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- [00:01]
Linus Sebastian
I'm ready for my life to change.
- [00:03]
Luke Lafreniere
ABC Sundays. American Idol is all new.
- [00:06]
Linus Sebastian
Give it your all. Good luck. Come out with a golden ticket. Let's hear it.
- [00:10]
Luke Lafreniere
This is immense world. I've never seen anything like it. And a new chapter begins. You're going to Hollywood.
- [00:19]
Linus Sebastian
Carrie Underwood joins Lionel Richie, Luke Bryant and Ryan Seacrest on American Idol News Sundays 8, 7 Central on ABC and stream on Hulu. And pleased to announce that the US government appears to be amenable to freedom cities, corporate run cities with laxer laws. And you guys have heard us talk before about Linus Town. This might be just the opportunity to get it started up. And Luke, Luke, you're going to be the first resident, right?
- [00:54]
Luke Lafreniere
Of course, of course, of course.
- [00:57]
Linus Sebastian
Heck yeah. In other news, MSI has announced yet another variation of the RTX 5070 that you can't buy, bringing their total to 19 different RTX 5070s you can't buy. So we're going to be talking a little bit about what exactly it is that inspires board makers to continue releasing more models that rely on on a supply constrained part. Like yeah, what's. What else we got this week?
- [01:30]
Luke Lafreniere
Pokemon Go has been sold to the Saudi Arabia's public investment fund and Microsoft teases Copilot for gaming. Which is like probably the last thing I wanted to hear about from AI.
- [01:44]
Linus Sebastian
Cool. Nice. I can't roll the intro. So Luke, the show is brought to you today by server Part Deals Delete me and Odoo of course, with some help from Our rap partner dBrand, our laptop partner Dell, and our partner Secret Lab, whose chair I am. Oh yeah, really enjoying right now for sure. Definitely sitting in a secret lab chair. 100%.
- [02:30]
Luke Lafreniere
Yeah.
- [02:31]
Linus Sebastian
What, what do we want to get into first here? Whoever prepared this Freedom Cities topic, boy did they ever put in the work. And that's probably a good thing because it's a bit of a. It's a bit of a prickly topic and certainly a little polarizing. So why don't we just go through the notes and then we can talk about Freedom Cities. Sound pretty good? Sound pretty good.
- [02:55]
Luke Lafreniere
Yeah.
- [02:55]
Linus Sebastian
Lobbying groups in the United States representing startup nations are drafting congressional legislation that is aimed at creating what they call Freedom Cities. Okay, we're going off script already. Isn't this just company towns?
- [03:14]
Luke Lafreniere
Yeah, isn't it? That's immediately what I thought. I haven't dove into this enough. I actually got really excited when I saw these notes because again, whoever did this like great because I haven't done the time to Research this properly. But I'm happy that somebody did. But yeah, immediately, company towns, I saw comments on it that were immediately calling out company towns. Those were a massive failure in America.
- [03:35]
Linus Sebastian
So like, if my, if, if these notes don't have, what is it? Oh, my soul to the company store. If that's not in here, then that is a, that's a major swing and a miss.
- [03:47]
Luke Lafreniere
Yeah.
- [03:48]
Linus Sebastian
For those of you who are not familiar with the history, company towns were, well, pretty much this. They were areas with looser regulation, pretty much nothing in terms of workers rights. And one of the biggest grifts or biggest scams in company towns was that they would pay you with credits that could only be used at the company store. Some even went as far as as to only allow the person who was issued the credits to spend them. So they couldn't even be traded to someone outside of the company to use it in the company store. It was only usable by you. And then because you know the company town controls who's allowed to have a store in it, only they were allowed to have the store. They jacked up the price and essentially put you in a position where, where you were completely at their mercy and couldn't save any money. Okay, sorry, sorry, sorry. I'm coming back, I'm coming back to the notes here. So they imagine that these Freedom Cities, okay, so that's how we're going to distinguish when we're talking about the historical side of it. We're going to talk about company towns and when we talk about the current version, we're going to call them Freedom Cities. And I use my air quotes here, extremely air quote. Okay, so these Freedom Cities should be free of certain restrictive federal regulations that impede innovation. They will be governed by corporations and in some instances should pay less in tax. According to one of the groups that is lobbying for these named the Freedom Cities Coalition. Freedom Cities are a once in a generation opportunity to solve the housing crisis, bring American manufacturing home and unleash the full potential of American entrepreneurs through the creation of special districts called prosperity zones. Seriously, this is like. Sorry, we're going off script again here. This is like, this is like straight out of freaking BioShock, you know, like this is, this has literally existed many times in literature and exists in literature because it has existed many times in reality and we all know how it ends.
- [06:24]
Luke Lafreniere
Yeah.
- [06:24]
Linus Sebastian
So it's like, it's, it's like relatable to write fiction about because it's not that fiction. According to Wired, the goal of these cities is ostensibly to Create safe havens for anti aging clinical trials, nuclear power startups, manufacturing hubs and shipbuilding ports, and basically avoid scrutiny from agencies like the Food and Drug Administration, Nuclear Regulatory Commission and Environmental Protection Agency.
- [07:02]
Luke Lafreniere
Nuclear Regulatory Commission, man. So they want to, they want to do unregulated drug testing is basically like the main thing that I'm reading from this. We want to experiment on humans and we don't want to get in trouble for it.
- [07:15]
Linus Sebastian
Yeah. And don't forget that they want to experiment on nuclear reactors and don't want anybody looking at it.
- [07:20]
Luke Lafreniere
Nice.
- [07:21]
Linus Sebastian
And don't forget that they want to do whatever they want to the environment and not have anybody look at it. Yeah, see, that's the, that's the thing about, like, the environment is that, you know, it's the environment, like it affects, you know, everyone around you. You see that, you see that wild thing where what's their nuts, like, blocked a river from running into a rock. Like, if you, if you nuclear something or you, you know, extinct a species or whatever, that actually impacts everyone. So yeah, that's, that's why you have it everywhere. Cool. Anyway, Trey Goff, the chief of staff of the Startup Nation, slash Freedom City, Prospera, man, that is such a, like, honestly, I don't think I could come up with a more dystopian sounding name.
- [08:20]
Luke Lafreniere
Why does it. I completely agree, but why does it sound so dystopian? Is it. Is it like 1950s, like, American dream? Like Bioshock stuff? Like, is it Bioshock? Are we thinking Bioshock?
- [08:37]
Linus Sebastian
Oh, well, Bioshock was already like, super derivative, so it's just the most modern gamer culture example that I could think of.
- [08:47]
Luke Lafreniere
1950S fascist romanticism said war.
- [08:51]
Linus Sebastian
I think Naitohan in floatplane chat. Nailed. Nailed it. It sounds propagandistic. Propagandist. Okay, propagandist, whatever. It sounds like propaganda and. Yeah, that's exactly it. It immediately gives me the ick. Because if something causes prosperity, you don't have to call it that. You know, the, the, the New York Stock Exchange isn't called the New York Prosperity Exchange because by calling it a stock exchange, you acknowledge that it doesn't just go up. Whereas Prospera, it just makes it sound like everyone prospers. I mean, I think it's. We could talk about it in a little more detail later, but I pretty much promise you that the people who are being subject to these, you know, human drug trials are not the ones that are going to be prospering from all of this. They may, they may make Some financial gains. But the irony of seeing the. The groups that are the proponents of this and the groups that are sort of generally against things like vaccinations being the same people is sort of funny to me, I guess. I don't know. Good luck, everybody. What else we got going on here? So anyway, Trey Goff.
- [10:28]
Luke Lafreniere
Josie. Josie. Hopefully I'm saying that right. Mayday in full plane chat said China has them. They're called special Economic Zones and have contributed significantly to Chinese dominance in manufacturing, which to me, well, sounds.
- [10:42]
Linus Sebastian
Yeah, that's just another way of saying that you can have forced labor there. Yeah, forced labor is a really good, really good way to dominate manufacturing.
- [10:53]
Luke Lafreniere
That's true. Very effective. It's high amount of effectiveness.
- [10:59]
Linus Sebastian
Yeah, it's effective, but it's the kind of thing that as someone who might end up living in a, in Prospera at some point or in a. In a prosperity city or Freedom City or whatever, you shouldn't be voting for this if you are not in the billionaire class, like 100%. Okay. So anyway, Tregoth, chief of staff of the Startup Nation Slash Freedom City Prospera, says that he and others from his company, working under a lobbying group called the Freedom Cities Coalition, have been meeting with the Trump administration about the idea recently and says that the administration has been very receptive. Prospera hopes to create as many of these zones as the market can handle and hope to have drafted legislation ready by the end of the year. Now, here's the thing though. Prospera is not like coming out of nowhere here. They actually have a Freedom City already. Prospera opened on the Honduran island of Roatan. Pardon me if I said the name wrong, but whatever, it doesn't change the facts. In 2020, they have attracted tech workers and startups with the promise of lower taxes, fewer regulations, and it just says a governing body. But I don't. I think the notes might have cut off there anyway. But the main points are lower taxes and fewer regulations. Ah, yes. And a corporate governing body, Startup nations or freedom cities like this outside the US have relied on the creation of special economic zones where standard business regulations are waived in order to attract foreign investment. Notably, the current Honduran government considers Prospera's special economic status to be illegal, despite the previous president giving them a permanent charter to operate on their own terms. Many Honduran citizens opposed Prospera, arguing that it increased poverty and worsened biodiversity in the area. And in 2022, Honduran Congress repealed the law that allowed for the creation of these special economic zones and in future to abolish existing special economic zones, classifying the law as a violation of national sovereignty. The Honduran government is currently being sued for $11 billion by Prospera over this reversal of their policy. Oh man. The Freedom Cities Coalition was created by Niuei Capital llc, which owns several trademarks for Prospera and is in part financed by Pronomos Capital, a VC firm backed by former PayPal CEO Peter Thiel, Mark Andreessen and Coinbase.
- [13:51]
Luke Lafreniere
Yep, makes sense.
- [13:53]
Linus Sebastian
There are other groups that are lobbying for Freedom cities in the U.S. including the frontier foundation and the Charter Cities Institute. And Wired obtained a memo from 2025 in which the Frontier foundation argues that domestic innovation in production has been significantly impeded for decades by outdated and unnecessarily restrictive federal regulation. Some of these groups are pushing to use federal land to build these cities, so they basically want the federal government to give them like I guess in Canada we call it crown land. So yeah, federal government land. Or maybe they want to buy it. Oh man, this is. This is wild. Companies are already taking advantage of startup nations like Mini Circle, a biotech company that focuses on gene therapy treatments designed to extend human lifespans. They have an office in Prospera, and co founder Matt Davis says their recent gene therapy clinical trial on the protein Follistatin, which he claims increases muscle mass without side effects and has life extending benefits in mice, was only possible in Prospera. Davis added that he could imagine other companies benefiting from freedom cities like SpaceX, which has been working on incorporating its own city around their Texas Starship factory and spaceport. Oh opinion. This is hilarious. It is unlikely that deregulation will benefit anyone outside of Freedom City's wealthy backers. Gil Duran, former political consultant and author of Substack newsletter Nerd Reich, claims, these are going to be cities without democracy. These are going to be cities without workers rights. These are going to be cities where the owners of the city, the corporations, the billionaires, have all the power and everyone else has no power. That is what's so attractive about these sovereign entities to these people is that they will actually be anti freedom cities. So it's time for us to talk about this. It's hilarious that we can make these kinds of arguments and that anyone takes them seriously when history has shown so clearly and so obviously and so repeatedly that it's a terrible, terrible idea and basically works out to be feudalism without any of the good things about feudalism like the copious amounts of vacation time.
- [16:33]
Luke Lafreniere
Yeah, I don't really have a lot to say. I know a long time ago, and we even got approached for it at one point, but I think it was Sweden was doing like a startup city thing where they had. Yeah, they had an old military. I might get some of this wrong. I might get a decent amount of this wrong. It's just been too long, if I remember correctly, that an old military base. So they had decent power and decent networking and some of the old barracks and stuff like that. But like, not like barracks, like basically an extended tent with bunks, like barracks. It was like an apartment building, effectively.
- [17:12]
Linus Sebastian
Yeah.
- [17:12]
Luke Lafreniere
And they just, they, they retrofitted it, did a bunch of renovations and stuff, and basically turned it into a town. And they were like, well, it's got fantastic Internet, it's got fantastic power, and we turn it into a town. So we're. We want to populate this area. So we're going to make it like a startup town and we'll give funding to startup companies and we'll make the housing really cheap and stuff. And we'll like basically seed the population here by making it really good for business, by giving them tax breaks, making it easy for people to move here. So if you want to start up, well, your people that you're probably paying through stock or whatever can get relatively cheap housing. You have good Internet, there's good business support, stuff like that. And as far as where you're sending goes, it like worked and they're able to effectively set up a new city and, you know, natural infrastructure shows up around that. If you have a few. If you have a few thousand people in an area, a little restaurant will pop up there, whatever else will start happening, and then it just grew over time.
- [18:05]
Linus Sebastian
Yeah, for sure.
- [18:06]
Luke Lafreniere
So there are ways to sort of do some of the benefits that you're looking for from this, but, you know, not the complete deregulation stuff.
- [18:17]
Linus Sebastian
It's just wild to me that they're being so transparent about what it is that they want and that we're not kind of going, whoa, red flag, red flag, red flag. It's like, yeah, we want to do.
- [18:32]
Luke Lafreniere
Well, they might want to do human.
- [18:33]
Linus Sebastian
Drug trials without any regulatory scrutiny. Yeah, but like, that's the part that you, you know, that's the part that you gotcha later. That's the, that's the part that you, you know, that's the, the fog boiling. You know, you don't say up front like, yeah, we want to do human drug trials without anyone paying any attention. So I am going to I am going to say something that is, I want to make very clear is me playing devil's advocate here.
- [19:06]
Luke Lafreniere
Oh boy.
- [19:06]
Linus Sebastian
Because. Because I do not believe that the complete removal of regulations that are designed to keep everyday citizens safe is a good idea. I think that's an experiment that we've. I think that's an experiment that we've run enough times to know that we don't need to run this experiment again. But here's what I will say. You made an argument a little while back with regards to AI where you basically said, okay, well, from the yo, look at the look on his face, I think he knows where I'm going, but he's not going to cut me off for a change. You made an argument about AI recently where you were like, well, okay, the horse is out of the stable. Every other country that has no copyright is going to train their AIs on copyrighted materials. We either just say, okay, screw it, we don't worry about copyrighted materials, goodbye laws, or we lose. We lose the AI race. Here, here is what I will say. Is that not fundamentally the exact same argument that these guys are making? We are losing in manufacturing, we are losing in drug development, we are losing in private sector nuclear innovation. We just need to YOLO the same way that our competitors are YOLOing. Because you know that in the Middle east they're going to yolo, you know, China is going to yolo. That appears to be their argument. And if we draw the parallel to your AI argument, where we basically go, yeah, our laws that are in many cases good laws, meant to protect people, meant to protect, whether it's rights holders in the case of copyright from having their works used to train AIs that will ultimately steal their jobs, or whether it's to protect people from, you know, turning into nightmare science experiments because of unregulated drug testing or whatever, are these laws going to hold back America?
- [21:40]
Luke Lafreniere
I'm sure in some ways they, they will. But I also think deregulating nuclear might hold back America pretty dramatically as well. As much as breaking copyright is like horrible for lots of people, I think the, the impact of just allowing slave labor in the States, if that's what making manufacturing better is, or deregulating nuclear, has much more negative potential impact, um, then the admittedly really brutal impact of just everyone's copyright being effectively meaningless moving forward. Um, but yeah, I don't know. It's, it's an interesting one. I feel like they are trying to be blatant about what they're trying to do so that when somebody goes, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, and tries to turn this around after they've already been established, they can sue the crap out of the country. That feels like the, the reason for them being blatant to me. I could be wrong, but I'm not sure you could be. They have much more ground to stand on if they were very clear about their intentions the entire time. Also, it's. I think they're really pushing the manufacturing thing in order to appeal to the current administration who has been talking about bringing manufacturing back to the States. But I suspect due to how quickly they shifted off of manufacturing and sort of going, yeah, but all this other like, cool stuff would happen too, that really the focus would be on unregulated testing, so drug testing on humans, nuclear development, stuff like that. And I, I think there's. I don't know, I don't know enough about those arenas. I know more about the AI stuff, so I feel like saying anything there would be a problem because I don't, I don't know enough about it, but I'm not like certain that we are or we. That Americans are falling behind in that regard. Like, I think American pharmaceutical companies are still running most things. There's the, the weight loss stuff that as far as my understanding goes, they're not doing the best at right now. I think the Dutch or something have the fancy one that everybody likes. I don't remember the name of it.
- [24:05]
Linus Sebastian
Whatever, but the Dutch is still pretty the west in terms of like clinical trial regulations.
- [24:11]
Luke Lafreniere
That's the one. Is that Sweden? I don't know. I don't know much about it, but I know that one's like not American or something. So. Okay, maybe they lost that race, but like they seem to win most when it comes to pharmaceutical stuff, so I don't know that that's necessarily happening. And then nuclear, like, I don't know. I don't feel like you need to deregulate it. Like, I, I don't know that America is necessarily leading nuclear, but like you almost never hear America talk about nuclear. So maybe you should like care about it more and then you do fine, probably.
- [24:48]
Linus Sebastian
Dude, I think the, the main issue is that.
- [24:51]
Luke Lafreniere
Not Dutch. I don't know. Dude, I said I didn't know. Leave me alone. I don't know who it is. I don't care about his epic whatever. Anyway, sorry.
- [24:57]
Linus Sebastian
The main issue is that it's. There's no real alignment. Right? Like on the one hand it's like, yeah, more cool, let's bring, Bring Back coal make it great. And then on the other hand it's like, yeah, but there's too much regulatory crap around nuclear. It's like what the nuclear. I thought you wanted, I thought you wanted more clean coal. Like what are, what are we doing here exactly? It seems a little unfocused, to put it mildly.
- [25:28]
Luke Lafreniere
Yeah. And this thing is, is much. It's like a, it's a crazy. Like I would feel okay. To be clear. I'm not saying I would feel comfortable. I'm saying I would feel more comfortable if it was. If they were specific, I think, and like one at a time was approved. If they were like, you know, we're going to pick this one area way out in the desert like we have before, where we're gonna do maybe not. Not regulated, but less regulated nuclear testing or something like that. Or maybe it's not less regulated, but they have people from the nuclear whatever thing like on site all the time. Yes. So they can fast track stuff, fast track approvals, do whatever. Like have a, like rapid development zone, basically, where it's like an area that is made for that and you have government officials like on site that are able to look at things and improve things more quickly and keep, keep the wheels of progress moving like that. That sounds like interesting to me. But just a blanket, like, yeah, we're going to build as many of these cities as we possibly can. And who knows, I don't know, maybe company store, maybe slave labor, maybe drug practices, maybe nuclear stuff. I don't know. Like that. That's just, it's too, it's too wild to me. I think there's ways to accomplish the goal here that isn't just giving people the blanket ability to not have laws. I don't know.
- [26:54]
Linus Sebastian
And like, I want to make this very clear that from a business owner standpoint, I find the land zoning and building code and regulatory hurdles that we have in place here very stifling.
- [27:14]
Luke Lafreniere
Yep. And I'm sure they are. And I'm honestly, I. I doubt they're as stifling, but I'm sure they're also very, very annoying to deal with in the states.
