Discord Threw It All Away - WAN Show February 13, 2026

Summary

The WAN Show: Discord Threw It All Away

Episode: February 13, 2026
Podcast: The WAN Show (Linus Tech Tips)
Hosts: Linus Sebastian, Luke Lafreniere
Date: February 14, 2026

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Overview

This episode dives deep into pressing privacy topics in the tech industry, mainly focusing on Discord’s controversial move to require facial scans for age verification and the broader implications for internet privacy and user trust. Linus and Luke also discuss Amazon Ring’s new neighborhood surveillance feature, news in gaming and software, Mr. Beast’s foray into fintech, pro-consumer victories, and various quirky tech stories.

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Key Topics & Insights

1. Discord’s Global Age Verification Rollout

[00:37 – 29:11]

What’s Happening

• Discord will require global users to verify their age, starting in March, just five months after a massive breach at a third-party vendor that exposed 70,000 user IDs.
• Default accounts will be “teen-appropriate” unless verified as adults.

Verification Methods

• For most adults, no verification needed—Discord uses “age inference” based on account tenure, device, behavior, etc.
• If age can't be inferred, users must provide:
  • Video selfie for facial age estimation (claimed to be on-device only).
  • OR scan of government ID and a selfie.

Privacy Nightmare & Backlash

• Discord previously stated images would be “deleted immediately,” but now policies are unclear, and partners seem to have shifted (from Kid to Persona, a company with ties to Palantir).
  • Luke: "Persona is a corporate partner of Palantir, a spying and surveillance company..." [10:39]
• Community trust is low, with many users threatening to cancel Nitro subscriptions and speculating about data security and further breaches.

Broader Impact and User Frustration

• International rollout criticized—Discord wasn’t required to go global but did, likely anticipating regulatory trends.

• Real-name policies and mandatory ID verification raise severe privacy, safety, and anonymity concerns, especially for sensitive groups.

  • Redditor (quoted by Linus):
    “Am I really going to associate my legal name with the PTSD groups that I'm part of?... Do you know how sickening it would be to the hundreds of members there to have to put our legal names on experiences that scarred us?" [13:18]

Alternatives & Structural Entrenchment

• Options like TeamSpeak, Matrix, and Steam Chat discussed as alternatives.
• Network effects and entrenched Discord integrations/bots make mass migration “really hard.”
• Luke:
  “...If we can just normalize there being alternatives, I think that would be awesome. This is a slow war, not a fast one, I think.” [28:06]

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2. Modern Standby on Windows: Battery Drain Update

[29:14 – 41:06]

• Microsoft claims Windows 11 should finally fix “Modern Standby” issues that caused laptops to wake up and drain batteries or overheat in bags.
• LTT Labs plans to test, but skepticism remains (“Has anyone not employed by Microsoft confirmed this is fixed?”).
• MacBooks and Linux laptops are highlighted as not suffering from this issue, reinforcing a Linux vs. Windows debate.

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3. Amazon Ring’s New ‘Search Party’ Feature & Surveillance Fallout

[43:06 – 57:46]

• Ring’s Super Bowl ad promotes a “Search Party” tool letting anyone use neighborhood cameras to find lost pets, regardless of being a Ring owner.
• Came after a now-cancelled partnership with Flock Safety, a notorious surveillance firm.
  • Linus:
    “...The last two companies ... I could have any interest in administering this are going to be Amazon and Flock. Dude, Flock ... could never earn my trust back. The way that they have handled security and data privacy.” [45:55]
• Linus draws a provocative analogy to stress that a company’s choice of partners is itself revealing.
• Ring/ Amazon’s track record with privacy (e.g., FTC charges for storing kids' Alexa data) further erodes public trust.
• Recommendation: Self-host with Ubiquiti, but options are pricier.

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4. YouTube React Videos, DMCA, and Lawsuits

[73:35 – 76:44]

• A new lawsuit questions not fair use, but HOW react content is sourced (e.g., using YouTube downloaders).
• Legal challenge: How can anyone prove what method was used (screen capture vs. downloader)?
  • Linus: “How would you prove how you got it?” [74:58]
• Fear this could have chilling effects on the entire react content genre.

---

5. Quebec’s Pro-Consumer Warranty Law

[76:44 – 82:50]

• Quebec mandates minimum 3-year warranties (up to 6 for big appliances), applies to resold items, and outlaws “planned obsolescence” tactics.
• Linus praises the move and says global adoption would be amazing:
  • “The answer is not for Quebec to back down. The answer is for everyone else to step up.” [82:43]

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6. Sponsor Integrity and the Anker/Eufy Dilemma

[85:29 – 97:36]

• Linus Media Group dropped Anker/Eufy as a sponsor over privacy scandals, despite them being a top sponsor.
• Now considering re-engaging—but only with Anker/Soundcore lines (not Eufy).
  • Audience and hosts weigh the question: “How do we know they’ve changed?”
  • Discussion ends with “needs more digging; maybe revisit in 2027.”

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7. Google’s ‘Result Removal’ for Explicit Content

[100:42 – 102:13]

• Tool lets users request takedowns of non-consensual explicit images from search results.
• Must upload your own data to Google for monitoring; only controls search display, not deletion from the internet.

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8. Tech Business & Culture Bits

• Alphabet/Google Issues 100-year Bonds [103:48 – 112:40]
  • Raises eyebrows: How is a “century bond” not crazy risky?
• Sony Exits Blu-Ray Recorder Market [112:43 – 113:51]
  • Blu-ray writing hardware finally disappearing; the age of optical media fading.
• Noctua’s 20 Years of Mounting Kit Support [119:27 – 122:06]
  • Celebrated as a rare, pro-consumer move: free upgrade kits keep coolers working for decades.
  • “This is so based. This is so pro-consumer that I think it’s sexy wood.” - Linus [119:44]

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9. Fun, Business, and Offbeat Moments

• LTT Lawsuit Hoodie Launch [57:46 – 63:18]
  • Inspired by years of ignored collaboration emails; now a partnership with dBrand.
• Publishing to Pornhub? [126:26 – 132:25]
  • Thread discusses uploading LTT content to other platforms with much higher CPMs—mostly as a tongue-in-cheek conversation full of safe-for-work innuendoes.
  • “We were already on OnlyFans.” - Luke [130:18]
• Mr. Beast Buys a Banking App [142:13 – 147:19]
  • Generally, the consensus: probably not a rugpull, but the crew would rather do their banking with "boring" traditional banks.
• Luke’s Potato Obsession [53:51 – 55:54]
  • An unexpectedly long, enthusiastic tangent about the virtues of various potato preparations.
    • “Potatoes just win. Potatoes are great.” - Linus [54:33]

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Notable Quotes & Moments

On Discord’s Age Verification:

• Linus: “...the craziest part of this is they didn’t have to do this. ...there was no real reason other than maintaining two forks.” [05:14]
• Luke: “Persona is a corporate partner of Palantir, a spying and surveillance company...” [10:39]
• Redditor quoted by Linus: “Am I really going to associate my legal name with the PTSD groups that I'm part of?” [13:18]

On Privacy and Partnerships:

• Linus: “Amazon and Flock ... could never earn my trust back.” [45:55]
• Linus: “If Linus Media Group chose to partner with Flock...and then I said, ‘Oh, wow. Yeah, we’re not doing that anymore.’ ...Doesn’t that just tell us a fair bit?” [48:50]

On Tech Company Monetization:

• “When you look at the mass of what Discord is and then you, you try to tell me Nitro is fully funding that platform. Sorry, bro, there’s no way.” - Luke [19:36]

On Cultural Change & Alternatives:

• “If we can just normalize there being alternatives, even if we can’t take a real, actual sizable chunk out. ...that alone...would be a huge win.” - Luke [28:06]

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Timestamps for Key Segments

• Discord Age Verification and Privacy:
  [00:37 – 29:11]
• Modern Standby & Battery Drains:
  [29:14 – 41:06]
• Amazon Ring Neighborhood Surveillance:
  [43:06 – 57:46]
• Discord Alternatives and Entrenchment:
  [15:36 – 28:06]
• Legal Risks for React Videos on YouTube:
  [73:35 – 76:44]
• Quebec’s Pro-Consumer Warranty Law:
  [76:44 – 82:50]
• Anker/Eufy Sponsor Dilemma:
  [85:29 – 97:36]
• Google Explicit Content Removal:
  [100:42 – 102:13]
• Alphabet’s 100-year Bonds:
  [103:48 – 112:40]
• Mr. Beast Banking App:
  [142:13 – 147:19]
• Lighthearted Potato Tangent:
  [53:51 – 55:54]

---

Overall Tone & Takeaways

The episode strikes a critical, sometimes darkly comedic tone, with Linus and Luke pulling no punches on privacy, regulatory overreach, and product user-hostility—while also delivering appreciation for organizations like Noctua and pro-consumer legislation. There’s a recurring theme of skepticism about major platforms’ motives and a constant push for open alternatives and user empowerment.

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For a full, unfiltered sense of the episode’s lively tech banter, wit, and audience engagement, this summary captures the crux of the critical discussions—especially essential for listeners concerned about tech privacy, user rights, and the evolving digital landscape.

Transcript

[Linus Sebastian]

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[Linus Sebastian]

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[Dan]

All right, there you go.

[Linus Sebastian]

What's up, everyone? Welcome to the WAN Show. We got a great show for you guys this week. Of course, the big news is Discord requiring facial scans for age verification. Oh, man. You.

[Dan]

You can.

[Linus Sebastian]

You can tell how passionate the writing team is about a particular topic when you see how many notes they created for it. Jordan is like, I am going to very thoroughly talk about why this is very upsetting. Yeah, yeah, we're going to be getting into that also. Oh, man. We had the other huge privacy nightmare. Did anyone watch Rings? A Super bowl ad? Because I did.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah. Not looking good. Okay, what else we got? Luke? Finally some good news. You got the good news, right?

[Luke Lafreniere]

Modern standby won't drain your battery anymore. Maybe. Maybe. Possibly. And yes, Slacks is already mobilizing to try to look into it. Because part of the question here is, has anyone else verified this? So we're going to try. It's. It's going to be difficult to conclusively verify, but we're going to try also. Let's see.

[Linus Sebastian]

I have a machine that definitely is very often on in my backpack, so it's a chronic offender. So maybe we could. Maybe we could work together.

[Luke Lafreniere]

In other great news, Mr. Beast just bought a banking app.

[Linus Sebastian]

You picked that?

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah. What could go wrong?

[Linus Sebastian]

Just roll the intro. The show is brought to you today by Razer, Squarespace, Zero Bounce, and Up, along with our rap partner, dBrand, our laptop partner, Razer, and our chair partner, Razer. Good Lord. It's gonna be called the Razer show at some point. With all the sponsorship money that Razer's throwing at the WAN Show, I. It's. It's. I mean, thanks, Razer, first of all. But also, it's a little confusing because I think they went 10 years without doing anything with us, so. Okay, they're back. They're back hard. All right, why don't we. Why don't we jump right into first topic today, which is, of course, the big news from Discord. Discord announced that it will start rolling out age verification globally beginning In March, just five months after a breach from a third party age verification vendor exposed the government IDs of around 70,000 Discord users. I don't think the timing for this could be a lot worse. Well, no, actually it could have been worse. It could have been just four months after a breach, but I think you understand what I mean. The platform is going to automatically configure all user accounts for what they're calling a teen appropriate experience unless those users are proven to be adults. Now it is worth noting that apparently not everyone is going to have to submit proof of being an adult. But the way that they get, you know, non user submitted proof of your adulthood is not going to make you a lot happier than submitting the proof. All right, first let's talk about what happens with users that are not verified adults. They will not be able to access age restricted servers or channels. They won't be able to speak on stage channels. They will see content filters for anything Discord decides is graphic or sensitive. They will see warnings about friend requests from users they might not know. I mean, honestly, that's fine. And will have DMs from unfamiliar users go into a separate inbox. Frankly, those last two should just be platform wide. I'll die on that hill. DMs from friends and interactions on non age restricted servers will operate as they always have. Users with pre existing subscriptions to restricted servers will have those. Oh, this is wild. Will have those servers content obfuscated until they pass age verification checks. The craziest part of this, Luke and I feel like, okay, part of me wanted to wait until the end of going through the information before talking about this, but I feel like I just have to jump in right now. The craziest part of this is they didn't have to do this. There were some jurisdictions that are pushing for stronger child safety measures that are, that are putting pressure on, on social media platforms including Discord, to put these kinds of checks in place. But then they didn't have to roll it out globally. And we've seen this before, sometimes it's a huge benefit to, to a user base. You know, when Apple gets a bunch of pressure from the EU to use USB type C, guess what? We get USB C iPhones everywhere. So sometimes this works out really great. But this is software. So there was no real reason other than maintaining two forks, I guess that they had to do this. Like, do you have any thoughts on this as someone who, you know, has led a couple of software teams now currently?

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, I mean I wouldn't want to touch this at all ever. And like they talk about how they. I think this is maybe in the notes somewhere. Again, we haven't gone through all of it yet, but they talk about how they're going to delete it immediately. But then they also talk about.

[Linus Sebastian]

We'll get into that. I just mean, like, why would they maintain the two forks? Can you give me a reason why they would roll this out globally when a lot of the world is not putting any pressure on them to do this?

[Luke Lafreniere]

Maintaining the two forks can be really annoying. And I think they might see the writing on the wall a little bit that a lot of different countries are moving in this direction.

[Linus Sebastian]

I mean, that's fair. That's. That's fair. The momentum is really building. I can't believe how quickly we went from. Everyone kind of agrees that Adrian Social.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Is just BS anyways.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh no, I was going somewhere else. Like social. Social media is like really bad for kids.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Oh yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

And then like sometimes legislation can seem to move pretty quickly. Like there are, you know, minor social.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Media bans right now. It's moving pretty fast.

[Linus Sebastian]

Moved pretty fast. It really did. Yeah. It took forever to get anywhere. And then it was like, okay, we're doing something. Okay, got it. All right, let's keep talking. Speaking to the Verge, Discord's global head of Product policy stated that, and this is a quote, for most adults, age verification won't be required. Remember how I said though that you weren't necessarily going to like how they were doing that? She went on to explain that Discord's age inference model uses account information such as tenure, device and activity data and high level patterns to attempt to determine the the user's age range. So I guess I'm safe because I still use GIFs, which are apparently boomer meta.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Now you call them that, which means you're obviously ancient, so you're good. You're in the clear for sure.

[Linus Sebastian]

If the system is unable to infer a user's age, the user will be prompted to take a video selfie from for facial age estimation. Discord claims the video won't leave your device, but as many commenters noted, that does not mean that your biometric data is safe. Alternatively, you can submit a scan of government issued ID along with a selfie as definitive proof of age. Age will be apparently estimated using the Kid tool from Swiss based vendor. Privately, Discord claims images of documents are deleted in most cases immediately after age confirmation. What does in most cases mean? Why would it not be in all cases? And they also claim they don't keep the information from the id, which, you know, you tell a community like Discord that, oh yeah, we're going to, you know, we're only going to do this with it and we're going to delete it probably immediately and it'll totally be fine. Of course they're going to start, you know, pulling at every loose thread they can find. So some Discord users posted on Reddit saying that policies for Kid and privately don't exactly line up with what Discord is saying.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I also think this is actually out of date information.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh, okay.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I full plane chat got me going down a path and then I started googling some things and it sounds like they've swapped out the Kid plan. Okay, they're now going down. They didn't do a like roll it back situation. They just switched partners and now they're working with a company called Persona. And people in floatplane chat, I've not verified this yet, are saying that Persona is owned by Peter Thiel.

[Linus Sebastian]

So wait, this is out of date, but not in a way that it is getting better in any way.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Oh no, like potentially worse.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, yeah, no Discord.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Why?

[Linus Sebastian]

Why? You were. For an actual fairly extended period of.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Time, Persona in the UK as an experiment. Okay, yeah, sorry, there's. There's some stuff on here. I'm not 100% sure what it is. There's a Reddit thread from 11 hours ago. Like, this is very new. Discord has assured its users that it is using Kid for its facial age estimation. There's a bait and switch. Kid is an on device, zero knowledge proof. You can scan your face. Then Kid runs an assessment model locally and estimates your age. I mean, that sounds pretty. All right. Discord only receives a token that say blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. That sounds not too bad. Persona is a corporate partner of Palantir, a spying and surveillance company that blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. They quote, unquote, delete your information within minutes usually, but they retain the embeddings. The embeddings are machine readable, portion of your face or id. Something, something, something. Discord is promised Kid but is giving us Persona. This is all relatively new. Okay, so, okay, basically about all this.

