]
B
Thanks, Dan.
- [192:49]
A
Couple more. Hello, LL and the D. Any tips or warnings about moving somewhere new for a job? I've never done it before, and the opportunity might show itself soon.
- [193:00]
B
I have never done that. I really admire the heck out of people who pick up their whole lives and go somewhere new and learn a whole bunch of new things and meet a whole bunch of new people. And I've. I've never had the drive or the. I mean, even like, the guts necessarily, to do something like that. That's super cool. Give yourself credit for being adventurous and give yourself time to. To give it a real shot to work out, I guess, is the only thing that I could really offer.
- [193:36]
A
Last one I've got today. Has Luke played Pacopia yet? A few months ago, he went into a small rant about what he wanted to see in a new Pokemon game, then proceeded to basically describe Bopia.
- [193:48]
C
Really?
- [193:50]
A
You haven't switched it?
- [193:51]
B
I heard it was rated really well.
- [193:53]
C
I have heard it's rated really well. Emma's been trying to get me to play it. I. Maybe I've, like, wrote it off on graphics too much. Maybe I should give it a shot. I. I just assumed it was just Animal Crossing, but with Pokemon, am I. Am I being too reductive about this? It's fun to watch people.
- [194:15]
A
I think so. It's a little more advanced than Animal Crossing.
- [194:19]
C
Okay. All right. Maybe I've been. I haven't really looked into it much. I just. Someone described it as Animal Crossing Pokemon to me, and I was like, I
- [194:26]
A
think it's Animal Crossing, Minecraft. Minecraft, Pokemon.
- [194:29]
C
Minecraft.
- [194:30]
B
Okay, well, the Minecraft is interesting.
- [194:32]
C
Yeah, please. It's Minecraft, Animal Crossing Pokemon. And it's so good. The people throwing Minecraft in the description loop there does make it a lot more interesting.
- [194:43]
A
I saw somebody made an underground dungeon for a Mr. Mime and he is trapped there.
- [194:49]
C
That seems good.
- [194:51]
A
That seems like the proper thing to do.
- [194:52]
B
Yeah.
- [194:53]
C
You can put Epstein in the ground.
- [194:55]
B
Oh, boy. And on that note, I think that's the end of the show. We will see you again next week. Make sure to subscribe to the Land show channel because we're going to be transitioning over there over the next little bit. So same bad time, but like, different. Different channel. See you. Wow. Yeah, see you there.
- [195:15]
C
Bye.
- [195:18]
B
Okay, I gotta run, guys. I gotta get to the airport finest.
- [195:22]
C
Okay, see you.
- [195:23]
B
Bye.