- [27:23]
Linus Sebastian
Yep. And so here, I'll give an example in the, in the badminton center. Okay. If you guys remember any of the tours that we've done, there's a wall down the middle between the two halves. Okay. So one half is going to be always badminton. Always all the time. The other half is wired up for LAN parties, like esports, gaming events, that sort of thing. So it's got all the power networking and everything. We have four doors in between the two sides. Because under normal circumstances, people need to be able to cross over if their group is, you know, split across courts on two sides, or if we have a tournament or something that's using the whole facility and someone has their bag, like, over here, we don't want them to have to hike all the way around to the one door to get to the other side. So at our expense, we put a bunch of doors in that wall so people could cross through. Again, at our expense, we put access control on all of those doors, like unifi scanners, so that if you have a wristband or something, you can boop yourself in to an unauthorized area, whether it's the gym upstairs or whether it's the other side of the courts or whatever. So we've got these scanners everywhere. All right. As part of our temporary use permit approval to use this building for esports and LAN gaming events, we had to have an engineer relook at our fire egress safety evacuation plan. And they basically came to us and they said, hey, all those doors down the middle, they need push bars now. And we kind of went, sorry, what? They need push bars because they need people on the one side. The badminton side need to be able to access this. This man door that's halfway down the side of the building on the land side, because you're going to have more people in there. And I'm like, brother, all the additional people are going to be on the land side. And they're like, yeah, but it's a regulatory thing. From any point, it has to be no more than X number of meters to the nearest exit. And there's like, this place right here needs to go out that way. And I'm like, my brother in Christ, these were two separate units. I put these doors here. And they're like, yeah, but you're going to have more people there. I'm like, my brother in Christ, the people will not be on that side. They will be on the side that has the door. Is there anything we can do about this? And they go, well, there is the original door for this unit at the front of the building. But you guys put this half wall in place. So now it's not a direct path. I'm going, okay, so just so I understand this correctly, because to get out, I would have to go this much to the side to get around this little half wall and then walk around it. I can't lock the doors. Yes. I can't lock the Doors between my LAN event and badminton. That is a major, like, security issue because we can't have, like, randoms going into a LAN event. You have to have the doors locked. So the point is, we are working on it, but this is the kind of arbitrary bullcrap that you deal with when you're. When. When you have over regulation, and that's 10 of zero. It wasn't a direct path in the first place anyway. Don't. Don't overthink it. Trust me, the story is as stupid as I. As I am making it sound like. Okay, Luke, here's another good one. Do you remember when we built the mezzanine in unit 101 where the lounge and the tech linked green screen set are?
- [31:31]
Luke Lafreniere
Yeah.
- [31:32]
Linus Sebastian
Okay, you know how there's two stairwells up to that? That's because the building code in Surrey at that time required two stairwells up to every mezzanine. Oh, that building code only existed for, like, a few years before everyone kind of went, oh, yeah, this is really stupid. This is, like, ridiculous because you are using a ton of floor space and a ton of the upper floor space for these multiple landings for, like, a tiny little, like 1500 square foot mezzanine. Yes. Oh, my God. I know. That fire egress is no joke. For the love of God, guys, calm down. There's a man door at the back. There's a man door at the front. And we've got to use some common sense. It is an empty box. There is nothing to burn. It's a badminton center. We are not using common sense here. If it was a difficult building to.
- [32:42]
Luke Lafreniere
Get out of, like, if it was.
- [32:44]
Linus Sebastian
A warehouse with racking to the ceiling, and we were. And. And it was a. It was a fabric warehouse. Okay, sure, let's talk about it. But, guys, it is an empty building. It will have at maximum, like, 40 people in it. And there's an emergency exit door at the one end and. And an emergency exit door at the other end. And you literally have to step around as much as I just showed you.
- [33:15]
Luke Lafreniere
It's a big guy. Effectively a box.
- [33:18]
Linus Sebastian
Calm down.
- [33:19]
Luke Lafreniere
An empty box.
- [33:23]
Linus Sebastian
But what if it's filled with poison gas or something?
- [33:27]
Luke Lafreniere
Zquez says air is flammable. It's good. Pretty good point. Pretty good point. Think about that one.
- [33:34]
Linus Sebastian
So anyway, the point is that this is the kind of. This is the kind of regulatory burden where we're not using. We're not using common sense. Right? We aren't. We aren't applying a common sense filter. And I do Understand that basically every regulation exists because somebody died at some point. Right. But if we're looking at it going, okay, pursued, like, I think this is something that could very easily be overcome if they just say, yeah, okay, that totally makes sense that you're only going to have at maximum, like 30 or 40 people in this area. The bulk of the people are going to be in the other area. And you're not going to have any racking, you're not going to have any obstructions. Yeah, that's fine. So it's like, well, we'll approve the TUP provisionally based on that. That continues to be the case. That's easy. That's easy. But the issue is that people are either not empowered or they are not savvy enough to make these kinds of calls on their own. And so you end up having to escalate and escalate and jump through hoops and red tape. And so from a business, and I'm not even trying to do anything complicated, all I am trying to do is put some desks in a warehouse. Ironically, we're zoned for bingo, right? You can be a bingo hall here. And part of my argument to the city that actually got the ball rolling in the first place is like LAN gaming is just bingo from a logistical standpoint. You've got like someone at the NOC or the, you know, the rolly ball wheel thing, right? They pull out the balls and then you got all the players sitting at their desks with their peripherals, whether it's a bingo stamper or whether it's a keyboard mouse. What difference does it make from a. From a. From a layout standpoint, from a. From a density standpoint, it is the exact same thing. The only difference is that someone who ran a bingo hall, you know, 40 years ago or whatever, greased the palm of someone in city hall and got an exemption. That's the only difference, Right?
- [35:59]
Luke Lafreniere
We should play. You should just. There's your solution. You just play one game of like online bingo at the start of the land. Everyone has to play bingo.
- [36:10]
Linus Sebastian
Easy. We want to do things properly. We.
- [36:15]
Luke Lafreniere
I don't know why I kind of alluded to this anyways. It's like most of the reasons why these rules can be super annoying is because there will be a small handful of people that will ruin it for everyone because there's going to be people that will try to use worming around the letter of the law to get bullshit bull crap made. And that makes it so that things have to be worded in really annoying. Ways that end up resulting in these really annoying situations for people that are trying to follow the rules. Bullshit. Yeah, I don't know. I'm out of it. I'm sorry. But yeah, I mean, that's where a lot of regulation comes from. Like you, you run into this when moderating communities, right? Like people, you, you have to start putting in these like super annoying rules because people are going to try to skirt around them. And then you, you put another rule in place and they try to skirt around that. Then you put another rule in place and now you have all the, this trail of rules in place because these people trying to get around everything and this trail of rules are really annoying. For everyone else that's just trying to have good faith conversation. It's, it's really annoying.
- [37:23]
Linus Sebastian
I had a conversation with the city staffer at one point. I won't say which city because I don't want to identify them, but they basically said, okay, like, you know, what do you need from us? And my response, in typical business owner fashion was I want for you to get out of my way. I don't actually want anything from you. I just want to get things done. I want to do things. And so I guess the reason I'm bringing this up is because I want to make it clear that from a business owner perspective, I understand where businesses are coming from when they complain about burdensome regulation. Not being able to lock the room for a LAN party against random badminton players coming in and potentially stealing things is a major user issue. It's not that I object. I don't care. I can, I could, I could put a, you know, I could bolt my computer to the desk if I really felt like it. I own the place. Right? But from a user standpoint, that is really important.
- [38:30]
Luke Lafreniere
I would hate that as a land goer, that would annoy the heck out of me.
- [38:33]
Linus Sebastian
Of course. And common sense, there is absolutely no reason that we need to be able, that we need to keep the doors unlocked because the occupancy of the one side will always be the same as it is now. And I'm the one who put those doors there. If it was good enough before I put the doors there, then it's good enough if the doors are locked, period. But no, but no.
- [39:01]
Luke Lafreniere
One of the problems too though is like, you'll go around every once in a while and you'll find something that is like clearly unsafe because someone didn't follow regulations and you, you know that they just like have somehow dodged inspections or whatever. And it's, it's it's frustrating because it's this. Yeah. This small group people ruins it for everybody. Think so? Yeah. Anyways, back to what I was saying before, I can understand the idea of like special rapid development zones, but I don't agree with the no regulation. I think you have representatives there supporting these companies trying to get things pushed through quickly and their job is to try to not slow them down as much as possible, but while keeping safety minimums in place.
- [39:49]
Linus Sebastian
So I mean, that's hard to do, especially when like we ran into, we ran into a big challenge with the lighting where it took us three attempts to get an engineer that would sign off on our suspended lights in the ceiling because it's their liability. Like a lot of the time these regulations are not even strictly speaking regulations, but what they are is just whether it's a firm or whether it's an individual. It's someone covering their own, but it's someone. And there's a good reason that you have a liability chain that you have liability because it makes people strongly incentivized to do a good job. And to be clear, it's not that we didn't do a good job of seismically fastening the lights to the ceiling. It's just that engineers tend to want things overbuilt 4x, you know, and we were like, okay, we're fine to over build 4x, but it needs to be done in a way that doesn't have, you know, wire cables hanging over the courts because they will interfere with the, with the, with the shuttle being hit. And so finally we made our way to one that would allow us to just add, I think it was like half a dozen more cables to every light fixture, but have them go straight up. We're like, okay, thank you. But that's the thing is just because you have that person on site doesn't mean that they're going to sign off on your, your, your nuclear test. And they shouldn't their liability to be clear. Exactly. Because if it's their liability, then it's their but.
- [41:26]
Luke Lafreniere
And to me it's like a, an exposure thing. Like if you're there working on this type of stuff all the time, maybe that would help. And if you have maybe less total overall work to do, you're able to focus on pushing approvals through for, for individual things faster. Maybe. I don't know, I don't know what that job is like. I could just be completely incorrect. But.
- [41:54]
Linus Sebastian
I'm just saying I think I, like, I, I, I, I sincerely doubt that the Major hurdle for things like human trials is. Well, I don't know. It could be. It could be. The major hurdle could be that it's just impossible to get anyone to, to look at it and say, that's okay. I mean, I had someone posted in, in the chat earlier. Let me bring this up. Bot said, hey, if there's informed consent and the people are terminal, why shouldn't they be able to agree to a risky trial? Linus, My understanding though is, well, there's two things there. My understanding is for terminal patients, it is pretty common for them to participate in risky trials. Like that is already a thing. As for the informed consent, that's where I have a bit of an issue because I don't know if you've ever met the average person or anyone below that average point informing them. People can very easily be taken advantage of and be convinced to informedly participate in something.
- [43:09]
Luke Lafreniere
Or they can be coerced also just be really desperate.
- [43:13]
Linus Sebastian
Yeah.
- [43:13]
Luke Lafreniere
And if they haven't been able to find work in a year and they can't make ends meet and you're like, hey, I'll give you, I'll give you ten grand if you shove this needle in your arm and then I get to watch you for a week and maybe you die, who knows?
- [43:29]
Linus Sebastian
Neospris says they can absolutely do it, but the problem is that companies don't want to report deaths in their studies and they have to report studies when they're used during compassionate care trials.
- [43:41]
Luke Lafreniere
Tom and said, isn't that the plot of Squid Games? Yeah, kind of. I think. I haven't actually watched it.
- [43:52]
Linus Sebastian
I don't know, man. I see this whole issue from both sides. It is very clear to me as someone who's trying to run a business and can't just get common sense stuff done, that there are problems.
- [44:04]
Luke Lafreniere
Yeah, oh yeah, absolutely.
- [44:05]
Linus Sebastian
With our current system and that if we want to be competitive, like the fact that I can't even. It takes me like a year to open a stupid badminton center. It's just a box. My God, it's just a box with some lights. Like, who cares, you know, Even getting something like that done, it took me five years to find something with the right zoning.
- [44:25]
Luke Lafreniere
Are both sides open yet?
- [44:28]
Linus Sebastian
Oh yeah, both sides are running.
- [44:30]
Luke Lafreniere
The floor is done on both sides.
- [44:32]
Linus Sebastian
You better believe it.
- [44:33]
Luke Lafreniere
The new floor is.
- [44:35]
Linus Sebastian
Yeah. The only thing we're waiting on now is your stupid 2 1/2 pound weights for the gym equipment. And then we're also waiting on the temporary use permit for LAN esports gaming events. So Would you say at that point.
- [44:50]
Dan
Open in March 2025?
- [44:53]
Linus Sebastian
No, it was open already. Both floors have been done since it was either late January or early Feb. Nice.
- [45:03]
Luke Lafreniere
I, I think you win prices right though, Dan.
- [45:06]
Dan
Oh, I didn't.
- [45:07]
Linus Sebastian
Oh yeah, no, Dan, you're. You're definitely the closest. You're definitely the closest. Yeah, we haven't strictly speaking done our grand opening event yet, so that's something.
- [45:18]
Dan
I think maybe that's what I was claiming for.
- [45:20]
Linus Sebastian
Yeah, we are, absolutely.
- [45:22]
Luke Lafreniere
Now he's just not going to do it in this March.
- [45:25]
Linus Sebastian
Sorry, in this March? Well, no, we can't do it in March anyway. I don't think it's going to happen until like the summer because we're coordinating with Badminton BC they're like a local group that's been running tournaments for like 15 years or something like that. And we're like, yeah, we could run our grand opening tournament or, or hear me out. We could bring in people with a decade and a half of experience and why not? Just. Yeah, they have to pay like exorbitant rates for courts. So we're like, okay, well why don't they make money on their event for a change? We just sponsor them the court time, we co brand it and then we get the benefit of them running a great tournament and they get the benefit of actually like making money instead of just doing this for fun for a change. So yeah, yeah, I think it's a good win. Win.
- [46:15]
Luke Lafreniere
I'm all about would they win, Would they crank the prizes because of that?
- [46:19]
Linus Sebastian
I don't know. I think that I'd love to see them do that, but I wouldn't want to tell them they have to do that. Like if part of the whole thing is, you know, that we're, we're getting the benefit of promotion for our facility. Yeah, yeah, no, I'm, I'm all about however many W's you can stack. Is like my favorite kind of deal stack.
- [46:40]
Dan
The W's talking about stacking W's. How about some announcements and some merge messages?
- [46:46]
Linus Sebastian
Oh yeah, I guess we should do that.
- [46:48]
Luke Lafreniere
What a guy.
- [46:49]
Linus Sebastian
No, we have one more discussion question that I wanted to.
- [46:52]
Dan
Okay, I'll go get some water then. Good luck.
- [46:55]
Linus Sebastian
Is there, Luke, is there any corporation that you would trust to actually make a good Freedom City that you would be willing to commit to live there for a year? This is a really good discussion question from the, the writer for this topic, who I think was Jake. Based on that, he was making little changes to it as we were going through it. Before. Don't look at Chat. That's cheating.
- [47:20]
Luke Lafreniere
I won't say it. But they said such a good one. There was one in there that was sick. I won't say it, though. I'm not gonna say it. I'll say it afterwards. I'll save it. I wanted to, like, throw a mildly obscure joke out there and say Solar Cities, but I'll. I'll stick away from that. Do you even know? Okay, yeah. A company.
- [47:47]
Linus Sebastian
A company. They have to be a company. In fact, I'm even going to make it worse. They have to be publicly traded.
- [47:53]
Luke Lafreniere
Publicly trade. Oh, my God.
- [47:57]
Linus Sebastian
Yeah. They have to have enough integrity in their DNA.
- [48:04]
Luke Lafreniere
I don't even know like, what company. I'm not a stock bro. I don't know what companies are publicly traded.
- [48:11]
Linus Sebastian
Most of them are. If you can think of them, they're probably publicly traded.
- [48:17]
Luke Lafreniere
Oh, man. So many of the things that I. That I can think of are just gonna sound so lame if I try to throw it out there.
- [48:29]
Linus Sebastian
I think I've got one.
- [48:31]
Luke Lafreniere
I've got. I've got one. I don't think it's very good, though.
- [48:35]
Linus Sebastian
Okay.
- [48:36]
Luke Lafreniere
No, I don't.
- [48:36]
Linus Sebastian
All right, you want to go first?
- [48:37]
Luke Lafreniere
I don't like mine, but I can go first.
- [48:40]
Linus Sebastian
Okay.
- [48:42]
Luke Lafreniere
I'll do two. I don't like either of them.
- [48:44]
Linus Sebastian
Okay. All right.
- [48:46]
Luke Lafreniere
Framework and Valve.
- [48:48]
Linus Sebastian
Framework. Okay. Valve's not public. Neither is Framework, so. Yeah, you Framework on both parts.
- [48:54]
Luke Lafreniere
Well, you told me they'd all be. And I found two that weren't.
- [48:57]
Linus Sebastian
Okay.
- [48:58]
Luke Lafreniere
Look at me being a special boy.
- [49:01]
Linus Sebastian
I would live in. I would consider investment disclosure. I would consider living in Framework City. I feel like they'd have a good framework for how things should be set up. I'm gonna say. I'm gonna say Royal Caribbean. Not Because I think that everything that they do would be like, oh, man. In any way.
- [49:27]
Luke Lafreniere
That doesn't feel fair.
- [49:29]
Linus Sebastian
Like, boy, did they ever.
- [49:30]
Luke Lafreniere
International waters. Isn't that. Aren't they just effectively doing that?
- [49:34]
Linus Sebastian
No, they're governed by laws, but it's complicated. But, yeah, I feel like. I feel like. I just feel like whatever their city would be would probably be. I don't know if they'd get a lot of work done or whatever, but they would. It would be comfortable. It'd be very comfortable. I think I could live there for a year. But, yeah, no, Chat definitely had the best one. Costco is definitely the best answer. I would live in Costco City.
- [50:05]
Luke Lafreniere
The second I saw Costco, I was like, oh, of course.
- [50:08]
Dan
They already have Kirkland clothing.
- [50:09]
Luke Lafreniere
Yeah.
- [50:10]
Linus Sebastian
Yeah.
- [50:11]
Dan
100, dude.
- [50:12]
Luke Lafreniere
$50.
- [50:13]
Linus Sebastian
I would just. I would unironically shop at the company store always.
- [50:18]
Luke Lafreniere
You want to know? I. You know what? I'm just gonna. I'm just gonna break it right now. The. You want to know what? Do you want to know what the labs voted as the quarterly activity that they want to do this quarter? Do you know what they voted it to be? And it won by, like, I literally don't know if anyone voted for it for any other. I think literally every single person voted for this. I think it's unanimous. They just want to go to Costco.
- [50:44]
Linus Sebastian
What? And do what? Like, eat the sample food?
- [50:49]
Luke Lafreniere
Just. Just. Just be at Costco, I guess.
- [50:53]
Dan
Costco poutine is fire.
- [50:55]
Luke Lafreniere
Get cheap hot dogs.
- [51:01]
Dan
Just a bucket of hot dogs.
- [51:05]
Linus Sebastian
Oh, okay.
- [51:06]
Dan
You know, that sounds sick.
- [51:09]
Luke Lafreniere
You need one membership for every two people. Oh, okay. I didn't know that. We were. We were literally trying to. Because they won. I was like, now we have to plan this. So, like, I. I was talking to Nick today about, like, how do we deal with. Because, like, accounting wants the expenses for the activities on one card. So I was like, can I buy whatever everyone wants to buy on one card at Costco when there's, like, a bunch of us? Like, does that work? Are you allowed to do that with memberships? I don't know. People say a gift card can get you in, so I'd have to. I'd have to buy a bunch of gift cards. It maybe work, but. Yeah, they just wanted to go to Costco because, like, it was funny. It's kind of funny. It's pretty funny. People could buy snacks, I guess, for the labs. I'm pretty sure we get the company snacks from Costco already. Yeah, we do.
- [52:06]
Linus Sebastian
Yeah.
- [52:06]
Luke Lafreniere
So I don't know how different they're gonna be.
- [52:08]
Dan
They want more of those Lucky charm cookies.
- [52:13]
Luke Lafreniere
Preacher. This breaks quarterly rules. Wow, there goes Elijah being a complete party pooper. How does that break quarterly rules also?
- [52:19]
Linus Sebastian
I don't know, actually, because just buying stuff is not what the quarterly rules.
- [52:25]
Luke Lafreniere
Well, the writers. Elijah went to Safeway or whatever and bought groceries. So how is it that different if we buy snacks?
- [52:34]
Dan
Going to Costco together.
- [52:36]
Luke Lafreniere
Yeah. And getting together, like, if you're a couple.
- [52:39]
Dan
That's a. That's a thing. That's, like, dangerous.
- [52:42]
Linus Sebastian
Yeah.
- [52:42]
Dan
It's like going to Ikea.
- [52:43]
Luke Lafreniere
Sounds like an event to me.
- [52:45]
Linus Sebastian
Yeah. I'm going to leave this to.
- [52:49]
Luke Lafreniere
I'll find a way. See, this is the problem with regulations. Like, we were just talking about earlier. I will find a way to make it follow the regulations that labs can go to Costco.