[Linus Sebastian]

Here'S what we can say definitively. We can say that so far the story from Discord doesn't seem to be firmed up in a way that is making their community happy. Yeah, I think we can say that many commenters have mentioned canceling nitro subscriptions and or moving to other platforms even if they don't get prompted to verify their accounts. Others have started placing bets on how long it'll take for Discord to be hit with another breach because of course, everybody bets on everything now. This is not financial advice. I would not get involved in that personally. Commenters have also brought up some pretty. Well, I've a pretty familiar debate between the real name, solve everything crowd and the privacy advocates reminding us that while there can be benefits to people using real names, I, you know, okay, this is pretty early in the show for me to say something this controversial, but I appreciate, or at least appreciated before it was so full of spammers, the real identity element of Facebook Marketplace. It was a lot easier to navigate knowing that for the most part, these were real people.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, now it's just scammers anyways.

[Linus Sebastian]

Now it's just scammers anyway. They seem to have kind of overcome it. Yeah, so there have been. There has been at least one time when I personally enjoyed and appreciated that element of a web service. But it's worth reminding even the people who do enjoy that vibe that online privacy can be a literal life and death issue sometimes. And even when it's not life and death, many folks have a good reason not to share their identities. As explained by Redditor Radia Active Truth. This is a quote. Am I really going to associate my legal name with the PTSD groups that I'm part of? Because of course they're not safe for work, so I would need to be age verified. Do you know how sickening it would be to the hundreds of members there to have to put our legal names on experiences that scarred us? There's so many perspectives. There's so many ways that people use the Internet and connect on the Internet that rely on not being forced to upload a government issued id. Okay, Luke, go ahead and say it.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Oh, just like this was obviously inevitable.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh, no, I was gonna. I was. I. I wanted you to just tell us you already use Team Speak, just like you already use Firefox, because you're just that cool.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I. I do. I do use Team Speak, though. Like, I actually do. I. Okay, I use an older version of Teamspeak. I do think. I've never used this one, but I do think a lot of people are unaware. So, like. Okay, hold on, hold on, hold on, hold on. I'm going to go back.

[Linus Sebastian]

Is Team Speak the answer, Luke? Is Teamspeak the answer?

[Luke Lafreniere]

I think for most people the answer is going to be to stay on Discord, which is really sad. I would encourage you to try something else. Now when we go back to the Old greats Ventrilo is still showing off this. This ui. So, okay, that might not be working for a lot of people. Is still showing off this ui. So again, it, it might not be up there for a lot of people, even though both of them are based. I'm just saying. But Teamspeak is trying. I haven't tried this version of Teamspeak, but they have like chat channels and server browsers and friends lists and chats and like, it looks a lot like Discord. I. When the group of people that I joined that was using teamspeak told me they were using Teamspeak, I was excited about this. And then I realized that we're still using like, I think Teamspeak 3 or something.

[Linus Sebastian]

Nice.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Also, someone in chat said Teamspeak 6 is just a matrix server with a different UI, which brings up Matrix, which is another thing a bunch of people have been talking about. I had that ready. Thank you. Thank you for priming me on that Flowpoint chat. Matrix is another option that people are exploring. Things are built on top of this, which I can't confirm that this is actually just built on top of Matrix. But it, I mean, that would maybe make sense, but there, there are, there are other options. I know a lot of people are going to run into this, this thing and just go like, well, okay, Discord is the only thing out there for a weird blip of time. People used Skype before then. People used like a huge variety of things. Mumble Ventrilo, Teamspeak X Fire Razor Comms for four and a half minutes.

[Linus Sebastian]

I was, I was gonna say, I was gonna say, I mean, the show is already brought to you by Razor three other times. Why don't they resurrect comms? Yeah, the show can be brought to.

[Luke Lafreniere]

You by Razer comms, but Discord did fully pull a Amazon Walmart maneuver and effectively kill everything else. So there really isn't much but these.

[Linus Sebastian]

At least not much with momentum. Yeah, not, not much that has any meaningful sort of user base that they could. That they could grow, that they could kind of quickly grow from.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, yeah. But there are efforts out there and I would implore you to at least check them out. Matrix sounds really exciting. There are also. I'm not going to name them just because the open source people can get a little spicy sometimes, but there's been a couple people in Floatplane chat that have been like, yeah, but Matrix is kind of not great. I've never personally used it, but I've heard great.

[Linus Sebastian]

Points out that Steam Chat has actually improved way better between the time that we actually relied on Steam chat quite a bit and then Discord took over and then was dominant. Valve has quietly continued to improve the social experiences of just using Steam. I mean, I don't.

[Luke Lafreniere]

So I said, what about Slack? Slack is not an acceptable replacement for gaming groups in my opinion.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, yeah, that's a tough one. And I don't love the fact that Steam's social experiences, which still aren't amazing, are baked right into the Steam platform. I want something that is truly cross platform. And like, okay, yes, they have the mobile app but like.

[Luke Lafreniere]

This is.

[Linus Sebastian]

This feels like one of those things where if Microsoft and the Xbox team were like on it. You know where I'm going with this? If they were dialed, right?

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yep. Like if they were dialed, this would have been solved so long ago. If they were dialed, they never would have abandoned MSN messenger and then now they would just have like a gaming. Yeah. Version or something. I don't know. They would have some form of way to like tie it into gaming.

[Linus Sebastian]

If only Microsoft had known how enormous social networking social media was going to be. Because they were, they were so far ahead. They had all the mind share, all of it. Nothing else mattered other than MSN and Skype, which they bought like trillion was dead. ICQ was dead. AIM was dead. Everything was dead. They were just. They were. It only show in town.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah. Some people are saying like the hardest thing will be. I think it was Elijah. I don't know, I lost it. No, it was Elijah. The hardest thing would be getting whole groups to move. Like I have a server with 1500 people. How do I move everyone?

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, no, that's really, that's a great point.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

Because you. There will be.

[Luke Lafreniere]

There's also a lot of Discord bots and Discord integrations for different communities and stuff.

[Linus Sebastian]

I.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Discord is. I think it's free to self host, I'm pretty sure. So like maybe consider that because it's still free. But like, I don't know guys. This isn't. This isn't it. I don't think, I think we're still going to be waiting for what it is. But when you look at the mass of what Discord is and then you, you try to tell me Nitro is fully funding that platform. Sorry, bro, there's no way.

[Linus Sebastian]

I don't believe I had this conversation with one of the writers the other day. I forget who it was, but they were, they were making the argument to me that. Yeah. Do you have any idea how much People spend on nitro and all that. And I'm just looking at it going like, I don't think. It looks like they've gone. I mean, we've seen it so many times that I don't know why. Oh, it was Elijah. We've seen it so many times that I don't understand why we keep getting surprised by it. A new service shows up, it's totally free, it's totally way better than anything else that you would probably have to pay for or is free and kind of jank because it's a handful of people that are working on it in their spare time. Like, of course, you've got mumble up on screen right now. Yep, that checks out. And everyone migrates to it. They get the user base, they keep growing the user base which allows them to keep getting access to funding, to keep burning money. And then at some point the Piper comes calling and they have to figure out how to make money on it. And they come up with all these ideas and they convert some of the users to paid, but it's not enough. I don't think I'm convinced that nitro is enough. Geek power points out. There are ads in Discord. Yup. Fair enough. As someone who uses it unpaid with no nitro and okay, admittedly I do have, I do have a pretty solid built in ad block into my brain, but I have. I don't think I've ever seen an ad in Discord. Okay, they bother me about nitro, but I just dismissed that pretty good.

[Luke Lafreniere]

There are cosmetics. I know very few people that have paid cosmetics. There are free. Well, I know people that have those.

[Linus Sebastian]

Okay, yeah, but.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Right.

[Linus Sebastian]

You only need a few whales. You only need a few whales. When it comes to cosmetics, I still.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Think there's gonna be just like what happens with basically every platform. I think there's going to be a major. We want to make more money now push at some point. And they've been slowly creeping towards it and maybe it'll just continue to be slowly, but.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah. And then the other part is as you acquire all these users, you're. You're kind of caught between a rock and a hard place. Right. Like you're, you're caught between this need to monetize the user base that you don't have because. Or that you haven't figured out because you were like, okay, well we'll deal with that later. And then you're caught between that and the regulatory burden that exists for extremely large platforms, regardless of how much money they're making. Like if you had a social media platform that had 100 million users, you're going to be under intense scrutiny. Whether you're making a billion dollars a year or losing $1 billion a year, it doesn't really matter just because you're so influential. Whiskey Nerd points out that the Discord IPO is supposed to be next month in March. That's something. That's okay. I saw a conspiracy theory that this is like 4D chess, trying to somehow manipulate the public perception towards Discord right before the ipo. Because that was the only explanation they could come up with for why they would do something this upsetting to their user base right before they go public. But. And maybe this is just me not being, you know, stock market brained enough, but could there possibly be any reason for you to want your company to be worth less before you go ipo? I thought you want to juice the valuation before you go ipo.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, it's weird.

[Linus Sebastian]

Hit me up. Hit. Come on.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Maybe that's the like, Palantir adjacent push working with Persona, because that's a. That's a weird move.

[Linus Sebastian]

Ah, all publicity is good publicity, says Advo Cactus Diaboli. Most equities trading is bots. Bots don't care about product sentiment. Okay, that's. That second part though, is an. It's an interesting point, but if they bleed users, bots probably care about that a little bit. Tank the initial price, go public, then once you buy a ton, you roll back the bad stuff and go up once you own it. No, because then you wouldn't just. You just wouldn't IPO in the first place. You would just keep owning the stock. Will control the running costs. I really, really don't think that's it.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Because, well, see, how much people actually care is what this ultimately is going to lead to. Because, like, you hear really, really loud noises about so many different things. Gambling, microtransactions in video games, all these different things. And then you see the user behavior is to just use it more than ever. Yeah, I think, I think the ultimate reaction to this is going to be nothing. And that's kind of sad, but I mean, I'm going to go check out, you know, Team Speak six or whatever this is. See how cool it is. Maybe it's cool, maybe it's not. Maybe it'll be a real alternative, maybe it won't be. But I'm interested.

[Linus Sebastian]

Okay, cool. That's a pretty depressing note to end that on, but let's get right into. Let's get right into A An update for you guys. Whale Land brought to you by Threat Locker. Do you want to throw the schedule up on screen? Luke is just one, count them, one week away. We've got an extensive lineup of games scheduled for the stage, the 8v8 arena and the lounge with locally hosted lobbies for a bunch of games including Battlefront 2 Tribes 2 and other classics like Halo Custom Edition. You can enjoy some classic split screen or local multiplayer action in the gaming lounge. We'll have a lineup of party games ranging from 8 to 12 players at once. And we'll be hosting a Smash Bros Tournament in the lounge on Saturday. Uh, we're pulling up to the land with the new and improved modified fire truck featuring uh. Okay, hold on. It only has some of this stuff so far, so don't read out all of this, but it definitely has a Super custom Nintendo Switch 2 themed gaming TV setup in the back so you can check out the fire truck in person. Um. Oh yeah, and we just got confirmed. Oh no way. Seriously? We just got confirmation today that just like LTX 2023 we will have a custom screwdriver station on site.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Oh, whoa. Really?

[Linus Sebastian]

I had no idea. This is the first time hearing of it. Heck, but that's pretty cool.

[Luke Lafreniere]

That is cool.

[Linus Sebastian]

So we'll see you guys there. Have I ever explicitly said that you and I are going to be there? Like, we've talked about Whale Land a lot, but did we clarify that?

[Luke Lafreniere]

Oh man, I got my dates screwed. I am going to be there. To be clear, as the. As a spoiler, I am totally going to be there the whole time. Everything's fine, everything's ok. But I got screwed up and I thought that thing that's coming this weekend that I told you about was that weekend and I was like, no. And then figured out that I'm all clear, I'm all good, so I'll be there.

[Linus Sebastian]

Geez, Luke.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I was real upset for a moment.

[Linus Sebastian]

Anyway, tickets are available at lmg, GG slash Whale Land. We will see you there.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I got to jump back into something because somebody in chat reminded me of something I was going to say. Where'd it go? DeepBluev7 said our servers for our open source chat solution have been buckling under. All the people signing up. Maybe just temporary, but usually some people stay at least. And that's awesome and I'm very happy for it. I really don't want this to come across negative, but something I was planning on saying for this segment was that if, say, TeamSpeaks users, for example, double quadruple. I don't think Discord will even notice. The mass that Discord has right now is insane. And one thing that this might help is like your open source project. Maybe you guys get bigger and maybe teamspeak gets bigger and maybe these other solutions get bigger and maybe they become at least seen as a viable actual alternative. That alone, in my opinion, would be a huge win because right now it's nothing. People basically just use Discord or nothing. It's only Discord. So if we can at least normalize that there are alternatives, even if we can't take a real, actual sizable chunk out. But if we can just normalize there being alternatives, I think that would be awesome. So just try to keep that in mind. I don't think we're going to be able to make a real dent to Discord. But this is a. This is a slow war, not a fast one, I think.

[Linus Sebastian]

All right, do you want to pick our next topic?

[Luke Lafreniere]

Sure. Modern standby won't drain your battery anymore, according to Microsoft. Windows 11. Yeah, according, according to Microsoft can also be used that way Windows 11 background processes won't trigger modern standby issues, meaning you'll no longer see excessive battery drain when your machine should be in the S0 sleep state. Previously, certain pros. Previously certain processes. Previously certain processes were able to break the machine out of the sleep state without the user's knowledge, leading to unexpected battery use. And in many cases it is now stored somewhere that it's difficult for it to breathe. So like a backpack or something like that. And it can also go into really, really bad thermal situations.

[Linus Sebastian]

And, and, and those thermal situations can be exacerbated by the use of say, for example, liquid metal thermal interface material, which, when, when it's stored in a backpack completely enclosed and the laptop gets super hot for no reason whatsoever and is on its side for an extended period of time, can lead to some pretty bad stuff.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Oh yeah, it can lead to unexpected battery use. Naturally in a good environment. It can lead to other even worse things in a bad environment. In newer builds, Windows will now try to prevent the PC from waking up. Try without the user opening the lid or pressing the power button. The discussion question is, has anyone not employed by Microsoft confirmed this is actually fixed? I don't think anyone's completed testing on this yet. I'm sure other people are. And please check theirs out as well. But Labs is going to be. Is going to be cooking on this a little bit. We obviously have a. Other things we're already working on, but this is Something we will be looking to as well. So hopefully we'll have updates for you there. I'm sure there will be an article if nothing else. And yeah, I hope other people check it out too because this is going to be something that's relatively difficult to conclusively make statements on.

[Linus Sebastian]

Okay, I have a fantastic test system for you. My elite book that I've been daily driving lately is, I would say a solid like one out of eight times is going to be like piping hot when I take it out of my backpack. My backpack. And so it comes up for me a lot just because this, this is kind of funny. I haven't had a desktop at work for like a year. It was back when I did the Qualcomm Snapdragon 30 Day Challenge. I stopped using my desktop because I was supposed to be using Snapdragon for a month and then I had some issues with my NCIX PC desktop. And then I just never went back to not just using my laptop on a dock, even though I went back to x86 more recently with a Strix Halo machine. So that, that hp, I. Look, I don't know that I would necessarily blame HP for this, but I run into this all the flipping time and it is so freaking annoying.

[Luke Lafreniere]

People are very rightfully pointing out that MacBooks don't really have this issue.

[Linus Sebastian]

Nope.

[Luke Lafreniere]

And also pointing out that Linux laptops don't really have this issue.

[Linus Sebastian]

Nope.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, that's totally fair.

[Linus Sebastian]

I mean, hey, we're, we're kicking the Linux challenge off, I think in this next coming week, right?

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

And I told, I told Elijah I want five drives. So my desktop upstairs, my desktop downstairs, my work laptop, my, my, oh, my handheld. And then I think there was, there was one other one. I was like, I'm doing it, Luke. I'm going for it this time. Yeah, I'm not going to touch Windows for a month.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Do we help each other at all?

[Linus Sebastian]

Interesting.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Like how? Like.