- [52:59]
Linus Sebastian
The problem is that it's not my regulation. It's the CRA's regulation.
- [53:04]
Luke Lafreniere
That's fine. Oh, I see. So I'll read their regulations and I'll find a way.
- [53:09]
Linus Sebastian
You're going to read the entire Canadian tax code?
- [53:12]
Luke Lafreniere
Yeah. Well, I'll get. I'll get Chat. GPT to do it or something. Because we just. If it's an event, it's like. Okay, so we just need to find a thing that we need to do at Costco or something to do with Costco that makes it an event. That's fine. We can make it an event. The only thing labs requested is that we go to Costco. Outside of that, I can. I can.
- [53:32]
Dan
Craft event outage is to find the cheapest snacks at Costco. It's like a game. It's like a. No, like a scavenger hunt, because.
- [53:44]
Luke Lafreniere
Palm. So I'll have to. I'll have to come up with something, like, pretty good. But I think there's a way to do it.
- [53:48]
Dan
You have to eat everything you buy in the Costco parking lot. It's a competition.
- [53:55]
Luke Lafreniere
Interesting.
- [53:56]
Linus Sebastian
Actually, eating contests are against company policy as well. Okay.
- [54:00]
Dan
Yeah, but I thought there was a CRA policy.
- [54:02]
Luke Lafreniere
That's fair. Well, no, now we have layered. Layered policies?
- [54:06]
Linus Sebastian
Yeah. Eating and drinking competitions are against company policy. I'm down with it can be dangerous.
- [54:10]
Luke Lafreniere
I like that.
- [54:11]
Dan
It's extremely reasonable.
- [54:12]
Luke Lafreniere
Yeah.
- [54:13]
Linus Sebastian
It's all about liability. It's all about liability. Do not play hide and seek in Costco. Ignore what Shade Slayer said in the chat. I forbid it. No. I forbid it. I have forbade it. Luke.
- [54:30]
Luke Lafreniere
No, no, not hide and seek. No, no, no. I'm trying to think of other things. I'm trying to think of other things. Can we try to, like, test all the TVs? Can we do, like, field testing?
- [54:42]
Linus Sebastian
Oh, don't be a nuisance.
- [54:45]
Dan
Oh, yeah. You're going to Costco for market research.
- [54:48]
Luke Lafreniere
Yeah, yeah, I'm sure we can find ways for that.
- [54:52]
Linus Sebastian
Then that's not an event. That's work.
- [54:54]
Luke Lafreniere
Why is that not an event?
- [54:55]
Linus Sebastian
You're not supposed to be working during the quarterly events. You're supposed to be having fun.
- [55:00]
Luke Lafreniere
Who can.
- [55:01]
Dan
There's our labs, people. That's fun.
- [55:03]
Linus Sebastian
No, it's not.
- [55:05]
Luke Lafreniere
We'll find a way overnight. Costco challenge? No. Crack the Wi Fi?
- [55:09]
Linus Sebastian
No.
- [55:12]
Luke Lafreniere
Secret shop? No, but. See, he just said it can't be worked. And you guys are now picking work stuff. So it has to be not work stuff. We'll find a way, though. It's all right. We just. See, in order to find a way, you have to know the rules. In order to know the rules, you have to almost break them, and then it's fine. So we're doing good. We're progressing.
- [55:31]
Dan
Yeah. It's like tax evasion. Sorry, tax avoidance.
- [55:38]
Luke Lafreniere
Yeah.
- [55:39]
Dan
Don't do crimes on company times.
- [55:44]
Linus Sebastian
Okay, we'll find a way.
- [55:47]
Dan
Speaking of crimes, how about some announcements?
- [55:52]
Linus Sebastian
I don't know.
- [55:52]
Dan
I'm getting worse at these segues. It's late.
- [55:55]
Luke Lafreniere
The earlier one was pretty good. That one was.
- [55:57]
Dan
Yeah, you only get one rough.
- [56:00]
Luke Lafreniere
Yeah.
- [56:01]
Linus Sebastian
Okay, what are we supposed to be doing now?
- [56:03]
Dan
Crimes. I mean, announcements.
- [56:07]
Linus Sebastian
Oh, right. Okay.
- [56:09]
Luke Lafreniere
What if we went to Costco? Oh, my God. To acquire. To acquire stuff that makes their area cooler so they like their workspace more.
- [56:19]
Linus Sebastian
You are basically just copying my ThinkGeek order idea from, like, 10 years ago.
- [56:25]
Luke Lafreniere
Well, no.
- [56:26]
Dan
Why don't you just go back to the lounge and play games?
- [56:29]
Luke Lafreniere
This was Nick's idea where he was considering we changed the event from going to Costco to going to Home Depot. But I was like, ah, but everyone voted for Costco, so we got to find a way for that to work. But Costco could still work for that. It might not be as good.
- [56:43]
Linus Sebastian
Look, I literally glizzy's industrial down as CEO so that I wouldn't have to do this anymore. So I found a way so that I wouldn't have to deal with this kind of slippery slope bullcrap anymore. Because the second you guys go to Costco, someone else is like, okay, well, then we should be allowed to go to Safeway again. But they did it because you went to Safeway that we had to make this rule in the first place. Every rule exists because someone tried to abuse it. And literally. It is for your protection. It is for your protection that we have these rules. Because if you go and you spend $200 of company money at Costco, you owe somewhere between 50 and $80, depending on your tax bracket in income tax, on it. And I know you ain't going to pay it, so this is very meta.
- [57:47]
Luke Lafreniere
Check your phone. I bet Terran's calling you. I bet Terran thinks this is funny.
- [57:52]
Linus Sebastian
I bet he does. But I bet Taran also takes his job of making sure we're doing things properly. Seriously.
- [57:59]
Luke Lafreniere
No, actually, to the point where I will either find a way that we can do this legitimately or we won't. Like, I'm not going to actually Just, like, do it wrong. But I do find.
- [58:09]
Linus Sebastian
Thank you.
- [58:10]
Luke Lafreniere
I do find the idea of, like, trying to find a way to do this legitimately to be fun and entertaining and cool, I'm just admitting that. But I mean, yeah, if we can't do it, we can't do it.
- [58:21]
Linus Sebastian
Like, it's. It's funny. It's because, like, in most cases, our company policy is because we have explored and exhausted every possible option. We have wanted to do things like giant gas gift cards, whether it's prizes or incentives or bonuses or whatever. And what we've run up against every time is that the CRA has seen this grift and is wise to it because the only reason to do it this way would be so that you can use pre personal income tax money for the employee for them to get a benefit that would normally be post income tax. Right? So if someone is going to Costco for a company outing and just, like, buys a blender and the company event is buying a blender, the CRA is going to look at this. It's going to be like, okay, so I'm in need income tax payments from all of y'all on your blender purchases. So we have these policies so that you guys don't get bent over by the tax man after the fact. It's so that we're making sure we're doing everything on the up and up in the first place and we don't run into trouble after the fact because once you owe interest on it and potential penalties, it's a lot worse. Hmm. I have rules because I care. Why don't we do some announcements and.
- [59:56]
Luke Lafreniere
I will attempt to get us to Costco because I care.
- [60:01]
Dan
I think Luke just buys snacks for an event at the lounge.
- [60:09]
Linus Sebastian
I will leave it to you guys to figure out. Introducing the hooded task jacket. These have a fun story to them. We ordered a whole bunch of this twill woven material, which was supposed to be used for our tech pants, which we were developing years ago. Well, they didn't end up being the right choice for pants, but they were perfect for a jacket that is perfect for getting stuff done. It's built for those awkward spring days when it's still too chilly for a T shirt, but too warm for a jacket. And you can either layer it over a sweater or rock it solo with the inner lining feeling great on your skin if you're just wearing a T shirt underneath. And of course, in classic LTT fashion, it's loaded up with three zippered pockets to secure all your stuff. An Embroidered LTT logo on the sleeve and custom LTT cord locks. It's available now at lmg, gg, Taskjacket, and Luke, if you want to show some of the fun photos at that link on your screen, that would be great. And Dan, you're also wearing one, right? Sorry. Your guys preview window is extremely small to me.
- [61:17]
Dan
It's very comfy. I'm excited to do tasks in this.
- [61:23]
Linus Sebastian
Do you want to show the website pictures?
- [61:25]
Dan
Luke, do you want to pull that up?
- [61:26]
Linus Sebastian
Sure.
- [61:27]
Luke Lafreniere
Give me one second. Yeah. This is great.
- [61:32]
Linus Sebastian
Look W. Calderini, who says jackets just in time for summer. We release products when they're ready. That's what people say they want. So whatever.
- [61:44]
Luke Lafreniere
Not at Costco yet, unfortunately. It's actually an epic photo.
- [61:54]
Linus Sebastian
He's doing tasks. They're doing tasks, guys. Okay, yeah. This is how you get tasks done.
- [62:01]
Luke Lafreniere
I understand you need to have a black version of everything. And the black version looks great. Like I, I like it, but it feels like the. The, like canon color for this jacket is the. The brown. Like the brown looks so good. The black is solid, but the brown looks so good. Heck yeah.
- [62:27]
Linus Sebastian
All right. In other announcements, LTT x Larian Studios back.
- [62:34]
Luke Lafreniere
Let's go.
- [62:35]
Linus Sebastian
Plus giveaway.
- [62:38]
Luke Lafreniere
All right.
- [62:38]
Linus Sebastian
Do we get. Some of you might have noticed.
- [62:40]
Dan
Should we get them on the table?
- [62:42]
Linus Sebastian
Yeah, I guess so. Some of you might have noticed on Twitter or Reddit that user cromwelp posted Larian Studios new backpack. Actually, do you want to bring. Do you want to bring up the post first?
- [62:53]
Luke Lafreniere
Sure.
- [62:56]
Linus Sebastian
We partnered with Larian Studios, makers of Baldur's Gate 3, to produce about 800 of these bags for their entire staff. Featuring a custom design on the front pouch, a Larian Studios patch on the side pocket, and a custom interior lining. Let's go back to the wide of Luke and he can show off the patch. Beautiful. And the custom lining. There's all you have to do to get one.
- [63:27]
Luke Lafreniere
There's kind of multiple parts to the custom lining, so.
- [63:30]
Linus Sebastian
Oh, sure. Go.
- [63:32]
Luke Lafreniere
First off, in the. In the big like pocket of holding area, there's another. It's a little hard to show, but there's another like badge and then the. The printing.
- [63:45]
Linus Sebastian
You could switch to the. Luke can. Luke. Just an idea.
- [63:50]
Luke Lafreniere
Huh?
- [63:51]
Linus Sebastian
Nice.
- [63:53]
Luke Lafreniere
Questionable levels of success. There's also a lot of boxes in the way. Now maybe we can.
- [63:58]
Linus Sebastian
Okay, well it's a black screen for me, so you might want to just go back to the wide.
- [64:03]
Luke Lafreniere
Uh oh, uh oh. So that's. That's the loot cam right now. Very helpful.
- [64:09]
Linus Sebastian
Nice.
- [64:10]
Luke Lafreniere
That's the.
- [64:11]
Linus Sebastian
Great job, everyone.
- [64:12]
Luke Lafreniere
Show it this way. There we go.
- [64:15]
Linus Sebastian
Nice.
- [64:15]
Luke Lafreniere
Back to the loot cam. Okay, hold on.
- [64:18]
Dan
No, no.
- [64:18]
Luke Lafreniere
That's production company, everyone. Okay, there we go.
- [64:23]
Linus Sebastian
Fine.
- [64:24]
Luke Lafreniere
There's. So. There's the inside. So you've got another Larian badge. It's like this gray instead of the orange. And these logos in the background, you might notice they're not all the same as the. The standard badge one, and that's because it's their localized studios logos. So they have studios all over the world. And these are the logos for the individual studios, which is super cool. Another cool secret of the inside of the bag is the. What I'm gonna call the combined works logo, but I don't know what you would want to actually call this. But it looks so sick. I don't know why it's so simple, but I just like it a lot. Look at that. Is it just sick? It's just lttx Larian. But I think it looks great anyway.
- [65:09]
Linus Sebastian
It's beautiful. And all you have to do to get one is go back in time and get a job at Larian. This is embossed work on Baldur's Gate 3. I think you mean embroidered.
- [65:21]
Luke Lafreniere
Embroidered. That is what I mean. I say the wrong words often.
- [65:25]
Linus Sebastian
Yep. That's fine. I know. Or you can be Luke, who gets one of the backpacks. Wait, who gets 11 backpacks? I don't think you need 11 backpacks. So I'll make you a deal, okay? You can keep one, and we'll give away the other 10. So if you guys are feeling lucky, there may be something on lttstore.com that will take you where you need to go to enter this giveaway, maybe near something that has your back. We're going to be drawing winners next Friday, so make sure to keep your eyes out and enter before then. Pretty exciting. I would just like to say thank you, Larian Studios, for your patience on this project. Because of some of our issues with backpack suppliers and backpack production, it took a very long time to deliver these backpacks. But I had an idea, Luke. I kind of. I pitched this to Taryn. I was thinking that, you know, if we ever wanted them to work with us again, maybe what we could do is we could document a start date and come up with, like, an idea for something, and then send them a timeline. Send them. Basically send it to them unsolicited. Be like, okay, here's a thing that we made. Here was the entire timeline, from concept to sending you these units. If this Is acceptable. Let us know and maybe we'll work together again.
- [67:06]
Luke Lafreniere
Yeah.
- [67:07]
Linus Sebastian
They were spectacularly patient and amazing to work.
- [67:12]
Luke Lafreniere
They were very patient. Yeah.
- [67:14]
Linus Sebastian
Yes. But basically, the final backpacks that they got are not from the same supplier that the sample backpacks were from, because it was no longer possible to get them from the original supplier. But it took us a very long.
- [67:30]
Luke Lafreniere
Time that they have these dual layer bottoms and they have the corrected carabiners and all that kind of stuff.
- [67:36]
Linus Sebastian
Yes.
- [67:36]
Luke Lafreniere
So they're in a good state.
- [67:39]
Linus Sebastian
Bots asks, are custom backpacks a possibility if we order that many? I mean, anything's a possibility if you order enough. 800 bags was enough for us to make something happen here, and I think we could get it done a lot faster if we were to do it again. We have a much larger, much more engaged partner on the backpack manufacturing side right now. With that said, there are going to be some challenges with all of the tariff situations that are going on in the world right now. So who knows? You know, the world's. The world's wild right now. Like, I was talking to a PC case company that was like, yeah, we're trying to get some cases over here before some new tariffs get applied to them. And what we realized is that even if we could get an order in, there's no way we could get it in in time, because everybody thought of that. And the ports are, like, swamped. Absolutely mired in shipments right now. This is from a single source, so take it for what it is. Logistics right now, apparently very challenging.
- [68:49]
Luke Lafreniere
Yeah, makes sense.
- [68:51]
Linus Sebastian
All right, what are we supposed to be talking about? Luke, you want to pick a topic?
- [68:55]
Dan
Now we got to do some merch messages.
- [68:57]
Luke Lafreniere
Yeah.
- [68:58]
Linus Sebastian
Okay. I'm going to have to rely on you guys to kind of do that because I didn't remember to set up the dashboard, so. Cool.
- [69:06]
Dan
Yeah. Well, let's see. I think I've got one here for Mr. Luke. Hi, Parasocial friends. I recently got promoted to lead software engineer. I want to build an awesome team, but my doctor's are all over the world. Got any advice on how to build a strong team remotely?
- [69:27]
Luke Lafreniere
Doctor? Oh, direct reports. I don't know why, but I don't think people have shortened that when talking to me before. But I get it. Direct reports. It can be really complicated if you cross certain time zones. I find for. For our group, we have all of North America and we have Europe, and that works pretty well because you set most of your crossover meeting times to be right at like, around 9am because if I remember correctly, that's like 4ish PM for like UK area. And then it gets a little bit dang, dang, dang. Speed typing. How fast do you type, Linus? Have you tested yourself?
- [70:27]
Dan
What? It's very loud.
- [70:30]
Luke Lafreniere
Locked in. Typing on the laptop.
- [70:35]
Linus Sebastian
Sorry about that.
- [70:36]
Luke Lafreniere
Earthquake simulator.
- [70:38]
Linus Sebastian
Okay, I, I am done. I was just sending Dan a quick message.
- [70:42]
Luke Lafreniere
What was I. That completely dominated my, my brain functions. Oh right. Yeah, yeah. So you meet at 9am and it works pretty well for, for most European areas and works pretty well for your, your North American areas as well. Other than that like I don't know, you're gonna have to get pretty used to handoffs and check ins. Ideally you are hiring and working with a team of people that are pretty good at working alone. Unless your team is pretty big. Because it's, it's often beneficial to have mixtures of disciplines across the time zones. Like one benefit that we have is that you know, if you need someone of a certain, if you have a large enough team and you need someone of a certain discipline, there's like kind of always someone online, which is nice. But that also means that those people aren't working with each other all the time. So sharing knowledge between those people and making sure that everyone's kind of staying same page can be more difficult. But like for, for instance my team, we meet twice a week for, for an hour. We very rarely use the whole hour. I pick a part of the meeting where like once certain things have been accomplished, I say a generic phrase like have a good rest of your week or whatever. So everyone knows that like it's cool if they leave now and then some teams, one, one of, one of my teams, everyone just hangs up immediately. Another one of my teams, nobody leaves and everyone just hangs out and chats for the rest of the meeting time. Another one of my teams, everyone very formally says goodbye. Every team is very unique but you can like allow for some space for people to hang out and talk so you can have that team building stuff. I find that is more likely with remote teams that they will do that with. Local teams are like, I don't care, I'm going to see you in 10 seconds anyways. I don't know. None of that was super specific advice. But find meeting times that everyone can actually do. Have multiple meetings per week, sync up often and if you're having it where one person is working on something and then they have to hand off to the other person, standardize how that procedure works, make a certain level of documentation required for the handoff and make a certain level of documentation or certain level of actually reading the documentation required for when they pick it up as well. Yeah, there you go.
- [73:14]
Dan
All right. And there's apparently announcement here for floatplane that we're supposed to read after the first merch message. Oh, I just threw it in.
- [73:25]
Linus Sebastian
I don't see it.
- [73:26]
Dan
It's in the announcements. Yep.
- [73:29]
Linus Sebastian
Oh, some of you had a keen eye on our AMD GPU review video, which, yes, was partially shot at the Texas Land House. Luke, do you want to screen share the Texas Land House?
- [73:43]
Luke Lafreniere
Sure.
- [73:44]
Linus Sebastian
Nope. We're apparently supposed to go to floatplane and click around in the video while doing talking points. So the Texas Land House went kind of viral on Reddit.
- [73:53]
Luke Lafreniere
Hold on, Wait, wait, wait. Isn't that the same thing? I'm supposed to show that, right? If we're clicking on the video, we're supposed to show it.
- [73:57]
Dan
Yeah, the link's there.
- [73:58]
Linus Sebastian
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, I had meant show the viral Reddit post initially, but yeah, no, you should. You should show the video. So we did a tour of it, and we've got an early sneak peek up on floatplane right now. Got a few timestamps for Luke to show you guys. I am ready whenever, starting at 6:17, which is the adult playroom.
- [74:23]
Dan
Throw it over there.
- [74:24]
Linus Sebastian
Luke.
- [74:28]
Dan
Do you want to hear it?
- [74:30]
Linus Sebastian
I don't know. Let's go now. Okay. At 13:58, my son and Kenton open up the DDR gaming station. We talk about how Yvonne wants one. I think the final video that goes up on YouTube will be more of just like a tight, scripted tour. Whereas we got a ton of behind the scenes of just like, kenting showing us around. It's pretty cool. So there's four DDR pads built into the floor. 1921 shows the server rack full of gaming computers.
- [75:11]
Luke Lafreniere
Hmm.
- [75:12]
Linus Sebastian
Oh, you'll find it.
- [75:13]
Luke Lafreniere
I went to 2021.
- [75:14]
Linus Sebastian
There we go.
- [75:15]
Luke Lafreniere
My bad.
- [75:16]
Linus Sebastian
So many gaming computers.
- [75:19]
Luke Lafreniere
Yeah, those are all full, like, desktops, right?
- [75:22]
Linus Sebastian
Oh, yeah, yeah. Oh, yeah, bud.
- [75:24]
Luke Lafreniere
Crazy.
- [75:24]
Linus Sebastian
They thought about using virtualization, but I think ran into a lot of the same challenges that I have in the past. Anti Cheat doesn't like it at all. Yeah. 3521 says actual GPU shooting. I don't know what that means.
- [75:41]
Luke Lafreniere
Yeah, hold on. 35.
- [75:43]
Linus Sebastian
Actual GPU shooting.
- [75:45]
Luke Lafreniere
Oh, the shooting of the GPU review video.
- [75:50]
Linus Sebastian
Oh, yeah. Okay. And then at 3822, I, having played DDR only like two or three times before in my life, played DDR versus Kenton. I did not Do.
- [76:07]
Luke Lafreniere
Well, look at you not even pressing the. Oh, perfect. Great. Perfect, perfect. Great.
- [76:12]
Linus Sebastian
Yeah, but look at how basic mine is compared to his. I'm playing on like super easy noob mode.
- [76:19]
Luke Lafreniere
Yeah. You don't have a bar. The bar does make it like wildly easier.
- [76:25]
Linus Sebastian
He apparently doesn't like the bar.
- [76:27]
Luke Lafreniere
Interesting.
- [76:28]
Linus Sebastian
Not a bar guy. Yeah. So we're going to be doing a video showcasing the full house. And Andy, our camera operator, filmed this behind the scenes and mini vlog about our trip to the house. It's not coming out till early April, so if you want a sneak preview of what's to come, you can check it out at LMG GG Floatplane. Or if you're feeling lazy, you can just subscribe to our YouTube channel as a channel member. Huge shout out to Kenton and Jade who. Who graciously let us film there. Both doing the tour of their house as well as shooting our 97D review video.
- [77:05]
Dan
Yeah, I got one more merch message here before we move on. Good evening, Sebi, Laffey and Bessie. I have yet to lose a video game to my 14 year old son, but that day is coming. Linus, what games can you confidently say you'll never lose to yours?
- [77:22]
Linus Sebastian
Ooh, I don't know. He's pretty good. Yeah, like, he like, he can beat me in like Ultimate Chicken Horse. Like, it's close. So for like 2D platforming, it's. It's really, really close.
- [77:43]
Luke Lafreniere
Is there a game that you actively play as much as he does? Because like there's gonna be games he can beat you in for sure that he plays.
- [77:54]
Linus Sebastian
I mean, he's old enough now that he has his own preferences. Right? Like he doesn't, he doesn't just play whatever dad plays. So like I'm better than him at tape to tape. But he picked it up really fast. Especially he was not naming any names. Time compared to some of the other people that we brought into the crew.
- [78:13]
Luke Lafreniere
Low bar. Yeah. Something that I've noticed with him though is that like, I swear it's within like the last year or two at most.
- [78:24]
Linus Sebastian
Yeah.
- [78:25]
Luke Lafreniere
There's been a huge spike in like his ability to perform in games.
- [78:30]
Linus Sebastian
Yeah, I know. He's like, he's like good. Like if we like I was standing over him and he like won Fortnite and I was like, do you do this regularly? And he was like, oh, I don't know, like once out of every some amount less than 10. I was like, oh, okay. So he's like, yeah. And he was just like mowing down Human players. And like, you can. You can tell from the usernames. I think it was. I looked it up at the time, but they were like, definitely human players. And I'm like, okay, well, I guess that's something.
- [79:08]
Luke Lafreniere
Look at this, right? Little Man's not super little anymore.
- [79:14]
Linus Sebastian
Oh, heck no. Yeah, no, that nickname has become less and less appropriate over the years.
- [79:23]
Luke Lafreniere
Yeah.
- [79:25]
Linus Sebastian
I don't know how long we're gonna. We're gonna keep it up anyway. But yeah, I know he's. He's very much just like slightly. Oh. Like the, the nickname.
- [79:38]
Luke Lafreniere
Oh.
- [79:39]
Linus Sebastian
It sort of seems like it's getting unnecessary, but it's kind of up to him, I assume. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, yeah, that should be. That should be a decision he makes. He's getting old enough that he can kind of make decisions for himself. Yeah. I'm still trying to think like, FPS, he's probably on my level. So it would come down to, you know, what game we're playing. Like, if we played something that he has a ton of hours in, he would have a huge advantage. If we played something that I have a ton of hours in, I would have a huge advantage. Like in a lot of ways, knowing the map, knowing the weapons, knowing the meta is way more important. Important than just like raw FPS skills. Unless you're playing like Quake arena or something. Right. I'd beat him at an rts, like, very easily just because he hasn't really played.
- [80:27]
Luke Lafreniere
Yeah.
- [80:28]
Linus Sebastian
But I think if we picked up a brand new game, he would probably be like, on par immediately and then he'd probably beat me in a very short amount of time.
- [80:36]
Luke Lafreniere
I mean, just like basic biology stuff, like reflex level. He's just gonna kill you.
- [80:44]
Linus Sebastian
Yep. Every day I always joke about this. I'm just like, every day, you know, I get older, dumber and slower and weaker. And every day you get well older, but also like smarter, faster and stronger.
- [80:57]
Luke Lafreniere
So. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
- [81:00]
Linus Sebastian
That's just. That's just the way it is. That's the way it is.
- [81:03]
Luke Lafreniere
And I think. I think my, like, oh, the last one or two years thing, I think it's just those curves have started getting a lot closer. Like two years ago, if we played a game like, it's like, okay, time to carry Little man, which was more than fine, you know, like, no problem whatsoever. But it was like, the goal is carrying Little man. And now it's like the goal is trying to not lose as much as possible to Little Man. It's. The mission has shifted. Yeah.
- [81:38]
Linus Sebastian
No, he beat me for the first time, I think the first game he ever beat me at was Towerfall, and it was, like, years ago. Like, he's. He's pretty good. And Towerfall, like, has pretty robust rubber banding. Like, it's. It's inherent to the game. And he got a little lucky that first time, but still, I was like, damn.
- [81:58]
Luke Lafreniere
Yeah, for sure.
- [81:59]
Linus Sebastian
Because I had gotten from being able to win a round anytime I wanted to. Legitimately losing sometimes.
- [82:05]
Luke Lafreniere
Oh, yeah. Like, I. I mean, I haven't. I pointed this out probably too many times, but I was frustrated about it. I haven't played Mario Kart in forever. He had, you know, the more advantageous sight line, all these other kind of things. But there is something that is fairly undeniable in Mario Kart, which is when you consistently get first, it's like, oh, because when you're playing against bots, you'll often get, like, item dumped.
- [82:31]
Linus Sebastian
Yeah.
- [82:32]
Luke Lafreniere
So, like, if you get first in literally every single map on a circuit, it's like, okay, you're like, you're. You know what you're doing. You're pretty good. And he. I think he did that to us at least once, if not every time.
- [82:46]
Linus Sebastian
Three times in one Grand Prix.
- [82:48]
Luke Lafreniere
Yeah. Which is like, okay.
- [82:52]
Linus Sebastian
Now, our advancing age did make that split screen on the pretty.
- [82:57]
Luke Lafreniere
We. I don't know how much realistic competition we were going to be because so we were trying to play on a switch in an airplane. So, like, I mean, neither of our eyes are amazing, and we're, like, leaning over trying to see it properly and stuff. But the. The reason why I mentioned the AI is because he did that against 150cc AIs, and people are going to say, like, oh, it's not that hard. The. The hard part that I'm pointing out is the consistency, and also it's. It's a gap. It's a change compared to one or two years ago.
- [83:30]
Linus Sebastian
And neither Luke nor I are, like, completely unversed. In the Mario Kart.
- [83:35]
Luke Lafreniere
Yes. Yeah.
- [83:36]
Linus Sebastian
So it's not like we were. Even though it was hard to see and there was a bit of joystick drift to contend with, it's not like we weren't there.
- [83:42]
Luke Lafreniere
No.
- [83:42]
Linus Sebastian
You know, causing trouble.
- [83:43]
Luke Lafreniere
Like, the problem I had was I literally could not see bananas. So, like, I remember I was in first, and in one lap, I hit five. It was just like, I guess I lose now. Like, there's just. There was no. There was no way to recover because I hit five bananas in one lap. I could not dodge them. So that was a Little bit unique, but it, it. What I'm kind of pointing out is that our performance, as much as we sucked, isn't even super relevant to the observation that he was really good. So I don't know. Yeah, it's interesting.
- [84:18]
Linus Sebastian
Should we move into another topic here?
- [84:21]
Dan
No, let's do some sponsors. I'm sorry.
- [84:24]
Linus Sebastian
Oh, what? We should do one more topic.
- [84:26]
Luke Lafreniere
Yeah.
- [84:27]
Dan
Okay.
- [84:28]
Linus Sebastian
Overruled.
- [84:29]
Luke Lafreniere
Pokemon Go sold to Saudi Arabia and public investment fund.
- [84:33]
Linus Sebastian
Fine.
- [84:35]
Luke Lafreniere
We can do something else if you want.
- [84:37]
Linus Sebastian
I was going to do MSI Announces.
- [84:40]
Luke Lafreniere
That's our other major topic. Let's do it.
- [84:42]
Linus Sebastian
Fine. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. Okay. MSI announced the Shadow 2X and Shadow 2X OC, a dual fan design for the RTX 5070. It appears to be the smallest 5070 from any manufacturer, at least according to PC part picker, being only 231 millimeters in length. But here's my issue with this, and I've seen this a lot of times, is why does MSI need 19, I kid you not 19 versions of the RTX 5070 when they don't appear to be able to consistently ship any of them at msrp? What is actually going on here? I legitimately would like the answer because I legitimately don't know. What is the point of creating more and more and more versions of of this GPU when you can't fulfill orders for your earlier GPUs that you already released?
- [85:56]
Luke Lafreniere
Some of them are so similar.
- [85:59]
Linus Sebastian
Okay, hold on, hold on a second. So Edselm says MSRP is too low. Yes, that is one of the reasons. So you stop shipping your MSRP card that you released and you go, oh, I don't know what you're talking about. Well, we have an MSRP card, we just don't have that one right now. We have the more expensive one, but in a lot of cases that's not even the defense because it's not just always a new higher price when it's just, it's just another. Another one. And Made in Canada says because money. But it's like, no, you're not making more money by developing yet another board and yet another cooler. If anything, you're just, you're just adding cost. Spider Murphy says shareholders like big numbers of products. That's not even true. Shareholders like a well understood product line that sells well. There is no way on this green earth that MSI releasing another version of 5070 could possibly impact their sales of RTX 5070. Their allocation of GPUs from Nvidia is fixed at this time. So, yes, they could be more competitive, you know, in a particular, like, oh, it's a smaller one or whatever. Like this particular card could be more interesting or whatever. But at the end of the day, they will sell 100% of the 5070 GPUs that Nvidia ships them. So what are we doing here? What is the point of this? Does anybody know? I want to know legitimately.
- [87:34]
Luke Lafreniere
I have no idea.
- [87:34]
Linus Sebastian
Luke. Do you know?
- [87:35]
Luke Lafreniere
I can't even guess, to be honest. It seems very weird to me.
- [87:40]
Linus Sebastian
But it's something that I've seen time and time again. You'll have this product that's under allocation and you'll have these brands releasing more and more versions of it. For what purpose?
- [87:53]
Luke Lafreniere
Yeah, Mr. Wizard 2K said market cap. Like, is it. Is it just your. Your, like, news stuffing kind of maybe.
- [88:01]
Linus Sebastian
But for to what end?
- [88:03]
Luke Lafreniere
Just getting your name.
- [88:04]
Linus Sebastian
Give me the news that. Give me the news that you have it in stock.
- [88:08]
Luke Lafreniere
Yeah, I hear that, but like, you know, Google News feed, if it. If I. If I scroll over to my feed and I see, oh, MSI released a new 5070 or something like, yeah, they're just.
- [88:18]
Linus Sebastian
I mean, I guess it's making us talk about it.
- [88:20]
Luke Lafreniere
Is there any. Yeah. Is there any stock of any of this stuff?
- [88:24]
Linus Sebastian
Like Jake message saying that in Canada there's some 50 series cards that are in stock at Memex, but apparently in America it's still really tough right now. Mighty Mike asks, do they get extra allocation for each product line? Not that I'm aware of. But. But Bent Bob has a good theory. More SKUs means more listings in store pages, even if they're out of stock, and therefore more brand awareness.
- [88:53]
Luke Lafreniere
But this is. Yeah, kind of.
- [88:55]
Linus Sebastian
That's an idea.
- [88:57]
Luke Lafreniere
Yeah.
- [89:01]
Linus Sebastian
What else are we looking for? Yeah, more search results. Maybe it's that.
- [89:06]
Luke Lafreniere
Man, GPU prices are so broken. I don't even know. Like, I just. I went on Amazon and I looked for MSI Nvidia 5070. Like, what am I even looking at?
- [89:25]
Linus Sebastian
Raiden428 says Zotac are being legends. Their discord is a great place to get cards. That's pretty cool to see them engaging directly with the gaming community.
- [89:37]
Luke Lafreniere
Sweet.
- [89:38]
Linus Sebastian
Like that. All right. The same day that MSI released this card, Nvidia claimed it has shipped twice as many RTX 50 series GPUs compared to the RTX 40 series five weeks after launch. However, it is worth noting that the RTX 4090 was the only RTX 40 series card for the first five weeks after its launch and it also suffered from stock issues. So that's something. So they actually have like four times as many SKUs, many of which are at much lower prices and have only shipped twice as many GPUs. Meanwhile, AMD Vice President David McAfee said in a podcast that demand for the RX9070 and 9070 XT has been, quote, unprecedented and that the company's number one priority is restocking GPUs, particularly at MSRP.
- [90:35]
Luke Lafreniere
Do you remember the MSRP for the 9070 or XT in CAD?
- [90:43]
Linus Sebastian
Oh, in CAD I have no idea. But 549 USD and 599 USD so that times 1.45 or so.
- [90:51]
Luke Lafreniere
549 USD to CAD. So 790 and this is Amazon right now. Like man, come on. Twelve hundred dollar cards that are supposed to be seven hundred and ninety. Like please.
- [91:10]
Linus Sebastian
I wish I had the power to say hey guys, just don't buy it if it's not at or at least near msrp. And this is the thing that I feel like I talk about a lot and people kind of get frustrated at me for talking about it. But the reason I talk about it is because there seems to be a significant number of people that feel like it's the reviewer's fault for not going hard enough at these companies for nothing. There's nothing that I can do about it.
- [91:43]
Luke Lafreniere
Buying so many of them that they're sold out constantly. All you're doing is teaching these companies that honestly they're underpriced. Like yes, that's it.
- [91:54]
Linus Sebastian
Yes, 100%.
- [91:56]
Luke Lafreniere
And they're clearly supply. So price can go up.
- [92:00]
Linus Sebastian
Like we talked about recently where we compared the total addressable market for GPUs and gaming PC gaming with the kind of viewership that, you know, tech review channels get. I reach this like tiny fraction of gamers. Like at the end of the day, I don't even see the point from Nvidia and AMD's perspective. I don't even see the point in engaging with reviewers anymore. Why bother?
- [92:32]
Luke Lafreniere
I still think it matters. I know your doomer view on this, but I still think it matters. To be completely honest, I think there's.
- [92:38]
Linus Sebastian
A we're still going to cover it.
- [92:40]
Luke Lafreniere
I think there's an opinion that zeitgeist that can kind of happen where like if, if enough enthusiasts condemn a product and the price in my opinion almost never results in anything, especially for products like this that are Just constantly sold out. It's, it's gonna become irrelevant to people. But if people are like, this thing just sucks, it's buggy, it doesn't work, whatever, it, it won't sell. Like that word will get out to the people that don't watch your channel.
- [93:09]
Linus Sebastian
But I mean we're talking about very mature companies with very mature product lines. But like, okay, no, here, find me a 50, 90 founders in stock then. Because that thing literally can light on fire and everyone's talking about it.
- [93:30]
Luke Lafreniere
How many of them though?
- [93:33]
Linus Sebastian
I'm just saying what we say is not going to impact how many they can sell. So why do they care? Why bother to engage with us at all? Because theoretically.
- [93:46]
Luke Lafreniere
Right, yeah, but I didn't say that what you say matters all the time. I said that if you, if you say that something is really bad, you're not saying it's really bad, you're saying it's, it's very performant but might light on fire. And then they can decide that for themselves. But you can say don't pre order things and nobody's going to listen. And they're going to pre order and crazier amounts than you've ever heard of and you're going to say don't do microtransactions. And people are going to buy microtransactions of like 80% plus of people. But if something is actually just a piece of junk and, and undesirable because of that, people will not buy it. There are certain things that people won't listen to. They'll let their greed override certain desires. So like if it's, if it's really expensive but it's like cool, they're just going to buy it anyways. If they just want it really bad, they'll pre order it, they'll do whatever. Like those things, those aren't going to stop people, oh, I shouldn't buy microtransactions, but this guy just killed me in this game and I would, I would prefer to be able to kill him. So I'm going to buy this microtransaction to become stronger and then beat him anyways. That type of thing is very easy to prey on with, with people. But if you're like, this thing is actually just junk, then I think people won't buy it. But if you're like, this is great, but so overpriced that at this price it is basically junk, I think people will still buy because what they heard is it's great.
- [95:14]
Linus Sebastian
But that's the thing Is like anything, is anything, almost anything. Like, the Humane pin is junk at any price. But almost anything is not junk when it's at the right price. Especially when you've got, like, mature companies with pretty mature testing processes, mostly churning out products that are not complete junk. And so with that in mind, I think there's very few opportunities for us to really, like, stop consumers from getting scammed. All we can really do is say, hey, here's what's a good value, here's what's not a good value. And it just feels like they. They're not. We don't have enough reach.
- [95:53]
Luke Lafreniere
I think junk is too inflammatory. But, like, look at the market share that intel had that they have lost, right? Like, that didn't just happen from random people that have never looked at any tech reviewers just randomly deciding to buy AMD for the first time in a decade. Like, no, that information came out. That information came from somewhere. It got into people's minds and it spread. You have people testing things. Those people are informing people on Build a PC or PC Part picker or whatever, these other various sites that are recommending recommendation engines of some sort. The build a PC section of the forum, whatever it is, and then that spreads out and spreads out and spreads out, and then word of mouth and word of mouth and word of mouth. And now AMD CPUs are super cool. It takes time. But you can saturate this information. You can still get it out. There's no, like, tech reviews are not irrelevant. It's just saying that you don't hit even a majority of the market share doesn't mean that you're irrelevant. It just means that a lot of people aren't going to be very actively listening.
- [97:01]
Linus Sebastian
Yeah, Yeah, I guess I just am. I don't know. I guess it's just surprising to me because I live in my bubble where anytime that I buy a tech product, I look at reviews for it. And, you know, from my point of view, there's a lot of products that have sold really well that anyone who read a review for it shouldn't buy. And yet they. And yet they do, you know, and it just. And I'm sure that someone, you know, will see me with my, you know, power tool or whatever and go, oh, my God, there was a model for 30% less that has, you know, double the battery life and that. Idiot. And it's more compact and whatever. And I'm just kind of sitting here going, yeah, I screw a drywall anchor into my wall every once in a while. I just don't really care. I'm sure they feel the exact same way.
- [97:55]
Luke Lafreniere
Yeah, I play Fortnite is like, you know what I mean? Like, I don't know. I'm not a pro gamer. I get 60 FPS, who cares? Yeah. Like a lot of people aren't necessarily going to care. But then at the same time, if they hear from their enthusiasm enthusiast, friend who watched one of your videos or one of anyone else's videos or read some article or whatever else that, hey, you should, you should buy AMD next time or something else that will. Shifting patterns over time.
- [98:26]
Linus Sebastian
Such big purchases. I think that's the thing that kind of kills me about it.
- [98:30]
Luke Lafreniere
I mean, and I excessively research things before I buy them and so do you. But not every. Everybody's like that and that's okay.
- [98:36]
Linus Sebastian
Like house, car, computer are probably the three most important things in my life. And probably a lot of you guys.