[Linus Sebastian]

Because. Okay, so here, hold on, let me put it this way because I think.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I agree with you, but I have.

[Linus Sebastian]

Some comments because I would think, you know, a very community driven initiative like Linux, right? You would think. Well, yeah, community is. Why not your immediate community part of it, right? Yeah. And if your community was like Linux noobs. Who are also on this journey at the same time, I would say that that is kosher. I'd say that that's fair game. But I don't think some of the other folks in our cohort would really qualify as a Linux noob. And then where do we draw the line? Like, am I allowed to call Wendell? You know, I feel like for me, I kind of still want to be me. I'm not going to completely pretend to not know anything because this is not my first kick at the can. But I'm. But I'm not going to just leverage the resources that I have. I think Elijah has a line in the script that's something along the lines of like not everyone has Torvalds on speed dial. Right. Like we can't, we can't just. We can't be us either. It has to be somewhere in the middle.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Elijah just trying to flex as per usual. Yeah, okay, fair enough.

[Linus Sebastian]

I mean it's a pretty cool flags.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, Yeah, I. I'm not sure how this is going to go for me.

[Linus Sebastian]

I. Yours is going to be kind of boring just because you're like daily ing it already.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, but like it's. It also it hasn't truly been daily because that laptop has had so many hardware issues that has been bouncing back and forth between getting serviced and coming back to me that sometimes I end up back on Windows for a while and then I go back to running various versions of Linux. Linux has genuinely never been the problem and I have verified multiple times that it happens. I have two drives in the machine now, so I have one for Windows and one for Linux. Well, not realistically. I have one that is split in half for Windows and Linux. Then I have a storage drive, but whatever, you know what I mean? And yeah, they want me to try to verify that it's working under Windows because they just don't believe me. So it's like, okay, I'm running Windows and I ran into the same problem again. Thank you. Please fix. And then after I have it for like a little while, if I know they're going to repair it, I go back to Linux anyways because that's what I want to be using. But I've been like verifying the issues within Windows and it's a problem in both. It's definitely like hardware issues with the laptop. It has nothing to do with software at all. So yeah, I've been bouncing back and forth. So I, I can't quite say that I've been daily it, but I have been fairly actively using it for a long time now and feel pretty comfortable in it. But I'm also not really gaming much on that laptop. I find personally, and I'm genuinely not intentionally calling anyone out here, but even a video that I publicly said I liked a lot and I do Like, a lot. Whenever you see creators do like Linux, I switch challenges. It's always framed as a challenge, and that always involves doing things that are particularly difficult in Linux.

[Linus Sebastian]

I don't even.

[Luke Lafreniere]

This stood out. Hold on, let me finish talking. This stood out to me because when I switched Linux on my laptop, I just did what I always do, and it was literally never a problem.

[Linus Sebastian]

All right.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Ever. But everyone always has, like, a thing, and it's very common that it's creators, and creators always have to edit videos. And this is like, a known problem is that, like, Premiere doesn't work very well.

[Linus Sebastian]

Right.

[Luke Lafreniere]

So they run into, like, the editing videos problem, and then they're like, oops, doesn't work. And it's like, yeah, okay, well, that was predictable because all the other Ice Twitch videos also tried to edit videos and also had problems. So it's like.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, I don't let the record show that that right there was definitive proof that anything can happen once Luke did, in fact, get to finish talking. But I'm still gonna jump in now that you're done and defend myself.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

I don't think anything that we tried to do as part of our last I switched was unrealistic or unreasonable because I wasn't trying to. I wasn't trying to.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Last I switched was.

[Linus Sebastian]

I don't edit video.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Our last I switched was pretty successful, though.

[Linus Sebastian]

I mean, I had a lot of issues.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I'm not necessarily saying I had a problem with our previous run at it.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh, okay.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I just, like, in general, I think the. I don't know. I would implore the audience to pay attention to the things that, you know, we, the three of us, or anyone else has actual problems with, instead of just their conclusion being that there was some problems with what they were doing. Like if they. If they play, you know, if you play games that are Proton Platinum and you just run some basic applications and spend the vast majority of your time in a web browser, like an enormously massive percentage of users, then in a lot of cases, you know what? I actually won't say this is a definitive statement. I suspect in a lot of cases it's going to be totally fine, but we'll see how it ends up going.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah. All right. I can't see Dan's.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Luke's saying there's a negative connotation to challenge that suggests there was a problem. That's part of it, but I think it's. That is definitely part of it. But I also think people put themselves in situations intentionally sometimes. It's like it's like the whole throwing for content thing, right? You put yourself in situations intentionally that will cause contention and will cause issues. Because that is insanely more interesting on camera. If I went to explain my laptop experience with Linux on camera, I would sit down and be like, it was fine. I used a web browser and it was, it was, it was fine. I didn't have any problems. I had to Google how to update it. And then I went, okay, that's how. And then I updated it and it was fine. Like, no one's going to care about that. So. So you have to like, do something. Like, they're literally promoting Linux by putting it in difficult situations that it's not going to do well at because then at least more people will see the video and you might get more people to adopt it. Like, I'm not going after the creators here, to be clear. It's just, it's a complicated situation. I just want people to understand that, like, just because it has problems doing certain things doesn't mean that it will always, for one and for two, doesn't mean that you're necessarily doing that. Like, how many people in the audience are actually editing videos?

[Linus Sebastian]

Okay, that is such a, that is such a hilarious thing for you to bring up because. Because so much of how we make decisions is totally not based on what we actually do.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Dude, we know. Based on GPU review videos that we make.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh, yeah, and look at Apple's marketing. How laser focused are they on, you know, on how creative you can be with your iPhone? And there is absolutely a subset of the users that are, you know, gonna be, you know, the next filmmakers, you know, the next generation of filmmakers. But there's also a lot of users that are just sitting in Starbucks browsing Facebook on their MacBook and that's all they were realistically ever gonna do on it. And they could have had a Chromebook and they would have had quite literally exactly the same user experience.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah. My phone is largely sold on its camera and 90% of the photos that I take are of my parking spots.

[Linus Sebastian]

Like, that's the most blue thing you've said, at least today.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I was reviewing my photos from New York and it's, it's, it's where I parked my car at the airport. And that's like it.

[Linus Sebastian]

It's funny because there's certain things that you do and there's certain places that you go take.

[Luke Lafreniere]

A lot of that is true.

[Linus Sebastian]

That is like when you went, I.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Took a bunch in Alaska and that.

[Linus Sebastian]

Get away from it all. Place you Went in Taiwan.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

You took a ton of pictures there. Like, you were. You were behaving like. Like a relative I haven't seen in a couple years. How many pictures you wanted to show me? Like, it was crazy.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, that's true.

[Linus Sebastian]

But other than that, like. Like, you almost seem weirded out. If I pull out a phone at dinner and I'm like, let's take a picture, like, why? To what end?

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, for some reason, my brain's like, people or building. No leaf. Yes, sure. Rock. Yes. I don't know.

[Linus Sebastian]

Parking spot. Triple. Yes.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. For sure. Every time. Will you actually use this reference? Someone said bird. Yeah, that's true. I have become that guy.

[Linus Sebastian]

You're such a bird, Dad. I don't know how it happened.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I often take photos of birds while my thumbs up is in the frame as well. I'll be like, yeah, good bird.

[Linus Sebastian]

If. If I had told you when I met you that you were going to turn into a weird bird, dad, you'd have been like, no, that's stupid. Birds are stupid.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah.

[Dan]

You.

[Linus Sebastian]

Like, 100%.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

There are ways. You'd have been like, they're a waste of time and money.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

Honestly. Yeah.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

Unbelievable.

[Luke Lafreniere]

That's still not necessarily untrue, but I do like them a lot.

[Linus Sebastian]

All right. On the subject of taking pictures, Ring. Ring is a company that is owned by Amazon and it takes a lot of pictures of your front porch and paid big bucks for a Super bowl ad to celebrate or announce or whatever. Whatever they were trying to do is not what ultimately happened, but to promote their search party tools, which allows anyone in the US Ring owner or not, to launch a search for their lost dogs using all the Ring cameras in their neighborhood. Now, hold on a second. Just give me one second here. I can see the look on your face. You know I can see you even though I'm remote. Right. Just contain yourself. As someone who has lost multiple pets and who cried multiple tears multiple times over losing multiple pets, I understand the sales pitch here. I get it.

[Luke Lafreniere]

However, if you're in that moment, if 10 minutes ago, you recognized that your pet is gone in that moment, a lot of people are going to want this thing, even if right now they don't. Not everyone. Some people will hold true to their. Their line.

[Linus Sebastian]

However. However, this launch, coming just a few months after Ring announced a partnership with law enforcement surveillance provider Flock Safety, was received with really an immediate and completely predictable response from just everyone. With the EFF calling the feature a surveillance nightmare. Look, if Amazon and Ring was a company that I had any kind of trust in whatsoever. Right. Any kind of trust in whatsoever. And they announced this like, lost dog feature and it was a core part of the design of the product that, that all of the image recognition was done locally on device. And that was opt in. And, and, and, and it's something that as someone, as a pet dad who has, has lost a pet that got out. It's something that I would crave, you know, that I could want. But the last two companies that I could have any interest.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

Really in administering this are going to be Amazon and Flock. Dude, Flock has, has, has demonstrated sort of irregular. Irrevocably. Yes. That's the. Basically, they could never earn my trust back. The way that they have handled security and data privacy.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Man, Flock and the Persona, AKA Peter Thiel. Getting into consumer stuff is not fun. That, that being like a primary thread of today's show is not cool.

[Linus Sebastian]

It is worth noting, by the way, that they apparently ditched the Flock partnership. But like, okay, doesn't that just tell us everything we need to know about them, how they choose their partners? Like, I don't want to, I don't want to be, I don't want to be like that. But you know, if someone is. If someone, say, for example, was married to someone abhorrent and, you know, doesn't seem to have a problem with it, you know, like, what, what's her, what's her nuts? Let's, let's use a historical example. Ava Braun or Eva Braun. Excuse me? Okay. Is that's Hitler's wife? Oh, like, I never. Does it not tell us anything about her? Just how she chooses her partner. It's like, yeah, at some point she cut ties with Hitler or whatever. Well, they kind of both cut ties with the world at the same time, but that's a whole separate thing. You know, like, just because she divorces the guy, does that not still tell us a fair bit about him? Especially if the circumstances of cutting ties were because of public pressure? Like, doesn't that just. Doesn't it still tell us a lot about the kind of decision making process that's going on behind closed doors? Is this call. Is this a thing? Zosis or whatever says Godwin's Law? Like, is this just like birds of a feather kind of thing? What's Godwin's Law? I'm. No, I'm not reading the AI overview is an Internet adage asserting as an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches. What? No. Okay, very funny.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I actually thought this was a pretty good comparison, Linus. I will give you that.

[Linus Sebastian]

Thank you.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I. I just. For other people that might be confused, I was like, I didn't think they did. Yeah, they did not divorce. I understand he's doing the comparison. Yeah, yeah, he's doing the comparison to divorce here. Because Amazon and Flock are no longer working together. But yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

And you know what? Like Avon Fox and Float plane Chat points out. Okay, what if this person was manipulated or in a relationship due to pressure or whatever. Yeah, okay. Yes, that's fair. It's not a perfect analog. Please. The. The point is just that Amazon as a company clearly chose to partner with Flock. Okay. If Linus Media Group chose to partner with Flock and then you guys got super mad about it, predictably. And then I said, oh, wow. Yeah, wow, that. Oh, you guys are so right. We should have never done that. We're. We're not doing that anymore. Wow, I'm so glad that. Come on, that's happening, you know, has it not. And we're not. Okay, Flock. Okay. I don't think you could draw a direct parallel to anything.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Like, maybe not someone as bad as Flock. But we've worked with. We've worked with Brand. Someone just pointed out Anchor. We've worked with brands. Someone said Raid Shadow Legends. We've worked with brands that we've then been like, you know what, maybe you guys are right. Let's pull back on that.

[Linus Sebastian]

But Flock literally, like, no, I agree.

[Luke Lafreniere]

The scale is not the same, but I'm just saying, like, this, this can't.

[Linus Sebastian]

Be extrapolated fully, so you can absolutely make mistakes. But in this case, I'm talking about partnering with, again, an abhorrent organization that has complete and utter disregard for user security and privacy. And some, in some cases, like Rage Shadow Legends never led to anyone being, you know, falsely harassed by law enforcement or, you know, Raid Shadow Legends never got anyone, never had anyone have a gun pointed at them because of it. Like, let's be real here, guys.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I think these. These two, was it birds of the same feather. Whatever. I'm trying to use the Flock analogy. Yeah, I don't know how much they mind it. Do be Amazon. After all, FTC, this is older, 2023. But FTC and DOJ charge Amazon with violating children's privacy law by keeping kids Alexa voice recordings forever and undermining parents deletion requests. Amazon just do be Amazon. At the end of the day, maybe they're kind of chill with. With Flock and the other thing for.

[Linus Sebastian]

Raising that and the Other thing is that it has to do with, like, our knowledge at the time. If we announced a partnership with Flock today, when you've heard me on stream talking about the horrible things that they've done and making it clear how horrible I think they are, like, we know there's no precedent in LMG's history for anything like that. Like, people are bringing up. People are kind of trying to sort of poke. Poke holes in it here. Someone brought up the honey thing. It's like, yeah, but we didn't know any of that when we did, and we stopped working with them as soon as we did. Like that. That's the difference. Whereas when you announce a partnership with someone that you know is horrible, then it's a completely different situation. April Fool's video idea. Good lord.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Oh, what is? We're partnering with Flock.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah.

[Luke Lafreniere]

New New LTT store webcams. Oh, my God. That's how we can use Twitter. New Twitter cams powered by flock.

[Linus Sebastian]

Ixipin 724 and float plane chat says, do not do that. You will never recover. And you're so right. The number of times. Funny, though, dude. The number of times I run up against people who legitimately believe horrible things about me because I joked about it or because I said it in an April Fool's video is distressingly high. Like, this is the reason that actors like Dwayne Johnson have no lose clauses in their contracts. Because people will actually watch someone be acting on TV and be stupid enough to think that they're weak because they lost a fight in a movie that they were scripted to lose.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Which I think, you know, I think you can be comfortable just not caring about those people's opinions, though. I think. I think that can be okay, Luke. Rise above.

[Linus Sebastian]

I wish that this was an isolated, small, tiny minority, Luke. I wish.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I think you dig pretty hard to find comments sometimes. I think you can't help yourself.

[Linus Sebastian]

I. I think that that can be true at the same time as it can be true that it is a distressingly large number.

[Dan]

Sure.

[Linus Sebastian]

Maybe I should just retire to a potato farm.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Dad, Dan and I had a fancy dinner last night. My favorite part was a potato. They're pretty good. Potatoes are pretty good potatoes. It's hard to. It's hard to knock. A good potato. Dude.

[Linus Sebastian]

Dude, a baked potato with some butter and some salt and pepper. You get a bit of sour cream on there. You get a little bit of, like, green onion. Oh, like now. Are you salivating, brother?

[Luke Lafreniere]

Oh, yeah. Potato in almost any form, though. Warm potato. Great, great. Cold Potato. Warm potato. Fantastic.

[Linus Sebastian]

Okay, hear me out. Hear me out. Okay. Nugget potatoes. Cold.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Nugget potatoes. Cold can be pretty good. Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

All right.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Potatoes just win. Potatoes are great.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah. And not. Not every. Not every French fries. Good cold. But. But there are. There are good cold French fries. I. I'll die on that hill.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I think they're better warm. Oh, I can't think of a. I can't think of a potato that's like. Even. Even nugget potatoes. I think they're better warm. Potatoes gain a lot from heat. I don't know why, but I think they gain a lot from heat. I will give you nugget potatoes, like, at a. Like, room temperature are probably the best form of potatoes at room temperature, in my opinion.