- [98:43]
Luke Lafreniere
Yeah. And you see people make 30 minute decisions or less on houses. This is. People buy sight unseen. People are crazy. I don't understand at all. I don't even.
- [98:58]
Linus Sebastian
People buy cars makes absolutely no sense to me. The fact that like, like high, yeah, high pressure sales, you know, exists in cars and that people will like make a snap decision. Like my personal policy if I'm buying something like a car, anything that requires financing is I have my conversation with them, I go home and sleep. Like there is absolutely no way on this earth that I purchase a car without going home and sleeping.
- [99:29]
Luke Lafreniere
Yeah, sweet.
- [99:32]
Linus Sebastian
But people 100% do it.
- [99:36]
Luke Lafreniere
Binky draws says any house I can get in this economy is worth it. Yeah, so I get that. But like there was. I remember when I was looking for my apartment, I remember I went to a new construction where they had like a demo unit of an apartment built, but the tower wasn't up yet and you could, you could walk through it and stuff. And I remember talking to one of the salespeople that were there and I mentioned that like I was kind of surprised because the salespeople that were there were pretty chill. They weren't really doing sales as it were. They were just kind of like hanging out and giving people snacks and stuff. And they were like, oh, yeah. I mean this is our first showing, but pretty much the entire inventory of the building is sold. And I was like, what? They're like, yeah, we have like two units left. We're building like four towers there. It's all gone. Okay. Like, how did that even happen? If this is your first showing? And they're like, oh, people saw Some pictures online and just bought all of was just renders like.
- [100:44]
Linus Sebastian
Okay, well if you're buying it as an investment and you're not even going to live in it, then you don't care anyway, I guess. Right.
- [100:51]
Luke Lafreniere
Yeah.
- [100:51]
Linus Sebastian
Because you're just going to stick your tenant in it and if the, you know, fridge can only be opened 70% of the way before it whacks into something or whatever, you know, the kind of issue that you would only notice, like walking through a place and touching.
- [101:06]
Luke Lafreniere
Everything, opening stuff up, you know, whatever.
- [101:08]
Linus Sebastian
It'S not going to be your problems. What do you care? Yeah, I guess.
- [101:13]
Luke Lafreniere
Yeah. Conrad said the. The B.C. housing market is looking really good lately. It's do it seems to be doing better things. But I mean, we'll see how by.
- [101:25]
Linus Sebastian
Looking good, we mean going down.
- [101:27]
Luke Lafreniere
Yeah. Oh yeah, that's looking good up here, to be very clear.
- [101:30]
Linus Sebastian
Yeah, I'm still rooting for it, Luke. Even though.
- [101:33]
Luke Lafreniere
Oh yeah.
- [101:34]
Linus Sebastian
A significant amount of my net worth is tied up in B.C. real estate. I am still. I'm still rooting for it.
- [101:41]
Luke Lafreniere
You'll be fine.
- [101:44]
Linus Sebastian
I've taken a bit of a bath, sir. I've taken a bit of a bath. But you know what? I feel clean. I feel cleansed.
- [101:52]
Luke Lafreniere
I just. Yeah. I don't know. I wonder where this. Oh, man. Oh, do I even say this? I really don't want to get into this topic. On. When.
- [102:03]
Linus Sebastian
Is he muted?
- [102:04]
Luke Lafreniere
No, I just stopped.
- [102:08]
Linus Sebastian
Oh, it looked like your mouth was still moving. That was weird. Oh, it's the delay.
- [102:12]
Luke Lafreniere
Yeah, probably Chat says do it, say it.
- [102:16]
Linus Sebastian
No balls.
- [102:17]
Luke Lafreniere
You know, we're in an extremely active, extremely erratic trade war right now, so we'll see what happens to housing in all of Canada. To be honest, who knows?
- [102:26]
Linus Sebastian
Yeah.
- [102:27]
Luke Lafreniere
We've never been in this situation.
- [102:31]
Linus Sebastian
Yeah.
- [102:31]
Luke Lafreniere
Ever.
- [102:32]
Linus Sebastian
But hey, I mean, it was for a really good reason. Like, I know there's a lot of fentanyl going over the border from Canada and it's really. It was really wise. It was wise and measured to put these.
- [102:48]
Luke Lafreniere
Yeah, it was stable.
- [102:50]
Linus Sebastian
You could even say a genius move to put these measures in place.
- [102:56]
Luke Lafreniere
Dead, antisocial and full plane chat said, say your bull chat, which is a fantastic deep cut. Yeah, I don't know. I don't know. Whatever.
- [103:11]
Linus Sebastian
Yeah. Good luck, everybody. It all makes release. It all makes a ton of sense. Everything makes sense right now. And good reason is driving actions.
- [103:25]
Luke Lafreniere
Yeah. Anyways, company towns or something. What topic are we on? What are we doing?
- [103:30]
Linus Sebastian
Yeah, I think we're supposed to be sponsors.
- [103:33]
Luke Lafreniere
Nice.
- [103:33]
Linus Sebastian
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- [106:48]
Dan
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- [106:50]
Linus Sebastian
You only select the apps your business needs and if you just need one app, it's free. Check out odoo@odoo.com wan or click the link in the description for a free 15 day trial. No credit card required. Oh my God. Cry room please. What? Was it Amazon that was rumored to have those?
- [107:10]
Luke Lafreniere
I think so.
- [107:11]
Linus Sebastian
Is that right?
- [107:12]
Luke Lafreniere
I think it was Amazon. Yeah, I think so.
- [107:18]
Linus Sebastian
Should we talk about Pokemon Go being sold to the Saudis?
- [107:25]
Luke Lafreniere
Yeah.
- [107:27]
Linus Sebastian
I know you're a big Pokemon Go fan, so how does this make you feel before we even get. Actually no, let's do the. I'll do the read first and then you can talk about how it makes you feel. Niantic. Okay. Pokemon Go and Pokemon Go Clones. Monster Hunter now and Pikmin Bloom. Seriously, this company has made one game over and over for like 15 years. Has been wired by Scopely, a subsidiary of Savvy Games Group, a multinational game investment fund group backed by Saudi Arabia's public investment fund. Niantic's AI mapping business. Niantic Spatial is supposedly being spun off as a separate entity, but is also receiving a $50 million investment from Scopely as well. Which brings questions about what player data, including geolocation and AR scans of locations where they play the game, will be shared and used for by these parent companies. A blog post on Pokemon Go's website states that the entire Pokemon Go team is staying together through this partnership and that this partnership will help improve the game and ensure longer term support.
- [108:38]
Luke Lafreniere
Never heard that before. We've never heard that everyone's staying together until there's layoffs in like six months to a year. We've never heard, never heard that. That didn't happen at Microsoft recently. No, definitely not. Definitely not. Definitely not. Definitely not. This is, it's interesting. I mean 10 cents. Been buying at least part of like every game for quite a while now. I guess the Saudi Arabia public investment fund just went a little harder and just bought a whole game. His Tencent seems to usually buy parts different strategy. This is rough. This is rough. I expect even worse microtransactions. Funny. Enough. See, I, I have some unpopular takes on Pokemon Go. Being a Pokemon Go enjoyer, I actually think it is a bad game. And the only reason why I like it is because it gets me out walking. I think things like remote Raid passes are bad just in general.
- [109:44]
Linus Sebastian
Yeah, we know how you feel about that.
- [109:46]
Luke Lafreniere
I, I don't mind using other people for it because there's a method where you can use an app to let people add you to their friends list and then you can invite them and then they can remote into the raid that you are standing at. So I'll go walk around and then call people in to like fight the raid with me so I can do more difficult things. But I don't think you as an individual should use remote Raid passes. But that is not a popular opinion.
- [110:13]
Linus Sebastian
Unless you have like a disability. Sure, whatever.
- [110:16]
Luke Lafreniere
Yeah, there's, there's, there are situations where it, it makes sense. Sure.
- [110:22]
Linus Sebastian
But for most people, Quantum Rand says read the Pokemon Go privacy policy. This isn't an issue for players at all.
- [110:28]
Luke Lafreniere
Yeah, it's already really bad.
- [110:30]
Linus Sebastian
Here's the thing about privacy policies though, is that they are only as bad as they are until they're worse. Nothing actually prevents a company from just updating their privacy policy and then you're going to get a notification that the privacy policy was updated. Most people aren't going to read it. Or, you know, coming back to my point about people not paying attention to reviews of GPUs, people won't pay attention to community backlash around a privacy policy update in general. And it will just stay what it is because people are going to desperately need their new Pokemon. And then it is what it is.
- [111:09]
Luke Lafreniere
You know. Okay, I'm going to, I'm going to counter a little bit. You said the like, okay, remote Raid passes are. It's good for people with disabilities. And someone full plane chat said okay, but. Or J Cup and floatplanes. That said, or you just don't live in a city. I think my counter for this is what I said right before that, which is it's not a good game. Like, if these things are true, I. Pokemon Go just sucks. Like, it's a, it's a bad game. The only benefit is that it gets you out walking. So if you can't or if you live in an area where there's nothing to do by doing that, then honestly, I just think it's a bad game and I wouldn't recommend playing it at all. I wouldn't recommend paying egregious amounts of money to be able to Play it in a less effective manner. No, I just would recommend not playing it like it's not a good game. Don't go spend your time doing something more fun and engaging. I don't know. I don't. So that's. I think that's my defense for it is it just sucks. So you shouldn't go out of your way to spend more money playing a game that isn't very good from your couch instead of going out and walking, which makes the game good. Anyways, so now that I got that out of the way, I suspect the biggest win that they can have with the community and the biggest financial win that they can have is uncapping the amount of remote raid passes that you can use. Because I think right now it's capped at like three per day or something.
- [112:37]
Linus Sebastian
Yeah.
- [112:37]
Luke Lafreniere
And the crazy thing to me is they caught. I don't know how much they cost, but I think they cost like more than a dollar each. And people rejoice when for special events they lift. They. I don't think they lift the cap, but they raise the cap to some higher amount. I'm gonna say like 20 or something. And people get stoked.
- [112:54]
Linus Sebastian
Wild.
- [112:55]
Luke Lafreniere
So, like, I think they are going to do something that community wants and lift the cap on remote raids and they're gonna make tons of money.
- [113:09]
Linus Sebastian
I don't even think it's game point. It's got to be the data because that, from my understanding, was the entire point of ingress and Pokemon Go and all this stuff.
- [113:21]
Luke Lafreniere
AR scans are crazy. There's benefits. Routinely do AR scans of different areas. Like, what is possibly the point of that unless you're trying to harvest some form of data? It's interesting to me that it's worth that much.
- [113:37]
Linus Sebastian
Dude. The valuations of things in general are sort of baffling to me. Yeah, I don't think we actually said how much the deal was for. I thought it was 300 million, though.
- [113:48]
Luke Lafreniere
I'm not sure. I don't think it. No.
- [113:51]
Linus Sebastian
Sorry. Excuse me. Three and a half billion. Sorry. I was off by. By a decimal place.
- [113:56]
Luke Lafreniere
My goodness. Yeah, I mean, there are three and.
- [113:59]
Linus Sebastian
A half billion dollar sacrifice.
- [114:00]
Luke Lafreniere
There are still a crazy amount of Pokemon Go players. And I guarantee you that that game makes monster money. Just crazy amounts of money. Because, like, it's. It's, I think, generally easier for people to justify. Okay. The people that will go out and walk, I think it's easier for them to justify because they're like, oh, okay, this is. I don't know. I'm Going to buy an event pass for this cool event day thing. It cost me like $6. I'm out walking, doing whatever. You compound that by enough people, that's a ton of money. And then you have the. The people that will just sit in remote Raid like crazy, and that's wild amounts of money.
- [114:44]
Linus Sebastian
Interestingly, they kept Ingress, so it's not like they're not still maintaining game code.
- [114:51]
Luke Lafreniere
Huh.
- [114:52]
Linus Sebastian
So it's not like they're just like, yeah, we don't want to, like, make games anymore or something. So they only sold Pokemon Go, Monster Hunter now, and Pikmin Bloom.
- [115:07]
Luke Lafreniere
That's weird. I wonder how many people even play Ingress still. I like.
- [115:15]
Linus Sebastian
Whoa. Whiskey nerd88 says, I met my ex playing Pokemon Go. Last time I checked, I spent about $6,000 in the game, but have not spent any money on the game in years. Wow.
- [115:28]
Luke Lafreniere
And due to the nature of the game, if he hasn't played in years, his Pokemon probably aren't even that good anymore because there's. There's constant power creep. Right. Still playing this. I know people play it. I just. I wonder how many. Because you never really hear about it. As far as my understanding goes, the Ingress community is, like, probably not shrinking much anymore because they. You get to that point where it's like, these people are just gonna play forever. But I wonder how many are left. Because, like, I. I played Ping Ingress back in, like, what, 2013 or something. And for the same reason then that I like Pokemon Go now. Right. Like, I liked the idea. I. I would walk around a city using Ingress as my guide because, like, it would bring you to interesting, like, statues or whatever else. Like, you could use it to kind of bring you around the city. I don't know, man. It's.
- [116:31]
Linus Sebastian
It's interesting.
- [116:32]
Luke Lafreniere
I don't think they're going to make the game better for players like me if they make any changes. I think they will make the game better for players that are not like me. But we'll see.
- [116:42]
Linus Sebastian
Our discussion questions here are pretty interesting. I mean, is Savvy Games Group essentially just publicly funded private equity? Yes. I mean, you got to remember that in. In the Middle east, like, public funds are kind of like private funds.
- [116:58]
Luke Lafreniere
Like, is it not. I genuinely don't know anything about it. It's not like the Norwegian investment thing.
- [117:05]
Linus Sebastian
I'm not convinced that the citizens get any benefit from this in the same way that the Norwegian one does. What I. What I do wonder, though, is if. If North America is kind of behind the Eight ball on the whole public private equity thing.
- [117:23]
Luke Lafreniere
Well, there's been some talks about that from America, I think, recently. Yeah, Not Canada, I don't think, but America. I think getting some. Some public investment funds that raise money off of natural resources makes a lot of sense.
- [117:42]
Linus Sebastian
There are things that are kind of similar. Like, I know some of the teachers unions in Canada, for instance there. Yeah. Like, these pension funds are pretty big, and that's. That's effectively public. They're all. It's all public servants who work for these unions. Right. So it's kind of public funding. So, like, sort of. Except that it's private. Like, it's. It's clear that this is not just like a black and white thing. Is it private funding or is it. It public funding? There's a. There's kind of a spectrum here.
- [118:08]
Luke Lafreniere
But I know you literally just said it, but I'm going to clarify because it is so insane. And I'm not necessarily sure you meant this directly. Do you know about the. On the Ontario teachers fund having $250 billion in net assets?
- [118:24]
Linus Sebastian
I didn't know it was that much.
- [118:25]
Luke Lafreniere
But they, like, own an airport and stuff. Not even in Canada. Like, they're. They are wild getting teachers. Okay. Ontario Teachers Pension Plan Airport.
- [118:42]
Linus Sebastian
Apparently it's the new. Tano says it's the biggest pension fund in the world.
- [118:46]
Luke Lafreniere
It's crazy. I don't know what's. They've just been popping off.
- [118:54]
Linus Sebastian
Wow.
- [118:54]
Luke Lafreniere
All right, okay, so it's not an airport. It's many airports. The Ontario Teachers Investment Fund owns a substantial portfolio of infrastructure assets, including stakes in. Okay, fair enough. Birmingham Airport, Bristol Airport, Copenhagen Airport, and London City Airport, as well as international water and power utilities. Like, they are not chilling. They are going hard.
- [119:23]
Linus Sebastian
All right.
- [119:24]
Luke Lafreniere
Wild.
- [119:26]
Linus Sebastian
All good on them. And yeah, someone posted this. Seems like the Saudi is diversifying from oil, and that is absolutely what they're doing. They're taking that oil money and they're putting it into stuff that will continue to grow as the world continues to electrify 100%. Now, our next question here is how do you feel about the sale of more and more art games culture to investment companies?
- [119:53]
Luke Lafreniere
Yeah.
- [119:53]
Linus Sebastian
Deadmau5 just sold his catalog and label for 55 million. And it's like, on the one hand, like, get the bag. But on the other hand, Adam writes, I prefer companies investing in artists, not just, like, owning the art. And that's. That's a really good point. And what I'll say is that the, you know, from the time that we got an offer for our company and our ip. The only real way that that happens is with these large private equity or union funded funds. They're the only ones that can afford what this stuff is worth. So that's the only real option to sell. I actually had, I had another topic in here that was sort of to. Oh man, shoot, I forget. Well, I was going to get into it somehow that it's really hard for Canadian companies to not get acquired by US Companies and the same thing looks like it's starting to happen to Western companies. Oh yeah, no, I was going to talk about it in this topic. Yeah. The same thing seems to be happening to Western companies getting acquired by like Saudi wealth funds.
- [121:17]
Luke Lafreniere
And this is, this is often not hostile.
- [121:22]
Linus Sebastian
Yeah, like there's agreed upon.
- [121:24]
Luke Lafreniere
I don't know. I haven't done enough research. The whole world's been on fire. It's been hard to properly stay on top of everything. So I don't know if this is true or not. But as far as my understanding goes, there's substantial evidence that our, our new Prime Minister up here in Canada, when I think it was when Trump took office, took significant steps to move an investment firm down to the States for tax breaks and now he's running our country. Whether that happened or not, I don't fully know. Well, I know that it happened, but I don't know if he was actually involved because there's some people saying that he had left before, blah, blah, blah, blah. I don't know. But like this is, this is a thing. I mean the, the Canadian brain drain is something that has been known about for a long time. You, you grow up here, you go to school here, you get a good education, you go get a job in the States because you make way more money.
- [122:10]
Linus Sebastian
Yep.
- [122:11]
Luke Lafreniere
And it seems like even a strategy where people will do that and then move back because you make more money and the cost of living is lower. So you can save a bunch of money, then you save a bunch of money and move back to Canada for.
- [122:26]
Linus Sebastian
The health care and for the retirement. But it's not just people. It's like entire companies and entire like art catalogs now. And it sort of looks like it's starting to happen to the US now as well where the, where things are just getting acquired and stripped out. And you talked about Tencent basically owning a piece of like everything, like every gaming, every gaming ip, every gaming company. How do you, you know, how do you compete with that? I mean it's economic. Yeah, it's economic warfare at a certain Point.
- [123:02]
Luke Lafreniere
I mean I think it actually is. Yeah.
- [123:09]
Linus Sebastian
Good luck everybody. What I will say is there was no way that we were going to get the same offer for LMG from a Canadian investor or from a Canadian company that we got from a US based company. And these days I kind of doubt that we would get the same offer from a US company that we could get from a Saudi backed company or a Chinese backed company.
- [123:37]
Luke Lafreniere
There's a question, there's a question. What if a Saudi backed company offered 150?
- [123:45]
Linus Sebastian
So far I have not even traveled there and it's not that it hasn't come up.
- [123:52]
Luke Lafreniere
What if, what if you wouldn't have to travel there? It's no problem.
- [123:55]
Linus Sebastian
Well no, it's not about the travel. I'm saying so far we have had zero engagement.
- [124:00]
Luke Lafreniere
Got it.
- [124:03]
Linus Sebastian
I mean look, I'm not going to pretend that I'm some kind of paragon of perfection. I think every man has a place and I think that if you were to say anything other than that every man has a price, that's. I just don't think it's honest. With that said, with that said, there are, there are still good people. Corey is the name says and this is in floatplane chat. My dad is selling his architecture firm to like a dozen plus of his employees and is taking a huge loss compared to offers he received from bigger fish. I think that's super cool. I think I've told the story already on the show about my uncle's vet friend who owned a veterinary practice and could have sold to the like predatory that's been buying up all the vet practices and then hiking the prices in the lower mainland and instead sold to, to my friend who is, who is Running it now, Dr. Duff at Fraser Heights Animal Hospital. She is an amazing human being and deserved to get a good deal.
- [125:08]
Luke Lafreniere
Let's go.
- [125:08]
Linus Sebastian
She paid, she paid a fair price. It wasn't that she was asking for handouts but it was just that these equity backed companies can afford to pay three times, two or three times a fair price and then they're just playing a long.