[Linus Sebastian]

I think they're better warm. I once accidentally Potato Chef ate so many room temperature nugget potatoes that I threw up. I wasn't sick. I just spontaneously was like, my stomach is at capacity. I was. I was reading. I was like, reading and just eating potatoes and. Yeah, and I just threw up. It was like. It wasn't even. Like, it wasn't the sickest, most like, foul throw up ever or anything. It wasn't even that gross because I had just eaten all of it and it was just. It was basically just potato. Like, it was probably still edible. Oh, gross.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I love. I love this, like, way too perfect image I have in my head of this situation of you just being way too laser focused in on what you're doing to not realize that you've eaten like an entire mass. It was a massive bowl size of your entire torso thing of potatoes. Your body's just like, bro, get it out of here. Yeah. ADHD turned up to 11. Someone pointed out. Yeah, yeah, that's all I'm. All I'm picturing is just like, wait, I must keep reading. And also this hand is just doing this motion for whatever reason. That's great. Anyways, back to evil things. We don't, unfortunately, get to keep talking about potatoes. Yeah, that. I mean, that sucks a lot. There are alternatives. Again, just like in the discord thing. There are. There are alternatives in this range of products. The alternative ends up being more expensive usually.

[Linus Sebastian]

But you can shout out ubiquity.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I was. Is just going to do it. There are also other alternatives that aren't ubiquity. But you know, in our kind of spaces, a lot of people do be like, in ubiquity.

[Linus Sebastian]

Okay, hear me out.

[Luke Lafreniere]

TRUSPEC security camera partnered with flock.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh, gosh.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah. No, but like it's, it's effectively going to end up being self hosting and through something like Ubiquiti or a variety.

[Linus Sebastian]

Of other products, it's got to be self hosted.

[Luke Lafreniere]

You can do a self hosted solution. You can have your own cameras. You could share them with with family members. You could remotely access them when you're away from home. You could use a lot of the same features. You can literally do the, like, press the doorbell, have a video call thing just without, you know, Amazon watching your every move. It is possible. Hey, it'll cost more.

[Linus Sebastian]

But it's also, if there was a company that you didn't have to feel like you were, you know, helping move us towards a dystopian future, it would be Crater Warehouse. We have, we have a lot to talk about this week and the big one is the one that Luke is wearing. Dude, it's kind of covered right now, so maybe if you can give them a better look at it. That thing is so flipping cool. This is it. This is the lawsuit hoodie. This hoodie exists because three years of unanswered collab emails felt like a sign to stop waiting for permission and just make this white on black hoodie that we wanted to make anyway. It's made from the same heavyweight 100% cotton as the Wan hoodie. So it feels thick, premium and built for daily wear with YKK zippered pockets to keep your things secure. The sleeves feature bold, fully embroidered controller, inspired graphics, and there's a small Easter egg on the care label that is optional to read but highly recommended. You want to bring up the website.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Okay.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, don't, don't worry about it. Don't worry about it. Let's see if people can figure out, let's see if people can figure out what it was inspired by. I will not confirm or deny because I don't actually. Oh, is it in there?

[Luke Lafreniere]

It's literally the first line of the description.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh, no, that's, that's not. Oh, wait. Oh, yeah. Okay, well, okay, never mind. We apparently went full. Not that subtle.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Literally the brand name is like the third word.

[Linus Sebastian]

Okay, cool. Well, okay. We weren't actually concerned about dbrand in terms of like the look. What we really wanted to do was a hoodie that looked like a thing. And then in order to make sure that the iconography wasn't going to cause any problems for us, we partnered with DBRAND to use their iconography. It's a pretty cool product. Do you want to scroll through some of the, some of the other pictures?

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, I love the charade ones. I think this is Shahrod. Yeah, yeah. He's got the helmet on. These look sick.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, the DBRAND robot helmet.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I don't know where they found to do these photos, but these are awesome. I am continually impressed with the photos that are coming out of this team. This is. Oh, good. I was hoping there's going to be a good picture of this. The zipper looks sick. It's like blacked out and it has this like copper inner core. It looks so dope. I don't think I've seen that before. I think it's. Yeah, it's all of them. Even the smaller zippers that are on your pockets have this like copper inner design.

[Dan]

I think that looks, it seems to be like a spring to kind of like keep it bit held down.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Is that what the actual copper bit is doing?

[Dan]

I think so. That's nice.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I don't know.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, but keep scrolling. Apparently the last picture is the bat, the best one.

[Luke Lafreniere]

There's a lot of pictures for this. I think they really liked the set that they were at because there is, there's quite a few, but we will, we will keep going through them.

[Linus Sebastian]

There's so many pictures.

[Luke Lafreniere]

There is a ton of photos. Nice. That's a bit of a hint.

[Linus Sebastian]

Dude. I, I, I kind of love this hoodie. When we got our first sample of it.

[Luke Lafreniere]

That photo's sick. That photo's hard.

[Linus Sebastian]

Amazing.

[Luke Lafreniere]

That's dope. Yeah. I don't know where the heck they were. That's sick. That's sick. That's probably my favorite one. Hell yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

It's here. Do you want to throw us back?

[Luke Lafreniere]

That one is dope. Yeah, those are cool.

[Linus Sebastian]

It's one of those things. I think this is when our team is like, ah, see, I don't want to take anything away from the other things we do, but this is the stuff that gets me uniquely excited. Like, this is when I think the team is at their absolute best when they create something that is so sort of gamer culture, like Internet culture referencing and yet is so flipping wearable. And if somebody doesn't know what it is, if they don't know that it looks kind of like a, you know, game console or if they don't recognize those icons, they're just like, wow, cool hoodie. But if they do, you know, it's the, if, you know, you know, and I just, I love stuff like that. They absolutely. Yeah, yeah. Marchable. They hit it completely out of the park on this design. Taking again. I don't want to whatever. Lawsuit hoodie Go check it out. Lmg gg/lawsuit hoodie flipping cool. Some quick housekeeping from the warehouse. Turns out when you keep making really cool new stuff, you eventually run out of space. So we're running three sales right now to clear some space and reset for what's next. There's the last chance sale at LMG GG lastchance. So this is the final call on some older stock that is not coming back. Once it's gone, at least we have no plans to bring it back. So no Restocks, no reruns?

[Luke Lafreniere]

No.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh, I'll just grab it later. This is later. Get it now. Only the bundles are end of life. Okay. Commuter bag, OG backpack and tech sack will live on, but these bundles are going away. This is last chance. We also have our end of season apparel sale. Clearing out some seasonal styles to make room for new designs that are already in the works. Same quality and fit. Just end of season pricing while supplies last. That's LMG GG end of season. And finally we have a buy more save more for all blank T shirts. One blank T shirt is just not enough. They're comfortable, easy to wear, and having a few in the rotation just makes sense. Stock up on blanks at LMG GG Blank tees. T E E T E E S. That's the one. Maybe. Dan, do you want to throw these links in the description and the various chats? If that kind of works for you. All right. Sick. Sick. Luke, want to pick a topic for us?

[Luke Lafreniere]

Sure, no problem. YouTube react videos could face lawsuits, but not for the reason. Wait, you.

[Linus Sebastian]

No, we're supposed to explain our checkout messages.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Don't make bigger topic.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, I know I screwed up. I know. But I introduced all the products and now that's when we're supposed to do checkout messages. Right?

[Luke Lafreniere]

Right.

[Linus Sebastian]

Okay. Wait, where's the thing? Wait, is it not in here anymore? Okay, I'm just going to have to wing this. Checkout messages are the way to interact with the WAN show. We don't want you to throw money at your screen. Or we do want you to throw money at your screen, but we don't want you to just throw money at your screen for acknowledgement. We want you to throw money at your screen and get. Oh yeah, check out no checkout messages. Comms. Yeah. Okay, so they're chat's gaslighting me. We want you to get high quality merchandise in return. So if you want to send a message into the WAN show where producer Dan. Are you guys going to throw him up there? Yay. There he is. Nice. Where producer Dan will just post it like that one that's up at the top of the frame right now. Or he'll reply to it or he will curate it for me and Luke to respond to. Then all you got to do is head to the checkout on lttstore.com. there you go. And you'll see this interface where you can pick a color, decide whether to leave your name or have it be anonymous and go ahead and place your order and we'll show you what a curated one looks like. Oh, man, I'm so tired, dude. I was snowboarding all day. I'm like dying. That was my best. That was the best that I could do just now. Am I super blurry?

[Dan]

No, you're just little down there in the bottom, I guess.

[Linus Sebastian]

Cool.

[Dan]

You are burliery.

[Luke Lafreniere]

It's a.

[Dan]

It's focused on the background. Put up your hands.

[Linus Sebastian]

I'll fix it. I will try to fix it.

[Dan]

Is that technology? No.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh, for crying.

[Luke Lafreniere]

So blurry.

[Linus Sebastian]

Blurry.

[Dan]

Linus.

[Linus Sebastian]

Ugh. I got a squint cameras in use by another application. Like. Yes, I know. That's the. That's why I need to fix it. Seriously, I can't. The Razer app doesn't let me change the focus if it.

[Dan]

I love technology. How about a merch message? Oh, no, you're worse.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah.

[Dan]

Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh, we're good. Yay. I'm so back. Okay, Dan, show us how merch message works, for crying out loud.

[Dan]

No, I won't.

[Linus Sebastian]

We'll just.

[Dan]

I'll show you how to check out merch.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I'll show you how to com works.

[Linus Sebastian]

Auto focus is disabled. What is it doing?

[Luke Lafreniere]

My goodness, we're losing them.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh, no, no.

[Dan]

Put on your glasses.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Just say okay.

[Linus Sebastian]

Okay. Hi.

[Dan]

I was wondering about how you chose the colors of LTD store items. Is there some science to it? Is it purely vibes? And why not just make the same product in more colors, especially apparel?

[Luke Lafreniere]

I can answer the more colors part. More colors or more SKUs? And that can get. That can get pretty rough on certain things, especially when there's a lot of sizes. So, like, if you look at. I'm going to bring up on screen our cleanup wizard T shirt. So if we added another color here, we don't add one product. We add six products because we add a red one of this in small and medium and large and extra large and extra extra large and extra extra extra large. And you can extrapolate that quite a bit sometimes. Like the pants. The pants can be Pretty brutal for this. If I go to. Let me go navigate through the store real quick. We have. He's going to keep working on his blur, so I'm not worried about you seeing him. I'm going to go over to this one, the city set, go to the new pants that we have that are awesome. Now, you have two different inseam lengths, a crazy amount of waist sizes and color. So you've got all the waist sizes times two, times the amount of colors, and the amount of products that you have to keep in stock just goes whoop. So usually try to keep it kind of dialed down. Now there's a bit of a research portion to selling things as well, where we put these pants on sale. We've got the regular, we've got the tall, we've got all these different waist sizes sell super well. That might inform us that the pants are good and maybe some people might like additional colors, and then we could expand from there. But if these just sell, like, kind of okay, then maybe we don't want to add a bunch of colors, because maybe people like the pants enough, but they don't like them enough to have to buy more in a bunch of different colors. So, yeah, T shirts have a bit of an easier time with this because you can have a bunch of blanks in a range of colors and then print the shirts onto the blanks. But then even that's not, like, a perfect answer. Hopefully I did justice to that question for the CW people. I know there was another part to that. How do you pick the colors? Yeesh. There's a very low percentage chance that I can answer this accurately. Linus might know decently well, but he has faded into the void. He's gone. So I'm going to give it a shot. CW people, I'm sorry if I fail you, but I think they look at trends, they look at upcoming trends, they look at general fashion stuff, and just try to look at the different types of colors that people are into moving forward and try to keep us matched with said trends. Now, we do tend to fall into a bit of a category of tech nerds. And generic tech nerd do tend to like black shirt. So black shirt with printing on it does often end up being a way that we go. But I also think that they're trying to have fun with stuff. They want to have fun jobs. They want you to have more interesting clothing. I support it. So every once in a while, we get stuff like the Pixel Heart shirt, which is this, like, crazy red. Yeah, I didn't Sell the teddy fleece jacket, which is pretty wild colors.

[Linus Sebastian]

That one does pretty good. People love that one.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I really like the RGB sweater. I really think people look really sharp in this. I think I've told the story like a million times, but is anyone supposed.

[Linus Sebastian]

To be able to see what you're showing?

[Luke Lafreniere]

I can show that now. This is the RGB sweater. This is a non black. It's actually dark. Like, I don't know if you can call it navy, but it's a dark blue with basically color flecking throughout it. I didn't know this was our product for a while. I sat down at a conference next to Taryn and he was wearing it, and I was like, oh, wow, it's a really nice sweater. It looks good on you. I had no clue it was ours.

[Linus Sebastian]

That's hilarious.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I think it looks really sharp. I think, like, when you look like this photo, I think is a really good representation of just like you wear a decent pair of pants, you throw this on top of it, and you look very professional while wearing a sweater.

[Linus Sebastian]

It's cool, but with a touch of fun.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah. 100%, yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yep.

[Luke Lafreniere]

That's cool.

[Linus Sebastian]

Okay, next question. Thanks for stalling.

[Luke Lafreniere]

No problem.

[Dan]

Let's see.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Hopefully my guesses on those answers were at least decently accurate.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, I didn't hear them because I had to leave the room. Yeah. In order to open up the application. In order to put it back to manual focus, which it was still on, but just. All right.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I did what I could.

[Dan]

Great. I started Clara Obscure a week or so ago and I'm really enjoying it. Linus talks about JRPGs a lot. Are there any other modern ones with some ARPG elements I should check out? Love the show. Thanks, guys.

[Linus Sebastian]

I'm the last person to go to for game recommendations because A, I tend to be, like, kind of basic. Like, I just play what I know I'm probably gonna like, and B, I don't get a chance to play a ton of games, so I don't really get to go off the beaten path much. Like, like what, what am I supposed to say? Yeah, Expedition 33 was really good. Did you really need me to tell you that, like, flipping swept the game awards? Right? Like, it's, you don't take, don't take my word for it at that point. Right. Yeah, I, I, I love crosscode. It's, it's probably. Ah. Is it my, Is it my favorite modern jrpg? The characters are so incredible. If you haven't played it already, go play it. But it's more of like a pixel art style that I'm personally really into and I just, I haven't, I haven't played that many modern ones. I did finish Expedition 33 since last Wan show, so if we want to talk about it at all, we can. But Luke hasn't played and I don't think Dan's playing. So there's not really going to be much for me to say other than yeah, it's really good. Without getting into stuff that would involve serious spoilers for people in chat and on the show who might actually play it at some point.

[Luke Lafreniere]

You know. Okay, so one, one small thing I know on the store that we're advertising like the Polo and the tech pants together and this, this might be me being RGB sweater pilled, but I think the tech pants and a nice belt and the RGB sweater would go really well together. Other I'm just going to put that out there before we move on.

[Linus Sebastian]

Thanks, Luke.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Come to me for future fashion advice. Next topic, YouTube react videos could face lawsuits, but not for the reason you think. A lawsuit has been filed between two creators for reaction based content. The Catch one channel is filing the lawsuit against the other for the way the react content was acquired.

[Linus Sebastian]

Interesting.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Christopher Cordova, the individual who filed the suit, is stating that the footage that was acquired without their permission was ripped using ripping tools that bypassed YouTube's technical protections, which they claim is in violation of the Digital Millennium Copyright act or DMCA. TorrentFreak stepped in to defend Jonathan Hunolt. Hopefully I said that right. The individual being sued saying that there is no way Cordova could prove. That's what I was kind of thinking. Or no ripping tools are being used stating that for years many react creators simply record their screen instead of ripping the content. They that's yeah, this is very difficult to prove. Judge demarchi did not immediately throw out the case, which has raised concerns in the react community, because if this case goes through, it could have effects down the line for all react type content. That would be, I mean, very interesting. To summarize, this isn't a question of fair use. Judge demarchi has acknowledged this as fair use. But what calls into question is the way react footage is obtained.

[Linus Sebastian]

How are you supposed to. How would you prove how you got it? Like what would, what would. Hypothetically, what would that look like to you?

[Luke Lafreniere]

Dude, I have no idea. I mean the discussion question here is how the. Is anyone ever going to prove how people obtained footage? I'll just cut it out of the video If I leak the file name?

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I have no idea. I don't think you can really prove this.

[Linus Sebastian]

But then what difference does it make?

[Luke Lafreniere]

Result? None, in my opinion. But would that result in. If you can't prove that you got the footage, like ethically, then you can't do it at all, or would it go the other way around? I don't know.

[Linus Sebastian]

I don't even think it's a question of ethically though. It's a question of whether you circumvented a digital lock effectively. Right. But then is screen capturing your screen?

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

Not the same thing. Is that not a ripping tool anyway? That, that's where I, and to be clear, I'm not even taking a side on this one. I'm just, I don't know what you do, asking questions.

[Luke Lafreniere]

You're not going to be able to prove it. And like you said, what difference does it make?

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, I don't, I don't understand why we're even having this conversation because I don't understand the difference. I don't know. Okay, in that case, let's not even, let's not even bother. Let's talk instead about something. Okay. That doesn't happen necessarily that often, but something pretty cool that the Canadian province of Quebec has done. They have a new consumer protection act.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Oh yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

Which is all in French. So bad news, everyone. But that's okay because we'll figure, we'll, we'll sort it out for you. But basically they had some planned obsolescence safeguards that were passed back in 2023 that are finally going to come into full effect October 5th of this year that are pretty cool. For starters, increased minimum warranty periods on consumer electronics and appliances from three years on laptops, desktops, tablets, cell phones and game consoles, all the way to six years on large appliances like stoves and refrigerators. That is kinda awesome.

[Luke Lafreniere]

The next line is also awesome.

[Linus Sebastian]

Like, okay, hold on, let's, let's talk about this.

[Dan]

Okay.

[Linus Sebastian]

Like, why is it that three years is not already standard for an Xbox? That's crazy.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, I like this a lot. I do suspect that this will result in products being just more expensive in Quebec.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yes.

[Luke Lafreniere]

But I, I think this would be cool if it was a standard. Basically everywhere. This, this, like, we're, I think we talked about it on the show like a couple weeks ago, but there's this whole idea that like even refrigerator repair people are like, yeah, you don't bother keep your refrigerator after five years, it's just garbage. Is like, that's crazy. This is now e waste on a totally different level, dude. Like when it's phones and stuff like that, that sucks. Obviously, E waste in general is unfortunate, but, like, we're throwing out washers and dryers and refrigerators and dishwashers as if they're, you know, phone cycle replacements. Like, this is bad, not good.

[Linus Sebastian]

I've got people asking, wasn't an Xbox already a 3 year warranty? No, this is a, like, I mean, what's the Xbox up to? I was gonna say $500 device, but it's gone up in price. Like, this is an expensive item that has a one year warranty.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

Okay, the next one. Warranties follow the product for the full term of the warranty, regardless of whether the item is resold. This is just such common sense. It's just so obvious. What something. This.

[Luke Lafreniere]

This water bottle that isn't a rule.

[Linus Sebastian]

Magically might not last as long if I sell it to Luke. What are you talking about?

[Luke Lafreniere]

Insane.

[Linus Sebastian]

All right, next. Used cars and motorcycles also get automatic warranty coverage depending on the age of the vehicle and mileage. Jordan says, I think this is dealers only, but it's not clear in the translation.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, that one's a little tough. I don't know how that works, but I like the gusto.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yep. Additionally, all goods bought or leased must be able to serve their normal purpose for a reasonable length of time. The law also prohibits the use of techniques that make it more difficult to maintain and repair goods. Goods and aims to guarantee the availability of spare parts and repair services. Based retailers must inform customers of their minimum warranty coverage under the law before trying to sell any extended warranties based.

[Luke Lafreniere]

So basically, that's a really good last line, actually, because people might not be aware that this change happened. Yep, that's a very good, very good addition. Whoever was like, we might actually want to add something to this. That was smart. Smart. Good job.

[Linus Sebastian]

So David and I. David and I did another one of those fun. Linus and David just go and buy something adventures.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Nice.

[Linus Sebastian]

We went to Costco to buy a desktop and we had a really cool experience with that from one of the reps there. That is not going to be able to appear on camera because we didn't call ahead and get permission to film at Costco. We just kind of showed up and we're like, well, we're buying a computer and we're going to roll on some meta glasses and good luck, everybody. By the way, apologies in advance. David has never shot anything on meta glasses before and he's a very active conversationalist so the footage might be a little shaky sometimes. David was like the king of, of interacting with, with the, with the host from behind the camera. You know that, right? Yeah, like he just, like, he can't help it. He's just a very active listener. He's a very, he's a very engaged personality and these are all good things as long as you're not a human tripod. So anyway. But yeah, it was really fun and we, we had a really great experience where the, the representative, which I didn't even know like Luke, did you know that Costco had like someone who works in the electronics department to like talk to you about computers?

[Luke Lafreniere]

No.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, it's a thing. So we talked to the guy and he gives us a little, you know, like pro tip that if you don't tell the motherboard manufacturer, for instance, that it was part of a complete system, it may very well have a longer three year warranty on it. And same with, you know, things like memory, they often have a lifetime warranty on it. So yes, it has, you know, Costa Costco extended two year warranty. So they, they do an extra year, I believe on computer systems compared to if you buy those systems elsewhere, which I think thought was a pretty good value add. But he was like, and you might even be able to get more. And it's the kind of thing that makes you feel really good as a consumer. Like the sales rep is no, it's there to help you and guide you and inform you rather than there to extract your money. And it was just such a positive experience. And that's wicked to have that enshrined in law. I guess I wish it wasn't necessary, but I'm glad that it is and I would love to see, I'd love to see this expand. I did see someone in the chat saying, yeah, there's already brand brands that are, that are looking to pull out of Quebec because of this. But I think the answer is not for Quebec to back down. The answer is for everyone else to step up.

[Luke Lafreniere]

That will give more opportunity and more sales attention to brands that don't.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Which is awesome.

[Linus Sebastian]

Now it's time to give some attention to the brands who sponsored the show today.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Nice.

[Linus Sebastian]

We received some new chairs on the WAN show set that Razer sent over. I unfortunately am not sitting on one of them. I, I'm sitting on a hard backed wooden chair that has my butt completely asleep. But if I was sitting on one of them, then I would tell you these are their new Iskur V2 new gen chairs. The leather on these now comes with Razer's Cool Touch technology to help not just with breathability, but to make them more peel resistant. Their goal is to find ways to vent heat to make longer sessions of gaming, working or podcasting more comfortable. Whether you like to sit upright or you have the posture of a slug. Their Hyperflex lumbar system adjusts 360 degrees to find an angle that works for you. And the headrest comes with memory foam cushions that are designed to fit the curvature of your neck. The armrests can be moved up, down, side to side and can even shift the angle that they sit at. And you can grab one of these for yourself today by checking out Razer's new Iskur V2 new gen chair at the link in the video description I can say with 100% the sponsor read is over honesty that I wish I was sitting on that chair right now. This thing sucks so much sometimes. A wooden chair can actually be really great. Oh yeah, this is not one of those times. The show is also brought to you by Squarespace. Whether you're an entrepreneur looking to finally launch your business business or you're looking for a way to share your hobbies with the world, it really helps to have a website. And our sponsor, Squarespace would love to help you get started. They've implemented new AI tools that have you start with a curated set of layouts that allow you to customize to fit your brand's vibe. All you really need to do is tell Squarespace what your brand is about, find a matching tone and hit enter and you will have at the very least a starting point. And if your business just happens to sell anything, all of that can be done right from Squarespace's platform. We've used Squarespace for many years for our Linus MediaGroup.com website and we've been extremely happy with. I mean the ease of use is like I know it's not in the talking points that often anymore these days, but like they should still talk about it because it matters a lot when you're a company that, you know, not everyone happens to be a web developer and you know, sometimes it's Colton updating the site. Love the usability of squarespace.com. so start building your website today and get 10 off your first purchase by visiting squarespace.com when. All right. You want to pick another topic?

[Luke Lafreniere]

Sure.

[Linus Sebastian]

Do you want to talk about anchor? This really came up when we were talking about the sponsors that we've kicked to the curb.

[Luke Lafreniere]

It sure did. No Notes anchor UFI Soundcore anchor EUFY Soundcore context anchor used to be our biggest partner. Did they?

[Linus Sebastian]

Our biggest partner? I don't think that's right.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

Is that right?

[Luke Lafreniere]

Think so.

[Linus Sebastian]

I'm gonna message Colton right now.

[Luke Lafreniere]

They used to be a sizable partner that we had. Maybe the biggest one.

[Linus Sebastian]

I don't.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I don't think that would have been right.

[Linus Sebastian]

But I messaged Colton, and Steve and I will find out.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Fake news in the wind duck. And we dropped them because of a fiasco with Yuffie where their camera cameras weren't encrypted, and they tried to lie and got caught. And it did get resolved, but it was weird and took a long time. And they still had us on their website for, like, months and months and months and months and months and months and months. But we want to work with them again, so Linus wants to suss this out.

[Linus Sebastian]

Okay. I just heard back from Colton. He says, yes, they were our biggest partner. 2020 era. Oh, man. Yeah. So they messaged me earlier today, and basically Colton's like, hey, we want to work with them again, specifically on the anchor and soundcore brands. Are we fine engaging with them? We dropped them many years ago because of the whole debacle. I'd just like to bring up for a moment that I'm so tired of people calling our integrity as a company into question when we have done stuff like this, like, unflinchingly, without hesitation. Apparently, they were our biggest partner. Literally. Didn't matter. We did it anyway. Cool. Let's move on. I think the big question here is put very succinctly by night author in the floatplane chat. Any reason to believe that they have changed? I think.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Good question.

[Linus Sebastian]

I think that's the question. And I have to be honest with you. They. They did eventually resolve the Yuffie thing.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Okay.

[Linus Sebastian]

We still. I still have no interest in engaging with the Yuffie brand. I didn't like the way that they deflected. Like, if the Yuffie thing had happened and then they had immediately owned it and taken steps. I'm not about people being defined by their mistakes. To me, you're definitely apologizing. You're defined by how you respond to them.

[Luke Lafreniere]

How did they respond?

[Linus Sebastian]

They did eventually. They did eventually. No, initially. Initially, they just, like, deflected and. And completely not apologize. Yes, they did eventually. It was, like, ages later. And so that was my problem. That was why we ultimately were like, well, see ya. And Andre B. Says, okay, well, how do you prove now that they're trustworthy? So I Think that's why Colton is talking specifically about the Anchor and the Soundcore brands rather than even bringing up EUFY with me. Because. No, I just don't. I just don't think that I would be comfortable with a Yuffie product at this point. But like, look, this is one of. This is one of those things where when we dropped them, it did create a ton of confusion because I was very explicit from the start. I said, look, we're just not going to take their money. That doesn't mean I'm going to stop using their products. Like, check this out. Oh, hold on. I'm up one sec. Literally right now. Literally right now. I am plugged in. I mean, I mean, an Anchor power brick.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I mean, there's also this.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh, hold on, I can't see.

[Luke Lafreniere]

One of the more recent articles on the labs website is testing an Anker nano charger.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, we never said we weren't going to cover them. We never said we weren't going to use the products. Yeah, we just said that we weren't going to take their money. And I think the question is, have they. Have they done enough for us to change? Yeah, I'm just looking at a lot of.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Oh, does the Verge require a subscription now?

[Linus Sebastian]

Interesting for some articles. Not all.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Apparently their UFI blames the software update and promises to do better. Article is behind one of those.

[Linus Sebastian]

And I mean, I don't know. It's been five years. How long do we have to put someone in sponsor jail for? Like, I, I think it's. I think it's. It was.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Oh, was it actually 2020? I think it was like 2022, 2023 or something. A lot of the. No, A lot of the stuff I'm finding online about this is from 2023.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah. Okay. Can you. Okay. Oh, no, Colton. Sorry. Colton said 2020. They were like, they were our biggest partner in 2020.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Got.

[Linus Sebastian]

Trying to remember. I'm trying to remember who it was. There was. Was it Tech Brew that made that really good point about not. Not just like, if, if a company makes a mistake, not just putting them in jail forever. Like at some point, if they rectify the issue, then. No, it wasn't Tech Brew. Who was it?

[Dan]

It.

[Linus Sebastian]

Luke, do you remember?

[Luke Lafreniere]

No, I don't know.

[Linus Sebastian]

Shoot. It was on. It was on there. Like it was on their podcast or something. Anyway, it was a good point. Yeah. IM says I personally haven't bought any Anchor or other of their brand products since the Yuffie News.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Blaze. Henry says don't forget that Anchor also Has issues with exploding power bank recalls, like every few months. That.

[Linus Sebastian]

Is that true, though?

[Luke Lafreniere]

Evidence of that.

[Linus Sebastian]

I know there were some bad cells that a number of battery bank manufacturers got. Got burned by, pun intended. So let's just be very. Let's be sure that that was actually an Anchor specific issue. Zen Foxen says, is an apology all that was needed? I'd want more assurance than that. I mean, yeah, that's. That's very fair, especially when you got gaslit the first time. Before the apology was issued, The mighty Reptar says, yeah, don't put Flock on your bad list forever. I mean, that. Ooh, yeah, see, that's a tough one because that is. And that is a situation where I'd say, yeah, they're on the bad list forever. I don't see how there would be any redemption there.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah. So I'm reading this Verge article because I'm kind of like, my memory is not that great. So I'm trying to recall what happened here. And the Verge article opens with, first Anchor told us it was impossible. Then it covered its tracks. Then it repeatedly deflected while utterly ignoring your emails. So shortly before Christmas, we gave the company an ultimatum. If Anchor wouldn't answer why it supposedly always encrypted UFI cameras were producing unencrypted streams. Among other questions, we would publish a story about the company's lack of answers. It worked. So they had to get like, dirty, like dirty mailed into. Into doing the right thing, which is like, like, you know, like you said, it's been years. Hasn't been that many years, but like, maybe people involved with this are gone. I don't know. But just an apology after that level of like trying to cover up something actually very serious is a little sketch. I might, I might like a little bit more. I don't know what that more would be.

[Linus Sebastian]

I think the bigger question for me from the business team is why do we need to do this? Is there just some other. Is there some other power company that we could just work with instead?

[Luke Lafreniere]

Because of my annoyance with this thing, I have. I don't know if I've even talked to you about this, but I have. Personally, I know they're a sponsor of ours, but on a personal level, I've switched to Ugreen. I've bought Ugreen things lately.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, I bought four Ugreen power wall warts recently just so that the kids will not lose theirs. So they have like travel, travel ones.

[Luke Lafreniere]

When I was traveling, I bought a family set power bank, which has been Great. I more recently bought a ugreen wall wart, which has been great. I also haven't used this yet, so I can't comment on it, but I bought one of their USB to 3.5 millimeter cables, which has a Bluetooth chip in the USB plug. So it just looks like a USB to 3.5 mil, but it basically adds Bluetooth to your car. It powers the Bluetooth over the USB and then it gives the audio over 3.5. It looks cool. I haven't used it yet, though. Yeah, I don't know. But that being said, I don't necessarily know that they need the biggest reason if they think the company has actually moved on. It's just this was like a pretty big deal. So, yeah, I'm. I'm interested in how, like, what did they do? So, okay, maybe they said like, sorry that we lied and then covered up and then deflected and then got blackmailed into saying the truth. But what did they. What do they do about that? They do. They do some form of action to follow up. And I think this requires more digging. Personally, that's my stance. I know the goal was to ask the audience, not me, but that's. That's where I'm at.

[Linus Sebastian]

Why don't we pencil it in for 2027 and how about anchor has a really good year and doesn't screw anything up and we revisit in 2027? Does that make sense?

[Luke Lafreniere]

Partially. I. I need to go look into the apology that they gave because I don't know what they said and I'd like to know what they did. Like somebody said we need heads on sticks. And it's like, like, to a certain degree, this was like actually unacceptable. But again, you know, things change, times change, people change, et cetera. Especially at companies, staff changes. What was it? We heard a stat recently, like, most people stay at a company for two years. It's been more than that now. So there could be like a very significant level of turnover for the people involved in that. That. And maybe we're good to go by the time we're 2027, like you said, based on statistics, a huge portion of that company will have turned over. Maybe second chance is fine. But yeah, I think paying attention to what they do in that period of time would be really good and paying attention to the ways they communicate. And hopefully. Here's a weird take. Hopefully they have some form of problem so you can see how they deal with it.

[Linus Sebastian]

Gurgi Double O8 says they also promised a microsite that we never got focusing on security.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Interesting.

[Linus Sebastian]

Okay, I think this requires more digging.

[Luke Lafreniere]

And needs to dig more.

[Linus Sebastian]

I'm going to flag that I'm on a new laptop. I haven't pinned snipping tool to my taskbar yet.

[Luke Lafreniere]

You also have to remember they're a huge company. Even y' all have communication issues at your size. Even bigger has got to be worse. I. As far as my understanding goes, this one was bad. A lot worse. But this is kind of a different level of problem in my opinion.