- [125:23]
Luke Lafreniere
Yeah, so they're, they're not as worried about ebitda. They're worried about owning every single option you can go to.
- [125:29]
Linus Sebastian
Yes, exactly. Gremlin Injector says your channel isn't the kind of business a pension fund would want to deal with. Managing your mistake is calling it a channel. The channel is less than half of our revenue. Now we're going to have an updated version of how does LMG make money? Pretty quick here But I think you'll be surprised to discover that we are running a company over here. It's very interesting to see people's sort of perspective on what it is that LMG is. Exactly.
- [126:05]
Luke Lafreniere
Yeah.
- [126:08]
Linus Sebastian
We are absolutely the kind of thing that investors buy. We have just made the decision not to sell. The only difference with that one offer was that it was, it was to a group that we were willing to hear out because they seem not that crappy. And so it's the first time we ever actually got a number for the company because everyone else we've just kind of not even gotten that far with. Yeah. Rod Rosenberg says LMG is a tool company. We aren't not a tool company, I'll tell you that much for sure.
- [126:46]
Luke Lafreniere
Yeah. Offers are an interesting experience to go through even with zero intent to entertain. Because it's interesting to see like what people put value on. Like what? Like what? That's an interesting conversation. Do you want to talk about that? Like what, what were they largely placing value on when they were buying?
- [127:13]
Linus Sebastian
A lot of it was Creator Warehouse.
- [127:15]
Luke Lafreniere
Yeah.
- [127:16]
Linus Sebastian
A lot of it was the institutional knowledge on the content creation side as well. They wanted, they wanted our people in leadership positions at some of their other IPs, they wanted our IPs to continue ticking and they wanted our, our experience and our expertise diversifying our revenue from traditional creator revenue streams like Adsense and Patreon to building our own site like Floatplane. Although that, sorry, was a smaller part of it and especially expanding into Merch.
- [127:59]
Luke Lafreniere
But that, that experience is, is interesting even if you're not willing to entertain the offer. I don't know.
- [128:06]
Linus Sebastian
Oh definitely. Definitely seeing what other people value about your company. A hundred percent.
- [128:12]
Luke Lafreniere
And when it's a purchasing offer, it's one of the few times that it's like probably going to be legit.
- [128:20]
Linus Sebastian
Yeah. And not just based on. It's not a job offer for me.
- [128:23]
Luke Lafreniere
Yeah.
- [128:24]
Linus Sebastian
At that point like I think I had a two year clause that I had to stay with the company. But that was it. Two years.
- [128:29]
Luke Lafreniere
Yeah.
- [128:29]
Linus Sebastian
Which would be expired by now if we had taken it.
- [128:32]
Luke Lafreniere
Yeah.
- [128:33]
Linus Sebastian
Top Gear 1224 says, did you see the Mr. Beast business breakdown for the investment request? Yeah, yeah I did see that. I am very surprised that Jimmy is still in like hyper growth lose money mode. Not because like I don't think he's doing bigger and bigger things every time. And that's a big part of why you need to keep taking money and you keep losing money is because you kind of try to, to use the Capital, you have to do something even bigger and you know, you lose money as just sort of part of that process, but because I would think that he would at some point just go, okay, I'm worth a billion dollars at this point. Maybe this is big enough. But he doesn't seem to have a limit to what he wants to build over there. And it looks like Beast Games was an absolutely enormous success for his company. So I think he's shopping another two seasons right now at the rumored price is 150 million a season. And so good for him, which is.
- [129:36]
Luke Lafreniere
Really fantastic for new media, to be completely honest. 100%, like completely. Regardless of what you think of him or his company or anything like that, that is a very big step for new media because that's, that's a, there's a, there's a certain layer of like the big heads never took us seriously. Even though we can take as many of their views as we want, we.
- [130:01]
Linus Sebastian
Can take as much of their money.
- [130:02]
Luke Lafreniere
Money as they want, etc. But we were never taken seriously as actual professional people who can perform. And clearly it worked extremely well. So now it sounds like the, the rumblings that I'm seeing is that there's, there's a shift there now and they're looking actually specifically for content creators, I believe mostly specific, specifically YouTubers, but I'm sure content creators in general, I, I think, I bet you would be youtubers and streamers just because short format probably isn't gonna transfer.
- [130:38]
Linus Sebastian
YouTube is the closest thing to what they already do and it's the easiest to understand. Yeah, I mean in a lot of ways we are, we are set up not that differently from the other, the other creator companies. You know, you look at stuff like, dude, perfect. You look at stuff like Mr. Beast. We're just operating at a much smaller scale.
- [131:06]
Luke Lafreniere
Yeah. Oh yeah, yeah, for sure.
- [131:12]
Linus Sebastian
Top tier says yeah, his YouTube videos are still a loss. But Chocolate is making money. Chocolate, the chocolate made less than I anticipated. Like his net profit on it. It was on the lower side of what I would expect, but would have expected. But my approach to business building has always been sort of almost like anti growth. Like it's been very bootstrap. Make sure it's sustainable at every stage and that's not the way to achieve hyper growth. Whereas he is just like, he's like all in every time I think he's raised, what was it, like $450 million or something unbelievable like that. We've raised zero dollars.
- [131:57]
Luke Lafreniere
I'll give you a dollar. I'll raise you a dollar.
- [132:02]
Linus Sebastian
Is it really an investment, though, if previously your dollar. I gave you the dollar in the first place?
- [132:07]
Luke Lafreniere
Yeah, I'll give you, I'll give you back a dollar.
- [132:12]
Linus Sebastian
Don't tell the cra.
- [132:19]
Luke Lafreniere
What was I going to say? I had something to say. Oh, do you think a lot of that profit? Because, I mean, we've talked about this before. You think a lot of that less profit than you'd expect is just because he's like selling through places like Walmart and everybody's got to take their cut. So the distributor's taking their cut, Walmart's taking their cut, et cetera.
- [132:36]
Linus Sebastian
Yeah, we bring everything in house, which improves the sustainability of it from a business standpoint because we're vertically integrated. We control our costs directly, but massively reduces your growth. He hires a team and pays a lot of people and middle persons and pays for a lot of infrastructure that achieves scale but doesn't achieve necessarily the same profitability for his company. Man, being in Walmart is insane. Think about this. Hold on, hold on. How many Walmart stores in America? I was talking, I was talking to someone about this recently because it was a really interesting perspective change for me when I was, I was talking to someone about, like, this is back when I was at ncix, I think I was talking to not Taryn, but my other boss about like, you know, who cares if this brand is in, you know, Best Buy or they have their keyboard in Walmart? Like, the stuff's not selling. I go in there and like the shelf, like display socks and this and that. And he's like, okay, Linus, look, Walmart has at this time, according to the AI overview. So take, take it for what it is. Walmart has 4,615 stores in the United States, including their super centers, discount stores, and neighborhood markets. If you have your product in Walmart. Okay, so let's even take something as cheap as a chocolate bar. What's a feastable bar? Like two bucks, Something like that?
- [134:14]
Luke Lafreniere
I have no idea. Sure.
- [134:16]
Linus Sebastian
Okay, so if every one of those stores sold just one feastable bar per day, which I think is pretty reasonable.
- [134:26]
Luke Lafreniere
Someone in chat responded a little bit too quickly with $1.50.
- [134:31]
Linus Sebastian
$1.50. Okay, all right, well, someone else said $2.42.
- [134:35]
Luke Lafreniere
I have no idea.
- [134:37]
Linus Sebastian
Times point. You know, I'm going to, I'm going with $2. I'm trusting my instincts. Okay, so that's, that's 92.30. Okay. Times 365. I think it's Pretty. I think it's pretty fair to say that any Walmart would probably manage to sell one feastable bar a day. And if it didn't, it wouldn't be on the shelf. Okay. Times 365 means that if every Walmart location sold just one of these chocolate bars a day, it's a $3.3 million business. It is insane the scale at which companies like this operate, because as soon as you go, okay, yeah, they could probably sell 10 chocolate bars a day. Okay, now it's a $33 million business. Probably they could sell more than 10. So just being in Walmart, just being in Walmart, at Walmart, there's going to.
- [135:32]
Luke Lafreniere
Be specific locations where that 10 is a joke. There's going to be other locations where 10 might be a struggle. But like, yeah, yeah, you are almost.
- [135:40]
Linus Sebastian
Immediately, just by merit of having your product in Walmart stores, going to be a bigger company than LMG and creator, warehouse and floor plane. Like, assuming your product costs, let's say, you know, 10 bucks or 20 bucks. Obviously Walmart is taking a significant amount of that margin, but in terms of just the sheer amount of revenue, like, it is, dude, absolutely wild.
- [136:07]
Luke Lafreniere
Yeah.
- [136:18]
Linus Sebastian
So good luck. Yeah, good luck, Jimmy. I forget what topic we're even on right now.
- [136:23]
Luke Lafreniere
Who knows?
- [136:25]
Linus Sebastian
Who knows?
- [136:26]
Luke Lafreniere
That's not the point.
- [136:27]
Linus Sebastian
Irobot. Irobot, more like dye robot. Roomba maker Irobot claims that it is unclear if the company will be able to survive for the next 12 months. Amazon was set to take over the company for 1.7 billion, but pulled out after scrutiny from both US and European regulators. After Amazon abandoned the acquisition, the company cut more than 50% of its workforce, reduced inventory and reorganized, but still posted a net loss of $146 million in 2024 and ended the year with 134 million in cash. IRobot just launched eight new vacuums. This is exactly why I didn't want to buy that robot sweeper thing for the badminton center. Remember the one that had a subscription and didn't work at all without the app and the subscription? Because I don't care how well your company is doing today, if you can be a market leader and then all of a sudden be in a position where it's unclear if you'll be able to survive the next 12 months, it can happen to anyone. Our discussion question here is competitors seem to have overtaken Roomba in terms of price and innovation. How can big established players stay nimble to keep competitors from overtaking them? I mean, that's the innovator's dilemma, right? Is you don't want to cannibalize your own product line. So you don't. And then someone comes in and disrupts you.
- [138:11]
Luke Lafreniere
It's one of the things you got to listen to Steve Jobs on, man. Just do it.
- [138:15]
Linus Sebastian
There's. Yeah, there's almost. There's almost no companies that survive a hundred years, man. Like, that's. That's one of the reasons that I look at, like, cryogenic freezing, like, preservation, and I'm like, dude, you. You understand that you are basically just like, freezing your body in a freezer of a company that literally won't exist by the time any theoretical technology could exist to resurrect you anyway, That's a whole other thing.
- [138:46]
Luke Lafreniere
Yeah.
- [138:49]
Linus Sebastian
I guess that's about it, guys. I don't know. I only daily to Roomba for a very short period of time because it was at my old house that had a sunken living room, so it just wasn't that useful for me because they couldn't do stairs yet. Does a Roomba really work without the app, or are we just going to have millions and millions and millions of e waste vacuum robots out there that just don't do anything after this?
- [139:14]
Luke Lafreniere
I have no idea, man.
- [139:17]
Linus Sebastian
Anyone got a Roomba?
- [139:19]
Luke Lafreniere
Huh?
- [139:20]
Linus Sebastian
Anyone got a Roomba?
- [139:22]
Luke Lafreniere
I don't.
- [139:23]
Linus Sebastian
I'm just confused because, like, to me, it just doesn't seem like the market should be that big for these things.
- [139:30]
Luke Lafreniere
Harris83 says you can manually press the clean button and it will zombie around for a while and then return to base. It does, but it loses all its smart functionality. Well, at least it still does. Oh, no.
- [139:41]
Linus Sebastian
Pavin says you can control an iRobot locally, especially with Home Assistant. Okay, that's pretty cool. Yeah, the old ones definitely work without an app. Okay. I connect locally to my Home assistant. Okay. Quite a few people talking about Home Assistant in here, but can it. Yeah. What about all the mapping and stuff? Like, does any of that work?
- [140:14]
Luke Lafreniere
Yeah, like, if you're telling it to engage with the Internet, it's not. Not engaging with the Internet.
- [140:21]
Linus Sebastian
Yeah, getting new parts is going to be an issue, Weasel. With that said, I think the ecosystem for these iRobots out there is going to be big enough that it'll be in someone's best interest to produce replacement parts for them. No offline maps. Okay. Interesting. Yeah, Jake Micro center says all the parts I buy for my Roombas is from AliExpress already, anyway. Well, maybe you're part of the problem. You ever think of that? How will iRobot survive?
- [140:52]
Luke Lafreniere
Well, I mean that is why the American companies are dying is it's just all these, it's a bunch of Chinese companies just completely dominating robot vacuums as far as my understanding goes.
- [141:08]
Linus Sebastian
Oh yeah, 100%. I'm just, I'm just confused. Like we get a ton of like sponsor offers for robot vacuums and stuff and I'm just confused. Are that many people buying them?
- [141:19]
Luke Lafreniere
I don't see that many people with them.
- [141:23]
Linus Sebastian
Like I just. Every time, and it's been a while in, in fairness, but every time I tried to daily one, I just found that it was more work manually faffing about with it than it would be to. But I have a built in vac so maybe that's part of it. But it was more work to faff about with the robot than to just like grab the vacuum hose and, and do a quick vacuum.
- [141:46]
Luke Lafreniere
So what are you doing faffing about with the robot?
- [141:49]
Linus Sebastian
Like I want.
- [141:50]
Luke Lafreniere
I wanted one train. You don't have to do anything getting.
- [141:54]
Linus Sebastian
It unstuck on like the, the fluffy carpet. We had like, I don't know, just stuff like going and fixing the parts that it like doesn't reach.
- [142:05]
Luke Lafreniere
These days of living in apartments that don't even really have carpeted areas.
- [142:10]
Linus Sebastian
I mean. Yeah, fair enough. I mean the early ones didn't really like handle going under chairs and around chair legs and stuff very well. So there was just, there was a lot of manual cleaning left over afterward. It, it just didn't really save me much time. But like I said, it's been a while.
- [142:24]
Luke Lafreniere
The one that I won from the Christmas party has saved tons of time for us to be honest, because the whole birds are really messy thing. They're really messy, but they're also.
- [142:36]
Linus Sebastian
It's.
- [142:38]
Luke Lafreniere
Yeah, it's not an incredible like, it's not disgusting. It's just a lot of like little poofs of feather or dandruff or whatever else. Little budgie poops that are just like dots of very easy to vacuum up whatever. So it's, it's very easy for it to do. But if you don't deal with it, it's like kind of gross and builds up. But if you just have the vacuum just run by every day, it's like, that's fine.
- [143:05]
Linus Sebastian
Yep, fair enough.
- [143:07]
Luke Lafreniere
Yeah, I don't know. They're really expensive though. Like I, my theory on the whole robot vacuum sponsor thing was just that they were so profitable. Like I, I just looked up best vacuum cleaner and there's some Verge article and the top one is 40 off. Yeah it's 40% off. Still over a thousand dollars.
- [143:29]
Linus Sebastian
We have a whole video coming on that very soon just like listicles and affiliate revenue and how that whole big discounts how that whole thing thing works.
- [143:40]
Luke Lafreniere
I also think here let's see what rating says cuz doesn't I think ratings does robot vacuums and I I trust them but I don't trust the listicles robot vacuums. Okay. Did they also say Robo Rock is the best? Let's see. Yep. Okay fair enough. Cuz like I well they do for best vacuum for pet hair. The first one that came up was Roborock S8 Pro Ultra. I was thinking I see Roborock everywhere. Like is this are they just buying position or what?
- [144:16]
Linus Sebastian
Dude, dude, dude. I've got. This is huge. Sorry. I just saw this Microsoft Teases Copilot for Gaming I heard Dan laugh in the background.
- [144:30]
Dan
Yeah, you got me too.
- [144:34]
Linus Sebastian
I Yesterday, Microsoft announced that they are preparing to add AI to their gaming platforms in the form of Copilot for Gaming, which they call the Ultimate Gaming Sidekick. They then showed off some potential use cases like what to do Next in Minecraft, a recap of a player's previous progress in age of Empires 4, and bringing up a strategy guide to defeat a boss. This is a quote. Gaming is the only form of entertainment where you can get stuck. They seem to think their AI companion can help with that. Microsoft also showed off an admittedly pretty cool demo where Copilot for Gaming told a player what character to choose in Overwatch 2 and then offered advice after they died. Like, you pushed up too far. Consider falling back to your teammates. If the final product manages to actually do this, it could be interesting, but we'll have to wait to see how it actually performs in the real world. Video game publications were quick to ask the question, hey, how exactly is it getting its information and from where this is from Polygon voicing concerns that Microsoft has just sifted through all of the guides that they made and threw that info into an LLM. This is an Alex.
- [145:45]
Luke Lafreniere
It probably did.
- [145:47]
Linus Sebastian
In the official Xbox podcast about this, there were multiple times where the host said things like, my mom has been getting really into gaming, so I think so many times Copilot could just answer this question for her. It's like, bro, your mom probably is just using games as a way to connect with you and AI Assistant sounds like it would make it a lonelier experience for her. Yeah, yeah, thanks Alex.
- [146:10]
Luke Lafreniere
That's the whole reason I don't like this. So great. Perfect way to lay it out, Alex. I appreciate that.
- [146:17]
Linus Sebastian
Thanks for playing with me, mom. Actually, I don't want to explain this to you. Can you just ask the AI?
- [146:28]
Luke Lafreniere
This is. This is the same like, I don't know.
- [146:36]
Linus Sebastian
It's planned to be available to insiders this April. But our discussion question. Forget about what it can do here. What would you like a gaming AI companion to do.
- [146:50]
Luke Lafreniere
In single player games? Yes, it could be fun if there were more dynamic and lively AI buddies. I guess. Like something I thought about is if you were playing like a squad based combat game of some sort and sure.
- [147:18]
Linus Sebastian
You and some Rainbow six.
- [147:19]
Luke Lafreniere
Yeah. But you didn't have to do keyboard commands or whatever to like, you know, okay, I have to walk up to the door. Then I have to look at the left side of the door and be like, okay, you guys stack up here and then go. They went in the wrong order. So I need to get this guy out. Get this good. And you're sitting there doing all these keyboard commands in front of the door. And then finally. Okay, and then you press whatever button and then things don't go properly and it's really annoying. I find a lot of times when you have multi unit control in a single player games, things can get a little tedious. And if you could just.
- [147:49]
Linus Sebastian
You're talking about voice command built into games. This is Copilot.
- [147:53]
Luke Lafreniere
Yeah, I don't want that at all. I don't want Copilot even a little bit.
- [147:57]
Linus Sebastian
I think Mr. Wizard in floatplane chat has a good one.
- [148:01]
Luke Lafreniere
All right.
- [148:01]
Linus Sebastian
AI, that was a sick shot, bro. Want me to throw that clip on a timeline for you? That's pretty good. That's a use case.
- [148:10]
Luke Lafreniere
I probably want it to shut the hell up because if I just made a sick shot, I'm probably trying to make another one and I want to be able to listen. Don't talk to me right now. I am trying to focus. I just got my clip and I would like to try to get another shot. And then when I'm done, I can go bump a dump and get my clip myself because it just recorded the last 20 minutes because I have shadow play enabled. Because why not?
- [148:37]
Linus Sebastian
Okay, okay.
- [148:38]
Luke Lafreniere
I do not.
- [148:39]
Linus Sebastian
If anyone else has anything sick shot, bro in the chat.
- [148:46]
Luke Lafreniere
Hey, Xbox clip that.
- [148:51]
Linus Sebastian
Yeah, they've got nothing else, man.
- [148:53]
Luke Lafreniere
Yeah, because there isn't anything else because it's just there's this like. There's this whole concept of. And I don't remember who popularized it or whatever, but there's this whole concept that when, when a medium gets surpassed, its flaws will be romanticized and will be immediate, almost immediately emulated. So like, if somebody didn't like something about a certain medium, if somebody didn't like that there was very limited range in 8 bit music, people will go back and try to make it or film grain or something like that. We are currently living in an era where people are trying to find retro cameras because they like the feeling that the retro cameras are able to create. Yeah, when you lose this, you lose like perfection is in some ways a loss of character. Like you, you lose like these, these interesting tidbits of this thing that you made. So I, I, this is something that I, I constantly complain about. Like, I, I've talked about how, you know, when, when computer stuff was more volatile, when it was more difficult, when parts failed more often, when we had liquid caps and he had to try to fix that, and when things went wrong all the time and it was kind of hard, it was more interesting, it was more engaging, it was a better hobby in my opinion. Objectively, it's still cool, but in my opinion it was just better. SLI was like kind of junk, but it was interesting, it was fun, it was unique.