[Linus Sebastian]

Okay, I think we need some more answers about how they've really changed. Also this. Let's pencil in for 2027. But they need to demonstrate in some way that they're.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Cultural hot take. If it takes this much digging to determine if an answer should be yes, maybe the answer should be no. 99% of who sees these spots isn't going to be doing the digging. I understand the take that you're trying to make, but I don't agree personally.

[Linus Sebastian]

But the flip side of it is that most people are just buying a battery, like a wall wart or a battery bank. And like, we just. We just did that labs article on an anchor wall wart that was just like a random side quest that Lucas was interested in. Like, it had nothing to do with this conversation that Colton's bringing up with me. And it's like a good wall wart. And so, like, why should we. Why should we not say, yeah, this is a good wall wart and get sponsorship dollars for it and then someone buys a good Walwort and then they enjoy their Walwort. Like, I just. Yes. And also no.

[Luke Lafreniere]

The only thing I hate about LMG is their indifference to crowdsource carriers. What.

[Linus Sebastian]

What are crowdsourced carriers?

[Luke Lafreniere]

What are crowdsourced carriers?

[Linus Sebastian]

Like, Like. Like for shipping.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Like Uber.

[Linus Sebastian]

Uber, but for parcels.

[Luke Lafreniere]

What? Sorry, what does this have to do with our indifference?

[Linus Sebastian]

I. This is the first I've heard of it. And also I need to look into this a lot more.

[Luke Lafreniere]

This feels so out of left field.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Indifference. Incoming. No, I mean, we've talked in defense of them a lot on WAN show. I genuinely don't know what you're talking about.

[Linus Sebastian]

But anyway, crowdsourced carriers. Yeah, we have.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Remember we had a topic not that long ago. We both got duped on it because it was like some AI slop thing. But we were talking about how Uber and all these different places are, like, often mistreating their drivers. They don't get paid very much. We've talked on one show about how like at a certain degree you're exchanging the value of your car for short term money. The fact that they're like little mini individual corporations, like hurts their ability to get things like health insurance and how it doesn't properly get flagged as not being employed. Even though in a lot of cases it effectively is. Like we've talked well this time before.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, I don't think that's quite what they're talking about though. I think they meant like crowdsourced carriers, like, like, like instead of FedEx or something. Am I, am I. Maybe I'm missing something here.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I don't know. I have no idea.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh, okay. All right, cool. Well, either way, that's neat. Should we, should we move on? I think I'm, I think I'm ready to leave it there. I kicked it back to the business team to do a bit more investigation and I think that one way or another this is still a little fresh and, and we can pencil it in for 2027 as long as they don't screw anything else up this year and as long as they tell us what exactly it is that they've done to show that their culture has moved beyond this behavior.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Sounds good. No notes. Google lets you remove explicit images and other personal info from search results. Google launched a tool to request removal of non consensual explicit images from search results. Users click the three dots on the image on the image result and select remove result. Okay.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Requests are trackable through Google's results about you hub, which also expanded to let users submit government ID numbers for monitoring. Major caveat is you have to give Google your data first.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah. And it only removes the results from Google search, not from the Internet itself. Well, yeah, it's something.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Which means crawlers are still going to get it. And crawlers are the thing that's becoming more common for Google search.

[Linus Sebastian]

The one really kind of cool. Sorry, it's. It's not in the notes. There is one other thing that's kind of cool is once you've requested a takedown, you don't have to like keep requesting takedowns. It'll proactively remove it again.

[Luke Lafreniere]

That is neat.

[Linus Sebastian]

It shows up again.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Do you think this will remove it from the AI summary?

[Linus Sebastian]

No. Oh, Google's own AI summary. I think probably will. I don't know about that. I don't think it gives image results. Really? Because that's not totally not AI, is it?

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh, maybe I've just never. Maybe I've never asked the AI for.

[Luke Lafreniere]

It'S given image Results from the lab's website.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh, fun time. Bloody hell. Okay, before we get into another business meeting, because I think that was one of our topics this week was to talk about.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Oh, is it actually in here?

[Linus Sebastian]

I don't know. I thought we were going to like kind of talk about the lab and how. Well, like what the future of the lab's website looks like if, if our traffic.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Okay, I don't have the chart here, so it's. It gets hurt a lot. I'll send an email.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, next, next week. But basically, yeah, AI. AI crawlers. We. We tried to turn them off and there's some interesting behavior. We'll get into that. Before we do our next topic though, I just want to talk about the Lina Khan thing from last week. What I was getting at, I went too far. I went too far and I'm sorry. What I was trying to get at is that being pro consumer and being based is sexy. That's all I was trying to say. It wasn't meant to be literally sexual. It was just like, it's so cool that it's like sexy wood. That's all. It wasn't meant to actually be personal. There. I said what I should have said right away afterward.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I don't think that helps. What you just said would again.

[Linus Sebastian]

But no, that's what I said last week. That's where I was going with it. Like I went too far because it wasn't meant to be about the actual person. It was just meant to be being super pro consumer and awesome is so good that it's like gone sexual. Yes. I'm not saying it wasn't dumb, Luke. Okay, that's all. That's all I have to say about it.

[Dan]

It.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Okay, okay.

[Linus Sebastian]

Alphabet is issuing 100 year bonds. Google's parent company will use the Sterling Century Bond to fund AI investments. Century bonds are highly unusual, especially in the tech sector where long term bonds usually top out at 40 years. Though IBM did sell a 100 year bond in 1996. Our discussion question here is. I got nothing from Jordan. This is crazy.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

Would. Would you have any faith whatsoever that Alphabet will still exist in 100 years, let alone be in any kind of condition to be paying you for holding their bonds because of, and I guess their logic. They need to build AI infrastructure so desperately and so immediately that they are mortgaging their future in order to have that AI infrastructure today. Is this. Am I, am I missing something here? Because I am. I am not like a financial services expert by any stretch of the imagination, but my My understanding is that basically they're just. You're giving them cash today and then they are giving you a return on that like effectively forever for life. But they will have to exist and they will have to have this money in order to continue to pay that out in the longer term. Which means, means that money you give them today, they have to generate a return on it, otherwise the whole thing doesn't make any sense. Am I missing something here?

[Luke Lafreniere]

If a company, oh man. If a company sells a hundred year bond and then the company itself is sold, the company that buys them would still owe on the hundred year bond, correct or no?

[Linus Sebastian]

I mean it's the guarantor. My understanding is Google's parent company, it's Alphabet, so it's a publicly held. So it's not about people at that point.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Okay. If Alpha, if Alphabet got taken private.

[Linus Sebastian]

Then it would be whoever privately owns them, then it would be their liability.

[Luke Lafreniere]

But it would transfer. Like they can't just be like oops, bought the company. I'm not going to pay these out anymore.

[Linus Sebastian]

Okay. While I will say like I, I could foresee a future where Alphabet doesn't exist anymore very easily, I, I don't think I foresee a future where Alphabet goes private at this point. They're just the scale that they've reached. It's. I don't.

[Luke Lafreniere]

And look, I, I'm just trying to say.

[Linus Sebastian]

I hate to use the I word.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Nothing's also have a crazy amount of. So someone, someone pointed out that IBM sold 100 year bonds in like 1996 or something. And I was thinking like, like oh no, that's in the dock. Yeah, I thought I sold my chat for whatever reason I could see that still being a thing because IBM just has so many patents and at this point they're just kind of sitting around with patents as far as I can tell.

[Linus Sebastian]

No, they do stuff.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Okay, sure. I could still see. Yeah. As far as my understanding goes they're doing that to generate patents. But anyways that's a topic for another time. I could still see Google being around because of the amount of things that they've made, But that's where like their, their, their like IP and their patents being important or you know, YouTube has proven a new age of YouTube staying.

[Linus Sebastian]

Power.

[Luke Lafreniere]

And maybe Google just exists forever now. Look at how much they killed off. Yeah, yeah, tons. Tons of.

[Linus Sebastian]

What I really want to know guys is am I missing something here? Is this as crazy as it seems to be on the surface?

[Luke Lafreniere]

Nuts. Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

Nobody seems to think that I've gone crazy here. Well, at least for this anyway.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, just this. Not the previous thing.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. No, it's crazy. Okay. We're all on the same page. Well, no, you just that you buy. I don't know how much total they issued, but like billions is my understanding. And. But you, you buy like what you want to buy. Yeah, yeah. Insomniac says nobody ever thought bitcoin was going to be worth a hundred thousand dollars. Got some bad news for you, Insomniac. It isn't.

[Luke Lafreniere]

How much is it gonna be worth in 100 years?

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, 100 years.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Like maybe an incredible amount more. Maybe nothing. Yeah, because maybe we have quantum coin at that point or something. Who knows?

[Linus Sebastian]

Who knows?

[Luke Lafreniere]

Or people decide to scam in some other way. Not that bitcoin's really heavy on that, but that space is. Bite coin. Oh, what an evolution. I'm sure somebody's done that already.

[Linus Sebastian]

Okay, all right. I did. Yeah. It seems like, it seems like this is. It seems like this is. Yeah. Just as crazy as it sounds to me. Is this just people being absolute like, like, like wealthy investors and funds being desperate for somewhere to put money right now that it's not going to rot? Like, is. Is that the issue with, with the way inflation's going with the US dollar and the way the US dollar is devaluing with the way that gold doesn't generate passive income? Like there's, there's reasons that all these different asset classes exist. This, you don't want to just have everything in real estate. Like, is this just like, like Tex Tech company bonds? Is this, is this the new YOLO Hail Mary? Because there's so much money being managed by, by some firm that they're just kind of like, well, we got to buy something with it. And okay, here's a thing. And if this doesn't work, then like, you know, whatever. Some of the other things we did will probably work really good. Like, is that, that, is that what's going on here?

[Luke Lafreniere]

No idea, man. None of the financial stuff makes any sense to me anymore. Everybody's just doing stocks based on vibes and now we're doing 100 year long bonds based on probably vibes. Just nothing means anything anymore.

[Linus Sebastian]

Scrappy DP says no, this is Google raising capital. Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, I understand why Google wants to do it.

[Dan]

It.

[Linus Sebastian]

The part that I don't understand is why anyone wants to buy it. That's what, that's what I'm trying to figure out.

[Luke Lafreniere]

No, it's not A new thing. Look at preferred stocks and perpetual bonds.

[Linus Sebastian]

Preferred stocks and perpetual bonds. Not a new thing. Okay, all right. Okay.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Just to be treated as equity. Why wouldn't you just. Just buy actual equity? It's a public company.

[Linus Sebastian]

Well, maybe there's some tax reason for it then, so you can borrow against it. Because a bond is. Is more certain. It's like, it's. It's a guaranteed payout that's, you know, lower than the.

[Luke Lafreniere]

More bonds are safer. Aggressive appreciation tied to share price.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, all right.

[Luke Lafreniere]

We're just getting into weird lands we don't necessarily understand.

[Linus Sebastian]

I mean, I can. I can wrap my brain around that, but I also just have to.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, we're like, the comparatives are things that we haven't necessarily heard of, which is like, okay, we should probably just get out of here.

[Linus Sebastian]

A bond is only a guarantee as long as the guarantor is able to guarantee it. I mean, that's why, like, U.S. government bonds were so popular for so long, because, well, yeah, the US Government won't go anywhere and they can always just, you know, print more money or whatever. But like buying a bond from a company that pivots as often and as hard as Google does for a hundred years. A hundred. A hundred years. Alphabet bonds. 100 years. Like, I. Okay, sure. Why don't we do another topic?

[Luke Lafreniere]

Sure.

[Linus Sebastian]

Sony will ship their final Blu Ray recorders this month. Blu Ray players will continue production for now. That's all. Just wanted to flag that. Blu Rays. Blu Ray's death is not greatly exaggerated. It seems like it is finally, finally coming. Finally coming. Cool. See you later. Blu Ray. Does anyone. Is anyone in chat? Gonna miss Blu Ray. Oh, east of Easton, Blu Ray recorders. Yep.

[Luke Lafreniere]

What is that for?

[Linus Sebastian]

Like, like writing. What is that for? Like, burners. Remember burners?

[Luke Lafreniere]

Why would you call it a recorder?

[Linus Sebastian]

Well, that was often what they were called back in the day. Writers. Burners. Recorders. I think the.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Never heard it called a recorder.

[Linus Sebastian]

I think the burner parlance kind of went away pretty early on. But, like, consumers liked it because it. That was cool. Yeah, but you have writer recorder. Yeah, 100%. Let's just do the float plane announcements. Yeah, some of these other ones are really depressing.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I don't know what.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh, check this out. Want to bring up the Interface? There are three early access LTT videos and two amazing floatplane exclusives up this week. One of the three Christmas bonuses this year was allowing employees to spend $1,000 on whatever they choose as long as they go with fellow employees. Sammy Chewy Ariana and Belle vlogged their time spending their thousand dollars on a bunch of stuff like a base belt, clothes, and a book. Fun fact. Of the three options, about 95% of the company chose to spend the $1,000 and then have a paid day off. There were other options. In fact, Luke and Dan were the only two people that picked one of the other options. Do you want to talk about it? You guys are done now, right?

[Luke Lafreniere]

No, but we're done. The primary portion. Except I forgot you're supposed to take the day off. And I wouldn't have been able to anyway, so I didn't do that part. But we. We got four really, like, fancy, very fancy cooking glasses, and we got a. We went to a Michelin star restaurant and had the day off. The day that we went to the.

[Linus Sebastian]

Michelin star restaurant, Luke didn't realize just how fancy it was until. What, they showed you the meat or something?

[Luke Lafreniere]

Oh, the cooking classes? Yeah. That was crazy. I was just like, oh, cool. For cooking classes. Neat. And then. Yeah. They went over the ingredients list, and I was like, whoa, okay. All right.

[Linus Sebastian]

Like, what was it? I forget. You told me.

[Luke Lafreniere]

At some point there's like this. Can you describe the. The lamb, Dan?

[Dan]

Yeah, it's like a special New Zealand lamb grown by sort of a small farm with very particular rules and regulations. And it's not sold retail. It's only given to a couple different restaurants when they start talking about crap.

[Luke Lafreniere]

The person's name that they know that they give it through and stuff.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah.

[Dan]

Jeffrey's brought this over and he's like, I work for a different company now. Do you want lamb? And it's like, oh, okay. Restaurant's a bit.

[Luke Lafreniere]

When the. When each individual ingredient in the food has a story. You know, you're paying a lot of money, so. So that was neat. And then we went to Michelin star restaurant. We did that last night, actually. That's right. So we did our thing yesterday. And that's when I was like, yeah. My favorite part was the potato, to be fair.

[Dan]

It was a very fancy potato.

[Luke Lafreniere]

It was an extremely fancy.

[Dan]

It was like a rosette done sort.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Of scalloped, surrounded by potato skin cream.

[Dan]

Which was very nice. It had some sort of cheese or something on it as well.

[Luke Lafreniere]

It was really good. It was a. It's excellent, unique experience.

[Dan]

I would say so, too. We did eight courses.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

Cool.

[Dan]

Yeah. Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

Anyway, most people just got the shopping spree.

[Dan]

I still haven't figured out why no one else picked this. It's been amazing.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I'm very happy with the choice so far.

[Dan]

I still have two courses to go.

[Luke Lafreniere]

It's four classes.

[Linus Sebastian]

Classes.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

Sorry. All right. We also have a blue screen of death competition featuring Elijah, Danny, one of our new writers, Jordan and Tatiana to see who can get a blue screen the fastest. If early releases are more to your tastes, we've got three. We released Tuesday's video a whole week early on floatplane which has Elijah converting from an Android to an iPhone and given giving his reasons as to why. We also bought a ninety thousand dollars. Oh, sorry, no. They provided a ninety thousand dollar TV plouf and I unbox and at least help a little bit with the assembly to see how good it is. It's crazy. It's incredible. Spoiler. Sorry. And finally, our dash cam roundup which will release right now, is coming early. Fill your weekend with exclusives and early access at lmg, gg, slash fpwan. What the heck? Sammy, why would you write do this call to action first, please. At the end of the doc or the end of the segment, it's red and bold and in larger font and it has like. Like little. Whatever the little hats are called. The little shift. Shift six the hats. It has a bunch of hats. Do this first, please, Sammy. Why would you put it at the end? Okay. Luke, please show the screen. What is this here? Sammy's here. How did you get here?

[Luke Lafreniere]

You want me to show the document? No, show the float plane landing page. The flow plane landing page.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, I supposed to do. Yeah, show the things. Show the thing.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Okay.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, I don't.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I don't know.

[Linus Sebastian]

What are you doing in the call, Sammy? Can they hear you? Yeah.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Show the things. Show the things. Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

Blue screen death.

[Dan]

Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

Are you even. Oh, I don't know why.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I'm still here.

[Linus Sebastian]

Why am I still here? Yeah. It's late, dude. I don't know.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I didn't realize you like ran onto set and I was like, how am I hearing Sammy right right now?

[Linus Sebastian]

I couldn't. I couldn't see him. So I really was confused.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I didn't see him at first. I didn't. Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

Anyways, I. I just. I just need. I just need you to go on the right screen. Okay, bye.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Okay.

[Linus Sebastian]

I thought he just hacked into our call.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, I was really impressed.

[Linus Sebastian]

I was like, wow, your mic's really good.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

All right.

[Dan]

Either the other section of sponsors.

[Linus Sebastian]

We can do more. Talk to us. No. Noctua. Noctua celebrates half a million CPU cooler mounting upgrade kits. This is so cool. This is from Tom's Hardware for the past 20 years. Yeah, exactly.

[Luke Lafreniere]

It's actually very cool. I like that they celebrated it.

[Linus Sebastian]

This is so based. This is so pro consumer that I think it's sexy wood. For the past 20 years, whatever Roland would be. For the past 20 years, Noctua has been offering mounting upgrade kits. Yeah, they have. For free. To anyone with a valid receipt for a Noctua cooler. This is with the intention of your Noctua cooler being able to be effectively the last cooler you ever buy. As long as you don't. You don't need the, you know, the. The better performance of whatever their new gen one is. I believe you have to pay shipping. That's my understanding. But the. The kit itself is available for free and. And this is great for those without the receipt. The kits are still available on marketplaces for around $10. You can. And we actually did a YouTube short on this before the 20 year mark, but after, I don't know, it was like 16 years or something like that where we took the very first Noctua cooler. We actually had them send us one. They still had a unit of the very, very first Noctua Heatsink. And we mounted it to the very latest CPU and showed it working and it was awesome. And it was great. And the fact that they will support a product like that for so long is. It's just. It's admirable. Very admirable. And I love it. Whoa. Binky Draw says not even shipping. You only need to pay if you want it expedited. That actually explains that time that Noctua sent us a bulk shipment of mounting kits for us to reship for them, because I guess they were trying to save a little bit of money. Interesting. So cool. What?

[Luke Lafreniere]

Just you, dude.

[Linus Sebastian]

You're just upset that my kink is being pro consumer.

[Dan]

That's so our gink now.

[Luke Lafreniere]

That's so weird.

[Dan]

Come on, Luke.

[Luke Lafreniere]

You know there's some people that you might have an uncomfortable attraction to based on that.

[Dan]

Yeah. Knocked you out. It's kind of weird, dude.

[Linus Sebastian]

I'm not uncomfortable with it.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I think you might be.

[Linus Sebastian]

I think Jacob would laugh it off.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Okay. All right. Let's try to go to something that doesn't arouse Linus Somehow. Logitech G is not going to create an AI device that plays the game for you in their Pro lineup.

[Linus Sebastian]

Too late. I'm into it.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Logitech G Pro series product manager Chris Pate was interviewed on Tom by Tom's Guide about the future of AI and Logitech products. And then in quotes Logitech, as a company, is very much looking at how to use AI and how to incorporate AI into, you know, both product development and into products themselves. From the. From a certain point of view. From the point of view of competitive integrity and esports specifically, I think we have to be very careful about how we use, potentially integrate and touch the Pro series with AI Touch. You didn't have to use. Just careful. Linus is here. We would never do it in a way that would compromise competitive integrity. We're not going to create an AI device that plays the game for you, right?

[Linus Sebastian]

No, no, no. Keep reading. It's good.

[Luke Lafreniere]

That's absolutely outside the bounds of what using that type of technology would be applied to the Pro line. Okay.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, so I just. Nothing. I just thought, that's cool. Yeah, good job. Logic. It's not cool for drawing a line. Right. Because taking a stance right now against AI in any way feels like. Like corporate kryptonite and just coming out and saying. And like, okay, it seems so obvious, right? No, we're not going to create an AI product that, like, plays the game for you because that's completely against the integrity of competition. Yeah, that seems obvious, doesn't it, Luke? And yet you've got all these monitor manufacturers that are figuring that started with a crosshair, started with a cheat, cheating crosshair.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, you're supposed to just put masking tape on your screen and then put a little cross on it.

[Linus Sebastian]

Stop. And then. And then got as far as like, sending alerts like that, that they would monitor what's going on on screen in your mini map and send you alerts if you're about to get ganked. Like, that is not playing the game anymore.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Speaking of. Nope.

[Linus Sebastian]

No, go ahead.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Speaking of things that Logitech could maybe use AI for maybe naming their mice, there's a new article on the Labs website making sense of Logitech's mouse lineup, where we go through their different things. This is like, the opposite of sponsored by Logitech, where we go through their different product lines and try to make sense of their naming schemes because they're a little.

[Linus Sebastian]

Should this be an ltt? Could this just be an ltt? Could I just take this article, write a script, and then just make it an ltt?

[Luke Lafreniere]

I think if you wanted to make it an ltt, I think you might. Might need to do more than just the Logitech mouse lineup. I think you might want to do, like, a couple companies or something.

[Linus Sebastian]

Why?

[Luke Lafreniere]

I don't know.

[Linus Sebastian]

I mean, they're the. They're Hands down, the leader in the space. You hear? I mean, I think you and I have probably said more times than we can count. You want a good gaming mouse that'll last you a long time. Find something from Logitech's lineup.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

So what's wrong with that?

[Luke Lafreniere]

And then if it's successful, Anything to do with that?

[Linus Sebastian]

And then if it's successful, hell marks 100% right. We just do the same thing with Razor. And then it's a whole series. Because you could try.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I think you can try it. I think I should try more. I would watch that. I. Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

Think.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Okay. That's an awesome business meeting time. I think sometimes we are often led by fear, and I think in the current YouTube environment, that actually doesn't. You know, in a weird way, I think the craziness going on with the algorithm right now benefits not being very fearful about your content, because if you release something that sucks, the algorithm doesn't really seem like it punishes you as hard as it used to. It just will not give it any views. So there's a possibility this video gets 300,000 views, which for us would be pretty rough. But if that does happen, then the next one can still do really well. So you don't have the momentum issue that you had in the past. So. So just go for it. Yeah. Sick.

[Linus Sebastian]

Since we're having a business meeting, there's.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

Dan, I just dropped a link to the LTT subreddit in the. In your teams. Yeah. Should we start publishing to Pornhub?

[Luke Lafreniere]

Sure.

[Linus Sebastian]

Apparently, the AD CPMs are 3x.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah. Nice. Just do it. There's also. If you need to do research for making your video, you could go. Lucas has been posting all the articles on the LTT subreddit, and I think somebody pointed out that we, like, missed one of the mice or something. So maybe there's some additional detail in the comments. We do read the comments in there, check them out on the subreddit.

[Linus Sebastian]

But.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, I don't know. You'd have to find an employee that wouldn't mind doing that. I'm sure there is one. You just put yourself on screen.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, he's gonna put up the screen.

[Luke Lafreniere]

No, that's not what happened.

[Linus Sebastian]

I missed it.

[Dan]

Luke, can you throw it up if you want to?

[Luke Lafreniere]

What? What am I throwing up? I'm not.

[Linus Sebastian]

Potatoes.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Potatoes. Okay. What am I putting on screen right now?

[Dan]

I'll try and find where you guys are on the dock. It was this link Linus sent to me.

[Linus Sebastian]

This is crazy. It's from a STEM creator.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Sorry, where is this?

[Dan]

It's under the logitech topic.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Okay. I wasn't there anymore. I see it. Ltc. So it's a subreddit thing. This looks probably fine.

[Linus Sebastian]

It's safe for work. I've sent it. All right, relax, guys.

[Luke Lafreniere]

People may not know this, but I publish the same STEM videos on both YouTube and. Can I say it? I think so. On the Hub. While YouTube generally generates more views, the ad revenue per million views on the hub is nearly three times higher. Other creators are uploading STEM videos on the hub and seeing two times the revenue. Since most of the subreddit spends their time on the Hub anyways, it seems like a smart move for LTT to post there.

[Linus Sebastian]

To be clear, I don't think this is something that we would do for the same reason that we have certain ad verticals disabled on YouTube. I don't. I don't know that I'd be particularly like. There's a reason that these advertisers pay more. It's because fewer sites will take them, Right?

[Luke Lafreniere]

Oh, that.

[Linus Sebastian]

That's why the CPMs are so high. I mean, we've had this conversation a thousand times around. Like, the LTT forum. We'll have some agency approach us. Oh, yeah, I could sell. I could. I could make you rich with ads on your community forum. And I'm like, yeah, how? And they go, oh, well, all you have to do is have ads for this stuff. And I'm like, yeah, okay, we're good. But I just. I thought. I thought it was interesting.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I think you could. You could try it and see what the community feedback is. Try stuff. Do it. We already have someone who will volunteer to do the uploading. They already volunteered.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah.

[Dan]

We could upload, like, the good news stuff there. Like, it could be a good news.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Consumer protection news break.

[Dan]

Yeah.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Give yourself a break and let's give me.

[Linus Sebastian]

Take a break.

[Dan]

Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

Who volunteered to do the uploads? Was this Elijah?

[Luke Lafreniere]

No, Dan did, immediately.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh. Oh. That was what he was doing.

[Luke Lafreniere]

You'd have to find an employee who would. Who would be, like, willing to do this. I am a team player. Waived immediately.

[Dan]

I'll take one for the team, and.

[Linus Sebastian]

Then if you have a partner to help you with it. Is it a double team?

[Dan]

Yeah, we'll double team the LTT videos.

[Luke Lafreniere]

A good news break would be good news. Oh, my God. That's funny.

[Dan]

Damn, that's pretty good. We're gonna get some work out of the feed cam anyway.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Oh, my goodness.

[Dan]

Is it possible to make too much money.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I just. Whatever. Just do it. See what community feedback is. No one in chat right now is like, oh, my goodness, you can't do that. That would be bad. Like, nobody seems to care.

[Dan]

Is that going to make our brand worse?

[Luke Lafreniere]

We were already on Onlyfans.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, that's true. Look, Luke, I don't think I've ever not been a try anything twice kind of entrepreneur.

[Luke Lafreniere]

The. Try it it.

[Linus Sebastian]

All right.

[Luke Lafreniere]

No balls.

[Dan]

I can't hold it.

[Linus Sebastian]

All right, all right, all right, all right.

[Dan]

Can we move on, please?

[Linus Sebastian]

We'll do it. Dan. Dan's going to create the account then, right? Is. Did you actually volunteer to do this? Because I can't. I can't tell you to do this.

[Dan]

No, I'll do it. Yeah, you can use my account. It's fine. I mean the work account. The work account, it's in.

[Linus Sebastian]

Keeper.

[Dan]

We're fine.

[Linus Sebastian]

We have a work account.

[Luke Lafreniere]

No.

[Linus Sebastian]

Well, I don't know.

[Dan]

We might.

[Luke Lafreniere]

We might need to contact them to get the username. I'm. I'm. I bet you someone took it.

[Linus Sebastian]

Say nothing. I'm sure they. I'm sure they'd get it for us. I think we've been in touch with them before. I'm sure we'd have. Yep. Okay. I still want to do a data center tour.

[Dan]

Yeah, that actually would be very cool.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

The dirtiest data center water cooled.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Questionable liquids.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah.

[Dan]

These are mineral oil PCs.

[Linus Sebastian]

When there's.

[Dan]

Recycled.

[Linus Sebastian]

When there's a leak, does it squirt? And he's dead.

[Dan]

Oh, we need two fingers to plug this hole. What's our next topic? Do you want to talk about ourselves?

[Linus Sebastian]

What would be the ratio of small white servers to large black servers?

[Dan]

Oh, I mean, Luke seen my server at home.

[Linus Sebastian]

So.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Oh, man.

[Dan]

Maybe it's that.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Oh, man.

[Linus Sebastian]

Okay.

[Luke Lafreniere]

All right.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah. Why don't we do sponsor spots and then we have some good after that.

[Luke Lafreniere]

You want to put a little buffer in front of that. You want to do a little no notes topic real quick?

[Linus Sebastian]

No, we're gonna do.

[Dan]

We need some aftercare here, Luke.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Exactly. Exactly.

[Linus Sebastian]

Before the show is brought to you today by.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I tried. The sponsors are. I tried. Okay.

[Linus Sebastian]

By Zero Bounce, if you run a business that must send out emails in large quantities, those messages are only useful if they arrive at their destination. Zero Bounce is a service that helps clean up email data so your messages can actually hit the intended inboxes. Not old or dead accounts. Zero Bounce claims that over 28% of emails disappear every year. You may not even notice how many of your messages bounce. Until they're already affecting your business. Several companies already use Zero Bounce, like Samsung, Netflix, Amazon and more. So whether you're a business owner developing software as a service or you're a creator, check out Zero Bounce. Go to ZeroBounce.net Linus-wan to save 20% today. The show is also brought to you by UPDF. Have you ever tried to edit or transcribe a PDF only to be hit with a confusing wall of inconsistent limitations? Well, our sponsor, UPDF wants to give you back control of how you edit, annotate or organize your documents. They now make it even easier than before to have it work across as many devices as you need. Tablets, phones, PCs. You're covered. You can edit text and images like your PDF is a Word doc, and you can even. You can even send a irate email to whoever sent you a PDF instead of something else in the first place. Yeah, but you don't have to because you have updated, so it doesn't really matter. You can even use OCR to turn physical scans into searchable documents and convert things into Doc or Excel sheets without breaking your layout. UPDF's legitimately, like, pretty super cool. I wish it didn't need to exist. But it does need to exist and it's pretty cool that it does. So if you need help finding sources or summarizing a PDF, their AI Scholar research tool can help speed up that process. It does all kinds of cool stuff, so take control and save time with UPDF by hitting up our link and getting a special 2026 discount while you're at it. All right. Should we talk about Beast bank now?

[Luke Lafreniere]

I think you could have a lot of fun with the titles videos uploaded over there.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh for sure.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Someone in FLO Chat already said that you should do like explaining what DP is and it's just an exploration of DisplayPort.

[Linus Sebastian]

Nice.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Like a fully safe for work explanation of DisplayPort port.

[Dan]

This is going to be great.

[Luke Lafreniere]

And then. And then there's all those exploring DP with my co workers, but there's all those videos that are like yeah, I got stuck in the washing machine or whatever.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah.

[Luke Lafreniere]

So you can do titles that are actually like not really innuendo y but seem like they might be because of the content.

[Dan]

I think you could use the do.

[Linus Sebastian]

You like the shape of my new screwdriver?

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. She checks out my screwdriver.

[Dan]

One in each hand.

[Luke Lafreniere]

10 million views anyway. Speaking of 10 million views. No notes. YouTube Music lyrics now require a premium subscription. YouTube Music is rolling out a 5 free lyric view limit on their platform. Once you hit that limit, only the first few lines are visible with the rest blurred unless you subscribe. YouTube Music Premium costs $11 a month in the US while full YouTube Premium is 13.99amonth in the US I don't know why pretty much anyone would get just YouTube Music Premium. And my reason for saying that is not because they grow you too cheap to get the whole YouTube Premium. My reason for that is I would just get something else. Shopify or sorry, Spotify or something. YouTube Music really is like the thing that you have because you have YouTube Premium. Just like how every company uses teams because they happen to have the office suite and teams happens to be there, which makes it like the best option. Not because it's actually good.

[Linus Sebastian]

Just so I only, I only highlighted this because it's, I guess wonderful that YouTube is finding ways to make. Or Google is finding ways to make YouTube music worse instead of making it more like Google Play music, which was awesome.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

So yeah, this. This blows. And. And that's all that I have to say about that.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Google says it now has 325plus million paid subscribers across services.

[Linus Sebastian]

That's pretty good.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I am assuming that includes Google Workspace.

[Linus Sebastian]

Also not that meaningful because their services are so broad.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah. And YouTube brought in over 60 billion in ads and subscriptions in 2025.