- [150:31]
Linus Sebastian
Maybe better is a strong word, but we could say more interesting.
- [150:34]
Luke Lafreniere
More interesting, more enjoyable to, to someone with my interests and my personality. Better. Maybe not better for everyone, but better for me. Yeah, you have this, this like marching forward where things get worse. Internet gets better. Land parties are almost killed because why bother?
- [150:51]
Linus Sebastian
We're gonna bring them back, Luke, because we're bringing them back.
- [150:54]
Luke Lafreniere
And, and that's, don't even worry, brothers. We are romanticizing the bad parts of something in the past that created something good that we find endearing, which is great. And I like that because we're bringing back LAN parties. LAN parties are dope, but LAN parties started to die when the Internet got too good. But I genuinely think people enjoy playing games together online less than just doing the lan party.
- [151:17]
Linus Sebastian
I 100% agree. And I think we have to find a. Sorry, I'll let you finish this bit, but I gotta talk to you about something after.
- [151:23]
Luke Lafreniere
No, I'm like, effectively done. It's just, this is, this just is fearful for me because I see this reducing online co op gameplay or playing with your friends and like, hey, I want to pick up this game. You've been playing it for a while. Do you want to, like, watch me play for a bit and help me get better? Or can we play together so I can learn from you? Or Whatever that's going to disappear when people are like, oh, just play with copilot for a while and then play with me. I don't want to carry you. And it's like, man, that sucks.
- [151:49]
Linus Sebastian
So I was playing Vampire Survivors last night and it occurred to me that there's like, there's one coffin I'm trying to find or something.
- [151:59]
Luke Lafreniere
Sure.
- [151:59]
Linus Sebastian
And like I couldn't like find it. I couldn't figure out how to get over to it. And I was like frustrated and when I was reading through this topic I was like, oh yeah, that could totally help me with that. Or it could advise me like which weapon to take because you know, I saw already earlier in this playthrough that its companion one for the upgrade is like one of the ones that. That's getting rolled. So I should take this one. So it could, you know, like there's things that it could observe. But like I've gone out of my way in that game to like not look anything up. So I've been able to kind of discover it as I go and I could look something up. And I just feel like, you know, for me the, the voyage of discovery is such a big part of.
- [152:42]
Luke Lafreniere
Yeah.
- [152:43]
Linus Sebastian
The joy of playing a game. But maybe, you know, maybe that's just old fashioned and maybe people are gonna.
- [152:50]
Luke Lafreniere
The like high quality joy which is I think another somewhat. I'm sure people. Oh yeah, you can make this argument for, for previous things as well. But I think this is somewhat of a modern problem where there's like a lot of low quality dopamine. Low quality joy that we kit. Yeah. Weak but constant. Right. Like it's that thing that I was just describing with the land party. Like you have to do a lot of work, especially if you're not just going to one. Like if you have to, if you're just doing one at your buddy's house or whatever, you have to, you know, bring tables over, bring chairs over, bring your whole computer over, do all these types of things, set everything up, network everything together. There's all these steps. It's work. But then the hit is strong. Right. Like it's, it's really cool. The heights are really high. You're gonna remember this stuff forever. If you're just co op playing games online or competitive playing games.
- [153:40]
Linus Sebastian
Oh yeah, dude. Like that, that Halo round, that was like one with a never forget, whatever ever forget it now. That was crazy. Yeah, that's crazy.
- [153:49]
Luke Lafreniere
Yeah, but it's like it's. And that exact same scenario could happen purely online and It'd be cool, but it's not the same.
- [153:59]
Linus Sebastian
Was there.
- [153:59]
Luke Lafreniere
It's not the same.
- [154:00]
Linus Sebastian
You lose that social element.
- [154:01]
Luke Lafreniere
You're. You're the microphone for the person who's screaming and cheering is getting auto gained down. You're not seeing the physical presence of people. I think it's like 70% of communication is body language. You're not seeing any of it. Like, it's just, it's not the same. You're diluting the experience. And I just. This, this type of stuff just, it's just dread for me. It's just like, damn, we're losing another thing. That's, that's all it feels like.
- [154:26]
Linus Sebastian
Okay, so here's something I want to figure out for Whalen, because one of the best experiences for me gaming wise is like sitting all together, having the teams sit together. You know what I mean? Yeah, I really like that kind of suck about it, you know, Mike bleed or, you know, whatever. Right. Like you can find issues with it. But like I wanted, I want to do like some team games where we literally go, okay, I know you have all your stuff set up over there. Too bad. Pick up your computer. The first eight people.
- [155:09]
Luke Lafreniere
Pick up your computer who have their.
- [155:10]
Linus Sebastian
Computers at these desks. At this desk and the first eight people that have their computers across from them. We're playing. Let's go. We're playing Halo ce or we're playing, you know, whatever. Right. We're playing Words on a game.
- [155:27]
Luke Lafreniere
Laptop and Steam deck users that just run over and win immediately.
- [155:33]
Linus Sebastian
Okay, whatever. We'll have to.
- [155:34]
Luke Lafreniere
I like the concept, though. I'm down with the general concept.
- [155:38]
Linus Sebastian
Yeah, Yeah. I want to not sell every seat. I want to have like a reserved area. So I don't care if anyone else cares about it. Because for me, it's like when someone, when, when you get someone, I want to be able to stand up and be like, got him. You know, Like, I want to be able to look them in the eye and vice versa. Like, I genuinely, I enjoy the trash talk element of LAN gaming. Whether it's directed at me or whether it's directed at other people. It adds so much energy to it. And so I want to find a way to have the small LAN experience where everybody's playing the same game. You're effectively all packed in a room playing together within a big land that has over 200 people at it. That's what I want to figure out.
- [156:24]
Luke Lafreniere
Yeah, I pax in its LAN prime, in my opinion. Not to, not to pun with the prime thing. They had tournament tables. So they would have. Generally it was five. So they'd have five computers and they did, they did back to back monitors. So you'd have one, one team on one side, the other team on the other side. So if you stood up, you're looking at the other team and they'd have a section that was like that or they would have a stage and it was five on one side, five on the other side. So it's all flat. But then there would be like the, the big screen that shows the like spectator view or the commentators or whatever would be in the middle and the teams on each side or you're off on the side and you're, you're just facing each other. And they used to do that a lot and it was sick and it was the. This is all a part of the. Like it matters, man. I swear it matters. I know, I know it's like weird and seems like romanticized and sensationalized, but I swear it matters when it's your team's turn and you and all your buddies that are singing in one part all have to stand up and like leave your kit and walk over to this other area. And now you know like that team's on the same computers as we are. They have the same peripherals as usual were sitting on a land connection. And it's like me and the boys or me and whoever, no excuses. And like just the walk over is such a psychological moment of like you and your friends you've been playing games with for years or whatever, effectively marching over to this other side to put it on the line against these other guys in some game you've probably never even played or haven't played in years. And these other guys across the, the table, who knows, maybe they have, maybe they haven't. But like you're so invested in that moment. It's so sick. Like I, I remember just so many of those because we would sign up for a ton of tournaments all the time just because that part of it was so much fun. I did a Minecraft tournament one time. I'm pretty sure I had never even played Minecraft before. I remember one of the, the tournament people was like, do you even know like what you're doing? And I was like, no. But I just, I was like, maybe.
- [158:37]
Linus Sebastian
I can figure it out.
- [158:38]
Luke Lafreniere
Yeah, maybe in that situation I was like, maybe I can figure it out. Oftentimes I could do pretty okay in games with no, like actual real practice. Someone said how, I don't remember yet, like get wheat or something. And do some other things. It was like you had to finish a certain list of tasks and I didn't come in last. But still, I don't know. There's these, like, steps involved. The. When you make things too easy, you some. You very often lose the. Lose the fun, you lose the quality. Dopamine. There's this whole concept of type 2 fun, and that I think is, like, almost too extreme. I think sometimes just. It can still be easy fun, but if you make it too easy, it's. You just lose all the quality.
- [159:25]
Linus Sebastian
Yeah, anything. Anything worth doing is work.
- [159:29]
Luke Lafreniere
Yeah, pretty much.
- [159:31]
Linus Sebastian
So I. Man, it's because I don't want to have, like. If we're doing the whole. The teams facing each other set up right. It's really hard to do team balance. It's like, okay, yeah, can you guys switch teams? And it involves, like, unplugging and moving.
- [159:51]
Luke Lafreniere
Not necessarily unplugging. So I hear what you're saying. And for our events, it might have to be unplugging. But at pax, they had computers there already. They had setups there already. That was Intel LAN Fest or whatever, though.
- [160:08]
Linus Sebastian
Yeah.
- [160:08]
Luke Lafreniere
So it might. Might not be super possible, but that was, that was pretty sick. I mean, I think there's some pretty cool ways. I don't know. I think there's some pretty cool ways to Spectacle, too.
- [160:22]
Linus Sebastian
We could also just build computers and just have standardized setups for it. That way we wouldn't have to deal with, like, connectivity issues or whatever else. It would just all already be set up for the games that we really want to do that for. I might just not even bring a computer. I might just hang out there the whole time.
- [160:42]
Luke Lafreniere
You're involved in every tournament game. It's like one of the players, no matter what.
- [160:46]
Linus Sebastian
Oh, it wouldn't be for tournaments. It would just be for, like, head to Head. Head to head games. It's not necessarily.
- [160:53]
Luke Lafreniere
Which is so sick, to be honest. Like, this is. That's the. Yeah. I don't know. It's practically the whole point of the land.
- [160:59]
Linus Sebastian
The lower the stakes, like, the harder I'll fight.
- [161:02]
Luke Lafreniere
It's almost more fun. Yeah. Who cares? Like, that's better. Yeah. So, yeah. A lot of the best land games are games that people don't play all the time. It's. Yeah, yeah. Like, I, I. There isn't a very many. There were some, but there weren't very many tournaments where they were games that I actually played that I had a ton of fun with. Yeah, it was mostly games that I didn't really play, but most other people didn't really play either.
- [161:26]
Linus Sebastian
So that means you gotta try to do that RTS FPS one for you.
- [161:31]
Luke Lafreniere
Yeah.
- [161:34]
Linus Sebastian
Like we gotta just. We gotta just do it. Gotta just like draw a line down the middle of the facility and go, okay, let's go.
- [161:42]
Luke Lafreniere
It's so old, but I would. I would love to do it. Yeah. Movie. Sweet.
- [161:49]
Linus Sebastian
All right, what else we got? Oh, LMG community member fixes corrupted wanvods. Yeah. User Boy 1321 posted on the LTT subreddit that they managed to save roughly 95% of those corrupted WAN shows between 2012 and 2015. To give some context, these files became corrupted due to YouTube retroactively re encoding older VODs across the platform. They've made a YouTube channel, LTT Archive, which has most of the recovered videos up right now. If you'd like to go watch Young Luke and linus. But recently, YouTube has also been testing DRM on their videos as an attempt to circumvent the downloading of YouTube videos. Meaning something like this might not be possible in the future. So far, the videos that have seen this happen have had this DRM forced upon those videos, including some videos that are licensed as creative. Comments. So our discussion question here is, are we going to sue the hell out of this guy for re uploading our content?
- [162:48]
Luke Lafreniere
Yeah.
- [162:50]
Linus Sebastian
No.
- [162:51]
Luke Lafreniere
No.
- [162:51]
Linus Sebastian
What we would do is we would just say, hey, if it's monetized, that's our content and, you know, we should probably get the monetization for it. However, in this case, this is not a decision that I would make on my own anymore. I want to make that very clear. But my inclination would be to just fully leave it alone just because it was transformative in a sense, in that it retransformed back to the original state after the platform that we were on ruined it. And it's not like we were going to make a ton of money from these anyway, so. Oh, they're in full play chat. Oh, hey, look at that. Okay. Sup, pug boy? But this is not a decision that I would make on my own. It is technically our ip and I don't know what. Our ip, not rip in pieces. It's technically our ip and I don't know what the implications are if we don't actively protect it. I know that with trademarks, for instance, that can be a problem. So I don't know. I'm not giving a final answer on that right now, but my inclination is to leave it alone. And then our other discussion question is if YouTube forces DRM, like forces encryption on media uploaded to the site, who owns it now that it's Uploaded? I think YouTube's been pretty clear for a long time that they own the rights for it. It will still be your content, but it will be basically binary. You know, you either upload it to the site and it's available on the site, or you delete it from the site and that's it. In a way, I could actually see rights holders preferring this system because then nobody else can theoretically download the content and re upload it somewhere else. So it does give you, the owner of that content, the ability to control where it is uploaded to. Theoretically. But I sincerely doubt that this encryption will remain unbroken for any meaningful amount of time.
- [165:00]
Luke Lafreniere
I found a one of the archives that was recovered or restored. I'll go with that.
- [165:06]
Linus Sebastian
Let's see. Oh, yeah, you and Rich both were sponsored by Razer Comms.
- [165:15]
Luke Lafreniere
Yeah, the sponsor by Razer Comms was a crazy throwback. Rich being on the channel was a bit of a throwback. He hasn't been on here a long time. And then we're both wearing like Starcraft fanboy shirts. And then look at the title.
- [165:31]
Linus Sebastian
I can't even see it in my preview. It's too small.
- [165:36]
Luke Lafreniere
It's probably late enough in the video. I can just say it. League of Legends porn.
- [165:39]
Linus Sebastian
Oh, my God. Oh, okay.
- [165:48]
Luke Lafreniere
Oh, man. Good times, good era. 2013. Good stuff.
- [165:56]
Linus Sebastian
Charge Nuclei says encryption can never be broken. No, but it can be leaked. It can be broken. And if it isn't broken, it can be leaked.
- [166:05]
Luke Lafreniere
Yeah.
- [166:05]
Linus Sebastian
Wait, what is this video that will have to be played back online. The keys will have to be owned by someone. And so, yeah, at some point, yeah.
- [166:19]
Luke Lafreniere
Encryption can never be broken.
- [166:22]
Linus Sebastian
I think they might have been slash s ing, but just didn't slash us. I just wanted to get out there that though.
- [166:29]
Luke Lafreniere
Okay, I see.
- [166:35]
Linus Sebastian
Why isn't my Chromecast working? So you hoarded Chromecast audios to sell on ebay since there's still no alternative on the market.
- [166:44]
Luke Lafreniere
Sorry, sorry. One second, one second, one second. Have you ever found this jacket?
- [166:50]
Linus Sebastian
No, I never found it again. I loved that jacket. No, I don't know what happened to it.
- [166:57]
Luke Lafreniere
Sorry, keep going.
- [166:59]
Linus Sebastian
So you hoarded Chromecast audios to sell on ebay, blah, blah, blah, et cetera. But is your investment compromised because suddenly Chromecast Gen 2 and Chromecast Audio devices weren't working this week. Even poor James from our team was affected. He had to chop his veggies in silence. Google became aware of the issue on Monday, identified the cause on Tuesday, and by today had started rolling out updates to devices. You can force the update by unplugging and plugging back in. Our discussion question is when will you children learn that owning things and storing locally is the only way? Yeah, it's just not the convenient way. Warner Brothers DVDs are apparently rotting, but Warner Bros has acknowledged the problem and is working with consumers to replace defective discs, although in some cases the affected titles are no longer in print or the rights have expired. And in those cases, Warner is offering to exchange the defective disks for other titles of like value. Discussion Question how would you like to trade that busted old copy of Casablanca for a shiny new Ernest Goes to Camp? That's about all I have to say about that. That's a rapid fire topic. And then our last major discussion topic I think is After Jeep's in Car Ads Glitch Indian company Mahindra shows ads on the dashboard screen Back in February, the Autopian reported on Jeep vehicles displaying a full screen ad for Flex Care Extended Care Premium plans appearing on some owners infotainment systems. They posted a couple of Reddit links from R Aholdesign with screenshots. Do you want to show the screenshots? Luke?
- [168:36]
Luke Lafreniere
Sure.
- [168:37]
Linus Sebastian
One of the posters noted that the message appears every time the car stops, even if they hit the OK button. Eventually, Stellantis responded to inquiries with this official statement. This was an in vehicle message designed to inform Jeep customers about Mopar extended vehicle care options. A temporary software glitch affected the ability to instantly opt out in a few isolated cases. Though instant opt out is the standard for all of our in vehicle messages. Our team had already identified and corrected the error and we are following up directly with the customer to ensure the matter is fully resolved. With that said, ads being shown on car touchscreens has been a concern for a while. Rushlane reported back in November of 2021 that Indian manufacturer Mahindra had an option for advertisements in their XUV700. And if you fast forward to present day, a Redditor SpartanCreedyt has posted a picture on RCarsIndia showing their infotainment with an advertisement for Scotch Brite with an Amazon Echo dot saying Alexa give me cleaning tips and the Scotch Brite logo beside it. Luke, do you want to show that Reddit post?
- [169:44]
Luke Lafreniere
Yeah.
- [169:47]
Linus Sebastian
I use Waze in my minivan where I don't have Android Auto and when I stop sometimes it pops up ads. It is ridiculously distracting because the human eye we're predators. The human Eye is attracted to sudden movement and they know that. So when they pop up a thing, it is absolutely designed to draw your eye. And while my phone on its little windshield mount is not that far off of where I'm supposed to be looking and it does pop up only when I am not moving, it absolutely draws my eyes away from the road. I hate it. I would like this to be illegal. This is one of those cases where.
- [170:36]
Luke Lafreniere
I think it should be.
- [170:37]
Linus Sebastian
This is one of those cases where being just militantly anti regulation is just actually stupid. Because if we have no regulation, this is what we get. Laws exist in many cases for a reason. I'm not saying that every regulation is good or that we have the right amount right now. I'm just saying that if you are just 100% opposed to any regulation, you've actually not thought about it enough.
- [171:15]
Luke Lafreniere
Yeah, I have. You know, I've not super knowledgeable about cars, but I've thought about it enough and I'm relatively certain it's just a battery and it'll be fine. But my car didn't start today.
- [171:32]
Linus Sebastian
Oh, no. Are you going to need a new car?
- [171:34]
Luke Lafreniere
No, I think it's just battery. I'm pretty sure it's just battery. I did. I was like, my gut reaction was like, no way. It's just better. I just put in a new battery. And then I thought about it. I was like, I put in a new battery at the start of COVID I did not just put in a new battery. It's been a while. I think it's. I think it's fine. It might be the battery.
- [171:52]
Dan
Let's check it after the show.
- [171:55]
Luke Lafreniere
Oh, it's not here.
- [171:56]
Dan
Oh, your car like did not start?
- [171:58]
Luke Lafreniere
Yeah.
- [171:59]
Dan
Oh, he didn't jump it and then came to work?
- [172:02]
Luke Lafreniere
Well, yeah, no one was there. Nobody was there. I had to take an Uber, join a ride home. I might be down. That would be sweet. Thank you. I'm also sick though, so I don't know. Maybe. I'll see.
- [172:15]
Dan
It's in the trunk.
- [172:16]
Luke Lafreniere
Yeah, cool. Perfect. I'm down.
- [172:18]
Linus Sebastian
I saw someone posting in chat about the. Apparently Google Timeline has been deleting people's histories even after agreeing to the new terms back in December. So I was checking mine. Mine's still here. I actually care an irrational amount about my Google Timeline. It's like, you know, a history of all the places that I've gone, which is a few places over the years and it has like all of my, like work trips and stuff. I'd be, I'd Be super not stoked if my timeline was deleted. I still, I still have it. But yeah, apparently some of them have been getting deleted. That's a bummer because it's like. It's kind of my like journal in a way. Andrew Candy says. Yep, my timeline history is completely gone. I'm pissed. Yeah, I don't. I don't blame you. Hessler says I. Same here. I started doing the self hosted. Yeah. Okay. Apparently you can use Google takeout to get it as an export and then import it back in. Oh, that is so annoying. How much. Oh man. How much work was it for them to hold on to this? Like really? That blows. Sort by most visited. What are the places I go to most? Shopping, then food and drink, then hotels, then attractions, then sports, then culture, then airports. Yeah, a lot of airports.