[Linus Sebastian]

All right, what else we got? Microsoft is rolling out a new secure boot certificate before the old ones expire in June.

[Dan]

June.

[Linus Sebastian]

So they've started pushing these through monthly Windows updates ahead of June 2026, which is the expiration of the original 2011 certificates. Secure Boot verifies trusted bootloaders that startup blocking things like rootkits from loading before Windows begins. The new certificates are being automatically deployed to supported Windows 11, 24H2 and 25H2 systems, though some devices may require firmware updates from OEMs first. Basically we're just flagging this to like look into your device, make sure that you're not going to enter a degraded security state with reduced boot level protections and all that good stuff. Also in other news, T Mobile introduces live translations with no app required. I thought that was pretty cool. I don't have the opportunity to try it because I'm not on T Mobile, so. Yep, there you go. That's pretty neat. And I don't know, sounds cool. Someone try it out and let me know.

[Luke Lafreniere]

So they're recording all your calls is what I'm saying.

[Linus Sebastian]

Of course they are. Yeah. Cool. Don't you love the world I want to talk about Ayaneo's new handheld. They the first time Ayaneo did like like we're making something that's really high end. They called it the Aya Neo Next and it was a pretty cool handheld back in the day. They just announced the next two which without Early Bird pricing on Indiegogo is starting at $2,000 and the maxed out spec will be $4,300. We are literally in decent secondhand car territory.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Multiple times the cost of my first car and I'm also assuming that's USD so it's like a few multiple times.

[Linus Sebastian]

The maxed out specs include a 9 inch 165hz OLED at 2400 by 1504 that reaches 1155 nits. The AMD Ryzen AI Max Plus 395 so this is a 16 core CPU 16 core mobile CPU Zen 5 cores that has an rDNA. What is it? Something something point something not for the previous one has an RDNA graphic GPU that's like about on par with kind of an entry level mobile dedicated GPU. Like this thing is flipping powerful. Rdna 3.5 thanks vocadist, diaboli or whatever. Up to 128 gigs of LPDDR 5X memory at 8533 mega transfers per second 2 TB of NVMe storage, TMR joysticks hall effect triggers a 116 watt hour battery that is going to make it so that you have to fill out special paperwork in order to take it on a plane. And it weighs about a kilogram and a half. Oh three and a half pounds.

[Luke Lafreniere]

That's sick.

[Linus Sebastian]

Do you want to show it on screen? As someone who already has spent a fair bit of time daily driving a GPD Win five, this is the last category of products that needs fierce competition. The the Strix Halo Handheld gaming PC space. It looks like a pretty cool little device though. Ayaneo has run into some trouble recently with their customers being kind of irate at them for reasons that I don't a hundred percent know right now but seem to be valid. I I like very briefly scanned it like supporting devices after the fact and stuff like that. I actually kind of like what GPD did with the win 5. The I when I unboxed it I thought it was really stupid but the more I've used it the more I've really liked their battery tether. I just put it in the pocket of my cargo pants and then it makes it so that it feels like a normal weight and I don't have to carry around a massive, massive battery with it. With that said, even, even with the giant battery. Oh, dude. It feels like, it feels like rocking out to my Zune.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

Um, even with the massive battery that it has, it still doesn't like last that long. I mostly used it, used it plugged in. But it's nice to be able to game in bed at like really high fidelity. I played Most of Expedition 33 on the GPD win five east of Easton.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Said good thing this can't fly because you won't after those prices either. And while I think that's really funny, I think the people that can afford that and will buy that will be able to fly afterwards because that's what's happening to the economy.

[Linus Sebastian]

Hey, did you hear about the new concept, the E shaped economy?

[Luke Lafreniere]

No.

[Linus Sebastian]

So it's to, it's to capture that the, the top of the K, right, is, is never going to approach the middle class again, which is going to remain enormously elevated from the, the very bottom who are struggling a lot. So this is, this is like a new kind of way of describing it. Yeah. So now we've got. The stratification has expanded. It's not that that the middle class is going to be coming along.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, that's not bad. I still think K shaped is a better descriptor for most people, but the.

[Linus Sebastian]

K shaped I think better shows the divergence.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, yeah, but that is interesting. What else is interesting in finance is that Mr. Beast finally been waiting for this. Bought a banking app. Now I can finally do real banking. Beast Industries. Mr. Beast Co. Has acquired Steps, which has apparently 7 million users, a financial services app for teens and young adults that has banking services provided by Step's banking partner, Evolve bank and trust. This follows Mr. Beast's announcement of a new YouTube channel focused on personal finance and investing backed by his own bank. That's cool. Other ventures include ghost restaurants, feastables and 10 trillion other things. First move into financial services, which feels like he's employing a strategy to continue to monetize his audience as they age, moving from snacks into savings. Although people definitely still buy snacks when they're older. Discussion Question Given the recent rash of influencer hyped mean coin rug pulls, I don't think that's recent. Do you think this is more of the same? Another grift or a sound business model strategy for Beast Industries? I suspect it will be a legitimate bank and I suspect it will be a legitimate bank that gets a lot of its customers through insane marketing from his financial channel. And it will be more successful than it should be because of that. I think it will be boring.

[Linus Sebastian]

I think it's a pretty sound business decision. I think that, I mean, I said years ago that he'd be the first YouTube billionaire. I think he is. He's past it now, right?

[Luke Lafreniere]

No idea. But he might as well be.

[Linus Sebastian]

Huh? I don't know. I haven't had like a chat with him in a long time time when he was younger though I can, I can say that he seemed to mostly have his heart in the right place. Even if not every. Even if I like wouldn't agree with every decision that he made and he did some things that I think were ill advised. I would like to hopefully believe that he would find a way to make his bank, you know, not predatory or whatever. But I, I've also seen Beast endeavors that have been kind of running seemingly pretty independently and he seems like he's stretched really thin like between the content and feastables and I, I would and.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Have bought, you know, I've bought YouTuber shirts. I've bought a wide variety of different YouTuber merch things. I've supported YouTubers on Patreon and Floatplane and, and whatnot. I think it's really cool that there's YouTuber creator Candy. I haven't bought any of it, but I totally would. I think I'm good doing my banking with some boring people in boring, really boring suited people. Ideally, like as boring as possible. Really. Like I want to walk in and immediately want to yawn and just be bored and then walk out with a bank account. That works. I think, I think that's what I want them to do. Personally. This is not financial advice, but please.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, I do them says not gonna lie. Feastables taste like trash. Well, the original ones were actually really good. They were pretty high cocoa content. They were like, like actually pretty good quality chocolate. And then they reformulated them to be more appealing to the average Mr. Beast viewer. And also they're probably cheaper to make now. So now they taste a lot more like the chocolate on a Kit Kat or whatever. But the early ones were actually pretty good. Like if you like quality chocolate that has like high. Is high in cocoa. My kids, I, I had like some really nice Swiss chocolate that was like 65 or 70% cocoa or something like that. And I was, I was treating myself to like an after dinner just piece of chocolate and they were like, oh, what's that? That doesn't look like you know, the chocolate we've had before, I'm like, oh, this is chocolate. They're like, well, yeah, but like. I'm like, no, no, but like, this is chocolate. And they tried it. I was actually surprised that they all liked it. I think I. I probably put my thumb on the scale a little bit by giving them extremely small pieces because the bitterness can be not that appealing to a younger palette. But they all really. They all really liked it. And I was like, oh, okay. Yeah. Well, it's really expensive, so we're not going to have it in the house very often. But, yeah, that's chocolate. It's really good.

[Luke Lafreniere]

People are saying it's technically not a bank. It's just a fintech company that is backed by a bank.

[Linus Sebastian]

Sounds like it needs to exist even less, but, yeah, I don't know.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I don't. I'm just supremely not interested. And maybe somebody will be, but this. This ain't for me.

[Linus Sebastian]

Cool.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Hey, that's a finance app aimed at Gen Z and Gen Alpha. People like, you're. You're just slowly doing the reverses of winning me over. So anyways, not for me. I won't be engaging. Not financial advice. Do whatever the hell you want. See you later. After dark.

[Linus Sebastian]

It's after dark.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I think it's after dark.

[Linus Sebastian]

I mean, it's clearly after dark. Oh, actually, there's lights on outside. It's not that clearly after dark. It's definitely after dark.

[Dan]

Well, that's why there's lights on outside.

[Linus Sebastian]

Nice. Solid.

[Dan]

All right, I don't have too many for you here. Luke, Dan and Linus. Has there ever been an item bought for an AMD upgrade where you were like, I could use that? And eventually bought it? Also, float blending exclusives are too good lately. Tammy, tone it back.

[Linus Sebastian]

No, I am not in the dashboard. And I usually don't actually listen to you. I read along because I process information better that way. I need to log into the dashboard right now.

[Dan]

Yeah, that's why. That's why I read them. So you can read it. Yeah, I will DM them to.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, don't you want to see?

[Dan]

That's probably too behind the curtain for floatplane jet. Have you ever. Has there ever been an item bought on an AMD upgrade where you thought that you could use it and eventually bought one?

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh. Oh, man. Hold on. Fill record.

[Dan]

Is this.

[Linus Sebastian]

Is this gonna work? Nice. Okay, I'm in. I hacked the mainframe grills.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Linus has grills now.

[Linus Sebastian]

Okay, very funny.

[Luke Lafreniere]

He only wears them off camera.

[Dan]

You got into.

[Linus Sebastian]

I thought you're making fun of my braces.

[Luke Lafreniere]

No, but I should have. They are the right color.

[Dan]

Got him.

[Linus Sebastian]

I'm sorry. I'm so sorry. I missed that because I was trying to think.

[Luke Lafreniere]

That's okay. I liked it enough. You didn't even need to laugh. I enjoyed it myself.

[Linus Sebastian]

I was pretty tempted by the live Laugh Liao neon sign, but I, I just, I couldn't spend money on that. Like I. I'd love to have one, but I wouldn't love to buy it. Yeah, that was pretty rough.

[Luke Lafreniere]

There's so many things I would love to have for free. That is very. I like that. That's good.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah. You know what? I would be. I would, I would be tempted. I would have been tempted to pick up some of like the cool bike stickers that Andrew had in his first motorbike. But then I painted my bike. Uh, let's see what else we got. Man, I don't know. It's. It's funny because other than my like tech junk, I actually don't like having a lot of clutter. I'm like such a millennial gray. Don't have extra stuff anywhere person. No, no. I actually haven't. Haven't really found much that I've been that interested in.

[Dan]

Okay.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Surprise, surprise. Neither.

[Dan]

Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

But usually.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Although I do think that a lot of the purchase that people have made are cool and suit them.

[Linus Sebastian]

Hold on. No, no. That might, might have been a bit of a lie because I, I wasn't dailying an OLED when the first person went OLED for their gaming machine. I don't think. And I, I think I, I went mo LED shortly after that.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Is that why though?

[Linus Sebastian]

I mean like I, I guess the thing for me is that I'm. I'm already aware of most stuff tech wise before I. I see it on an AMD upgrade.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

And. And a lot of the non tech stuff stuff is people's own hobbies and their own interests which I don't necessarily share because I, My main hobby is running a business because if it isn't, then your business isn't really likely to be very successful unless you are really, really, really, really, really good at it. And you can run your own business in 40 hours a week which is like wow, that's cool. Especially in the early days. Like wow, good job.

[Dan]

Up next, I have had the joy of running a stem camp for kids of all ages recently.

[Linus Sebastian]

That's cool.

[Dan]

I'm constantly looking for cool experience experiments or activities in tech for it. Do you have any Suggestions for a cool stem activity. Fractions.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I really liked making like catapults and stuff.

[Dan]

Trebuchet.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, trebuchet is catapults. That's really fun. And you can like get them to try to do the math before every shot of like where it's gonna land. Like I like actually tie in like actual learning objectives. Don't just do the fun part. This one must reward the. Yeah, reward the. I did the math stuff with thing. Get thrown and go bang. And that's cool.

[Dan]

Here's your projectile. It has to go exactly 200ft.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah. Math, please. This may be beyond the scope and is honestly just because I've had to have this conversation a lot of times recently with my kids. But I, I'd love it if you did a little thing on like adhesives and helped them understand, you know, how they function and why some of them work for some things and don't work.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Super glues. Just like explaining super glue at all.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah. Like my kids keep trying to use hot glue on 3D prints and I keep having to explain that no, in fact you can't do that unless depending on the filament, maybe you can, but it's really not optimal for what they were trying to do. And it's just the kind of thing that I think we don't really get like taught. I like, I don't remember ever being taught anything to do with. Yeah, with adhesives and solvents and stuff like that. I don't know. Yeah, this might be more the older kids. Kids, but it's just something that's on my mind because I've had to talk about it a little bit lately.

[Dan]

Hey Dll. I'm making my way through tactics on tactician. How many levels ahead of story battles did you usually have to be towards the end?

[Linus Sebastian]

I didn't keep track. I just, I just played the game and tried to win and I would. I, I don't, I don't think I, I don't think I ground much. I think I skipped almost every random encounter which might explain why I was. Oh, oh, wait. Well, hold on, hold on, hold on. Okay. I'm a bit of a completionist when it comes to abilities though. So I would just like hide in a corner and like hit my own guys and stuff to get abilities and then I would end up really over leveled. So I, I don't know, I'm, I'm a mess. It completely ignore me in my. And my strategies.

[Dan]

Last one I've got for you today. Good evening. Wan Wuk and Winus. I'm writing from the future as I am visiting Japan. Have any of you been to the Tohoku area? And if so, where should I visit if I get the chance? I'm currently in Sendai.

[Linus Sebastian]

I don't think I've ever been there, but if I had, I wouldn't know because the way that I travel for work is I get on the plane and then I arrive wherever it is that I am, and then I open up an app or a cab or whatever it is that I do, and I go to whatever hotel I'm supposed to go to. And then in the morning, I go to whatever factory tour or thing that I'm supposed to do is. And then I go home. And so I don't really know where I am sometimes because it doesn't really matter. Sorry. Eleanor says visit the Ghibli Museum, though. That sounds amazing. I'd love to go to a Ghibli museum.

[Dan]

Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

Cool.

[Dan]

That's it.

[Linus Sebastian]

Is that it for today?

[Dan]

Wow.

[Linus Sebastian]

Okay. You didn't curate many. We had a lot of merge messages today, but I guess not too many questions. Oh, wow. How about that? Well, you guys all. Noki says I'm working on this to help with your wiki page. What is this? Oh, wow. Whoa. A whole history of, like, float plane, closed beta alpha phase domain announcement. Okay. The real trick, though, Nokia, is you've got to find other people talking about it. It can't be first party.

[Luke Lafreniere]

This is actually pretty good. Yeah, this. This has some information that most people don't know.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah. Luke has done a lot of cool stuff. Let's get him a. Well, let's get him a wiki page. You should have one.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I don't think it makes sense.

[Linus Sebastian]

The most important LA frontier. I mean, what is the other one? A hockey player?

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, big deal.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah.

[Dan]

Does he have a float plane?

[Linus Sebastian]

No.

[Luke Lafreniere]

No, but he has a jersey. My dad has one of his jerseys. It's kind of cool to have an official jersey without the, like, custom name on the back. Like, it's actually just an official jersey and it is also your last name. That's pretty sick. That's pretty cool.

[Linus Sebastian]

That is pretty cool.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I kind of want one. But their jerseys are really expensive.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh, yeah, dude, they're.

[Luke Lafreniere]

They're so expensive.

[Linus Sebastian]

All right, I think that's it. I'll have to get back to it.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Looks so. My God. Maybe one day.

[Linus Sebastian]

See you guys next week. Same bad time, same bad channel.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Bye. A sweater. Yeah. Sorry. Oh, sorry. Sorry. Oh, sorry. Got them.

[Linus Sebastian]

They're not wrong.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, they're not wrong.

[Linus Sebastian]

Lifelock. How can I help? The IRS said I filed my return, but I haven't. One in four tax paying Americans has paid the price of identity fraud. What do I do? My refund though. I'm freaking out. Don't worry, I can fix this. Lifelock fixes identity theft guaranteed and gets your money back with up to $3 million in coverage. I'm so relieved. No problem.

[Dan]

1.

[Linus Sebastian]

I'll be with you every step of the way. One in four was a fraud paying American. Not anymore. Save up to 40% your first year. Visit lifelock.com podcast terms apply.