- [174:06]
Luke Lafreniere
Let's see. How do I even find this timeline? Yeah. Is it in Maps?
- [174:12]
Linus Sebastian
Oh, you go to Google Maps. Yep. Then you click on your profile picture.
- [174:17]
Luke Lafreniere
Okay.
- [174:17]
Linus Sebastian
And then you go to your timeline.
- [174:18]
Luke Lafreniere
There it is. I've done it before, I just didn't remember. Okay, where's your how do I find my ranking thing? Insights.
- [174:27]
Linus Sebastian
I think I had it under places.
- [174:30]
Luke Lafreniere
Places.
- [174:31]
Linus Sebastian
Yep.
- [174:33]
Luke Lafreniere
Oh, man.
- [174:35]
Linus Sebastian
I've apparently visited 185 cities. That's crazy.
- [174:39]
Luke Lafreniere
That is. That is pretty nuts.
- [174:43]
Linus Sebastian
Remember too though, that like, you know, San Jose and Santa Clara and Sunnyvale all count as cities.
- [174:54]
Luke Lafreniere
Yeah.
- [174:54]
Linus Sebastian
Surrey and Richmond and Vancouver are technically cities. Like, yeah, sure, whatever.
- [174:59]
Luke Lafreniere
Yeah. Mine is shopping, food and drink, airport, sports, culture, hotels, attractions. In that order.
- [175:06]
Linus Sebastian
A lot of airports. You're airport king then.
- [175:08]
Luke Lafreniere
Yeah.
- [175:11]
Linus Sebastian
When the heck was I ever in Calgary? That must have just been a layover seven years ago. Yeah, I've been to Calgary International Airport, a Shell gas station and White Spot. Oh, that's right. That was from the Banff workation. I have been to Calgary. All right. Why is Banff not on here? Well, okay, good try, everyone.
- [175:36]
Luke Lafreniere
You said invest in a jumper pack. Saved my butt several times. Honestly, man, I've thought about it like so many times, I just never pulled the trigger.
- [175:44]
Linus Sebastian
Which jumper pack?
- [175:47]
Luke Lafreniere
Yeah, you can jump yourself, basically.
- [175:50]
Linus Sebastian
Oh, oh, for the car? Yeah, I have one in my garage. I don't keep it in my car because I'm an idiot.
- [175:55]
Luke Lafreniere
Yeah, like I, it's. I'm clear when I, when I get a new battery this time, I will clearly just also get one of those. I like, I've been aware of it. I just. I don't know why I haven't pulled the trigger on that. I'll figure it out. There's clearly a few actual like, hey, I work in a shop. Car people. I've already gotten a good recommendation on a battery. Does someone have a good recommendation on a jumper pack? Can I just. I'm doing that thing from earlier, right? I'm not, I'm not. I like car stuff. I watch some car YouTube stuff, but I don't. I'm not highly knowledgeable of it. They won't. They cost money. Yes, but see this? It can also save money because I had to get an Uber to get to work today and that sucked. That was a. That was a. I did not like that expensive money. Whereas a jumper pack can bail me out of bad situations and save me money on Ubers.
- [176:53]
Linus Sebastian
Our final topic, Apple's at it again. They have delayed some of their AI powered personalized Siri features until later this year, some reports say indefinitely. And some people within Apple's AI division have reportedly said the features might get cancelled outright. Apple has polled the Bella Ramsey video advertising the feature and added a disclaimer to the iPhone product pages. People are mad and have accused Apple of false advertising. Our discussion question is how are you? I'm proud of you for making it this far in the wan show doc. I don't really have a discussion question. I just hope you're having fun. Love it. Thank you for that. Here's my question. Yes, we should be mad at Apple for advertising features that they are delivering late or won't deliver at all.
- [177:43]
Luke Lafreniere
Who? Tesla.
- [177:44]
Linus Sebastian
But when we think about the amount of money involved. Where is this outrage from the Tesla user base? Seriously though, Almost got him.
- [178:03]
Luke Lafreniere
Oh, I thought you were just hard ignoring me because you were like, no, I won't be baited. And then he just dove in.
- [178:10]
Linus Sebastian
Oh, like, wow. It is. It is mind blowing to me that it is not. Okay, is Tesla speedrunning going out of business right now?
- [178:24]
Luke Lafreniere
Maybe. It kind of seems like.
- [178:26]
Linus Sebastian
Kind of seems like it. Oh, dude, it's already lost all the gains since the election.
- [178:33]
Luke Lafreniere
Apparently today it's up almost 4%. Yeah, but the one month is down 29%.
- [178:42]
Linus Sebastian
Even a dead cat bounces if you throw it at the floor hard enough.
- [178:45]
Luke Lafreniere
I noticed this a few days ago. Okay, so the scales are nuts and like, I am not investment boy, so I'm sure people are gonna be like, me. You don't know stuff. And that's 100%. You're right, I don't. But look at this. One day, okay, it's up almost 4%. Five days y. It's down 1%. One month. It's down 29 and a half percent. Six months. It, it's, it's up 10% year to date. Down one year. Way up. Five years. Way up. That's kind of obvious, but it's just like, yeah. Whoa. The fact that it is up 10% from six months ago is interesting to me.
- [179:29]
Linus Sebastian
Did you, did you see the Tesla commercial on the front lawn of the White House?
- [179:33]
Luke Lafreniere
Sure did. The whole. It's all computer. It's all computer. It's just all computer.
- [179:40]
Linus Sebastian
Schraff2k says Linus gets full credit for being an early Elon Hayden. I don't hate him. What I don't like is that he lies and misleads. I don't like that. He obviously thinks that he should not have to answer difficult questions when it comes to the safety of the vehicles or when it comes to reporters investigating their quality or whatever the case may be. He thinks it is amusing to reply with a poop emoji to real questions that deserve answers. These are things that reveal his character. I don't respect those aspects of his character. I don't hate him. I literally bought a Model Y for my in laws because they wanted one. I have voted with my wallet that if the product is good enough, clearly I'll buy it. But what I have said for years and years and years is that he has revealed his character. His character is that he thinks he is beyond being questioned. His character is that he doesn't believe in the value of worker protections. His character is that he believes that he can just say something and not be held to account for it. That's his character. We wouldn't be friends, but I don't hate him. It's also, and I've said this on the show before, it's also clear that, no, I'm not going to repeat my previous statement, but what I'll say is this. I run one company and I have three children. That is very difficult to balance while being a quality father to my three children with one wife.
- [181:39]
Luke Lafreniere
What if you had two wife?
- [181:43]
Linus Sebastian
What if I had four times as many children? To imagine for a second that I am quality. Fathering 12 children across a multitude of wives is laughable because quality being a father is a ton of work. And that work, you can't just, like, do it intensely for a little bit and then like not do it for a while. It's constant. And all of the dads out there watching this are going to know that. And one of the things that I've also talked about is that I think as men, we are not always choosing our role models extremely wisely these days. And I think at the time, back then, I talked about Musk, I talked about Jobs, Steve Jobs, as people who achieved a lot of really great stuff, but who I do not admire for the way that they treated their partners, their baby mamas and their children. I do not think that those are admirable qualities. I don't think that. I don't think that makes you a good man. I think being a good man means taking care of your progeny and doing it properly.
- [182:58]
Luke Lafreniere
Yeah.
- [182:59]
Linus Sebastian
So I don't respect it.
- [183:00]
Luke Lafreniere
The great stuff side is legit, right? You can say he bought Tesla, he didn't invent it, but yeah, you could.
- [183:08]
Linus Sebastian
Say he's the world's best Diablo 4 player.
- [183:13]
Luke Lafreniere
In doing so, he popularized electric cars, which you can see is good or bad. The stuff with SpaceX is like, genuinely insane. I don't even know. The catch was like, one of the most wild things I've probably ever seen in my entire life. But then everything that l just said is also legit, so it sucks. One of the things that's been wild for me is the about face that a lot of people do, which is interesting, where there's like, dramatic changes. So you can, like, you know, watch someone or follow someone or read their stuff or whatever it is. I don't know, watch their ticky talkies. And then, you know, in five years, maybe they're a completely different person. It's like, damn, I don't know. But he's got to move on.
- [184:06]
Linus Sebastian
Who cares, man? There's so many examples of this tufanuk in YouTube chats, like, who names their son X? Someone who doesn't respect that. That will be an adult person someday who probably wants to have a name that isn't stupid and isn't a meme. You know, like treating kids like property that you could just like, meme on is, is so utterly disrespectful of another human life. One that you have a responsibility to care for and respect. Yeah, it's not cool. With that said, I'm not saying that.
- [184:48]
Luke Lafreniere
Just X. I think X is actually kind of cool.
- [184:51]
Linus Sebastian
Oh, there's another one that, like, stupider one.
- [184:54]
Luke Lafreniere
Archangel, something, something, something, whatever. Which is wild. Kind of sick.
- [185:00]
Linus Sebastian
Laughing Canadian says, entirely unrelated to Musk and his family system. I think that's one way of putting it. I dislike couples that have like eight plus kids. There's zero chance that's healthy. You literally cannot raise that many kids properly. Actually, I don't necessarily believe that's true. I was one of five. And when you're all under one roof, by the time you have an eighth child, your oldest is, like, probably at least 15 and is contributing in a major way. And I actually think that a hugely beneficial part of my upbringing experience was being old enough to remember babies. A huge part of being able to be an effective parent is that I effectively did some of it. When I was younger, I cared for small children, and obviously there weren't eight of us, but we didn't quite need a van, but we sure as heck filled a minivan. And there were great, great things that came from the social interactions of living with people. Not just having a sibling and, like, living with your parents, but having to get along and having to share and having to, you know, fight for things and learning when to yield. These were all really important aspects of growing up that I think are actually lost in very small families. To be clear, I'm not saying having a small family is a wrong choice either. I'm just saying that condemning someone for having a very large family because you don't think they can raise the kids properly I think overlooks how much raising children will do of each other as long as there are sufficient checks and balances in place from the adult mentors and role models. I'm not talking. Going full Lord of the Flies here. Just saying. Just saying. Try not to. Try not to judge. Try not to judge.
- [187:05]
Luke Lafreniere
Yeah.
- [187:05]
Linus Sebastian
Unless you know the exact situation.
- [187:08]
Luke Lafreniere
Yeah. Moving on.
- [187:14]
Linus Sebastian
Yeah, I think that's it for topics.
- [187:18]
Luke Lafreniere
I was gonna say it's 10. Are we moving on to merch messages?
- [187:22]
Linus Sebastian
Yeah, I guess so. Is it after dark time?
- [187:25]
Luke Lafreniere
I think so.
- [187:25]
Dan
I think it's after dark time. Oh, yeah, that one.
- [187:33]
Linus Sebastian
Oh, yeah. I guess my background doesn't change. Not so dark.
- [187:40]
Dan
There we go. All right. Yeah. I got a few for you here. Hey, Dll, I know Linus has the bike paint project, Dan has the Hayabusa project, but what is Luke's ongoing side project?
- [187:57]
Linus Sebastian
Float plane in the lab.
- [187:58]
Luke Lafreniere
Yeah. His second job, to be honest. Yeah. Outside of that, I have enough time to hopefully not be hated by my partner, take care of birds, or at least a little bit.
- [188:17]
Linus Sebastian
I mean, if she forgets who you are and what you look like and what you sound like, she can't really.
- [188:20]
Luke Lafreniere
Hate you, and try to take care of my physical self as much as possible. But, yeah. I mean, lately, it's been a lot of work. We're hiring. Hey, we're hiring. Help me. Help me. Help, please. Yeah. That's about it.
- [188:44]
Dan
Hey, Wan show. With the new Zeus GPU being floated, what are your thoughts on how this will shake up the GPU market if it successfully launches?
- [188:53]
Linus Sebastian
I'll believe it when I see it. Yeah, I'm not putting a lot of stock in those claims. I mean, we saw, what's it, more Threads? The Chinese GPU company that managed to build a functioning gpu, which was more than I expected. But, like, come on, we all. I think it's pretty clear from their efforts and from just what we know, because we just know that that building a GPU and hardware is not the hard part. Look at what intel did with the arc. They built the ARC gpu. There it is. Because it's an ARC gpu. But even with Intel's literal decades of experience on the software side, it was still an enormous challenge to get that thing over the line and get it performing half decent. So, yeah, sure, whatever. Good luck, guys.
- [189:46]
Dan
Hi, Dan, Luke and Linus. Question for Linus. I have the original carabiners on my backpack.
- [189:51]
Linus Sebastian
It's not really a question.
- [189:53]
Dan
Wait for Linus. Don't interrupt. Should I go ahead and replace them with. Even though they're okay?
- [190:01]
Linus Sebastian
It's up to you, man. You could totally replace them or you could totally not. I replaced the one on mine that broke, so my backpack looks stupid. I can't say I would recommend that, but I was going to say it's a free country, but I have no idea where you're from, but do whatever you want. It's your backpack.
- [190:20]
Luke Lafreniere
I, I didn't talk about this a lot because I didn't want to dissuade people from doing it, but I think it's been long enough now that I can talk about it. I, I use the backpack all the time, and I had never had any problems with any of my carabiners until you're coming back from Disney and one of the TSA ladies, like, cranked one of the carabiners for, for no reason. I, I, I don't know. Maybe she knew. No, there's no way. But just. And like, shoved her thumb through it and I was like, what? And I, I kind of, like, grabbed it and pushed it back and it's fine, luckily, but I was, like, certain it was just gonna get snapped right off. And I tested it a bunch of times. It seems okay, but I think I was lucky more than anything. It was originally, like, completely past the post. Like, it was, it was out. I was just, it was probably one or two millimeters further and it would have been permanently broken. But yeah, I. Outside of that close call, they've all been fine.
- [191:27]
Dan
Hi Linus. I recently cleared FF7 for the first time and boy, it is a lot of busted exploits. Do you have a particular exploit or trick for an older Final Fantasy or other game you like, like to take advantage of?
- [191:42]
Linus Sebastian
I don't actually love taking advantage of exploits because I like to. I like to play the game kind of the way that the. I use the term good faith a lot, but it's kind of like. It kind of is like a. A catch all term for how I like to engage with. With things and how I like to be engaged with. So I like to play a game at least the first time around. You know, obviously it's fun to find broken builds or whatever, right? But I like to play a game the way that the developer kind of intended for it to be played through what they thought was supposed to be fun. So I tend to. I tend to try to not look up too much. I tend to rely only on like the first party resources that I was supposed to have if I bought the game and I got the manual or I read through the store page and played the tutorial or whatever else. And I try not to look too hard for things that are completely broken. But if there was one that I would say would be kind of fun to exploit broken stuff in, I guess it would probably be like Final Fantasy Tactics because it can be pretty fun to build God characters that can't be hit and stuff like that. But it also takes the challenge out. A big part of gaming for me is feeling like I overcame a challenge. Otherwise what am I even doing here? I don't mind it as much in Tape to Tape. Luke, I was telling you I'm saving a run that I'm in the middle of for the next time we're. We can play together because wow, is it ever broken. But what's cool about that is it's just like this self contained one hour run. Whereas like if I'm breaking a game like Final Fantasy Tactics, that's like you know, 30 plus hours to do a playthrough. I'm just. I'm removing the fun challenge that will be the final boss. And why am I even playing the rest of it? I should just watch the cutscenes on YouTube, right? Like it just. It just feels kind of pointless to me. But I'm not, you know, if someone else is. If someone else enjoys a different element of that game that's totally, totally for them, but that it's not what I Enjoy.
- [194:12]
Dan
Yeah, hi DLL. I apparently made a mistake ordering a 4x24 gigabyte kit of 8000 mega transfer ram on my new AM5 board as it can only reach 5600 mega transfers per second. Stable. What's the deal with this generation? Does everyone just buy two?
- [194:31]
Linus Sebastian
Yeah, everyone just buys two sticks. You're lucky to get 56. That's pretty good.
- [194:38]
Dan
My preschool age daughter is getting into gaming and just beat Astrobot. Do you have any recommendations for games that games like that for her to try next that involve problem solving?
- [194:49]
Linus Sebastian
I had never even heard of Astrobot.
- [194:52]
Dan
It's like the PS5 of like a launch title.
- [194:57]
Luke Lafreniere
You're like playing the PlayStation mascot. I think it's like Mac, but people love it. It's very highly rated.
- [195:04]
Linus Sebastian
Oh, interesting. Wow. Five, five stars.
- [195:07]
Luke Lafreniere
I think it won like game of the year or something.
- [195:11]
Linus Sebastian
I have no idea. I mean if must play if they're playing like really adult suitable games. I don't mean like an adult game, I just mean a game that like adults would enjoy. Well then they could play like, like any fun platformer game. I actually enjoyed the crap out of Lucky's Tale even though it was just like supposed to be like a crappy showcase title. I thought you can also give her some retro games, you know, some old fashioned Super Mario World. My kids loved it in spite of how old it was.
- [195:44]
Luke Lafreniere
Looking at the game, I've never played Astrobot and maybe I'm just totally wrong here, but looking at some of the gameplay, like they might like some of the LEGO games.
- [195:56]
Linus Sebastian
I just find them, man, are they ever unchallenging. That's fine. Lego is apparently bringing their game development in house. Even if it like hurts profit. I guess they want to control the quality a little bit. I've only tried a couple of them, but they seemed very mediocre.
- [196:13]
Luke Lafreniere
Yeah, I tried one and was like, I guess I'm not interested in any of of these. Which if it's like a little kid game, sure, maybe I guess. But so was Super Mario Bros. So I don't know. Doesn't have to be that way.
- [196:29]
Dan
And last one I got for you here. Hey Riley, how you doing? Hi lld. I just bought a physical copy of Baldur's gate for three from Japan. Mr. Luke, as a man of culture yourself, do you think the censorship will heavily affect the experience with the game? Will I be missing out?
- [196:46]
Luke Lafreniere
Sorry, which game?
- [196:48]
Dan
Baldur's Gate 3.
- [196:49]
Linus Sebastian
Baldur's Gate 3.
- [196:50]
Luke Lafreniere
The censorship. Oh.
- [196:52]
Dan
As a man of culture no.
- [196:57]
Linus Sebastian
How censored is the game in Japan? It's always fun to me. Japan's or funny to me. Japan's like, sort of schizophrenic approach to adult content. Like, one day they are.
- [197:10]
Luke Lafreniere
You just gotta put a little line over it.
- [197:13]
Linus Sebastian
Yeah. And then the next day it's just like, yeah, this is the most outlandish like, weirdo stuff ever. And it's. I, man, I don't. I don't know, man.
- [197:21]
Luke Lafreniere
Are they just censoring like. Like nudie scenes or are they doing, like, gore and violence stuff? I doubt gore and violence. Right.
- [197:30]
Dan
It's probably just nude.
- [197:31]
Luke Lafreniere
Yeah. Then, I don't know. Whatever. It's fine.
- [197:35]
Linus Sebastian
Japan.
- [197:36]
Luke Lafreniere
I mean, there's a. There's a setting in the game already to do that. And, like, I'm sure a lot of people do that.
- [197:43]
Dan
It's probably just, like, checked on by default.
- [197:46]
Luke Lafreniere
People streamed the heck out of that game. They probably had that stuff turned off.
- [197:51]
Linus Sebastian
Yeah.
- [197:54]
Luke Lafreniere
Yeah, yeah, It's. It's fine. I'll enjoy it. It's a fantastic game.
- [197:59]
Linus Sebastian
Was that it for wan show today? Yeah. All right, well, then I guess we'll see you again next week. Same bad time, same bad channel.
- [198:07]
Luke Lafreniere
Bye. Someone linked an escapist magazine article called we were Spartans that was published in 2011 that is like, perfectly encapsulates how online gaming co plans and why that's bad. Oh, it's a good read.
- [198:28]
Linus Sebastian
Where is this? Okay, maybe text it to me. I can't see it.
- [198:32]
Luke Lafreniere
Okay.
- [198:36]
Linus Sebastian
By.