Do We Have To Move Again? - WAN Show October 18, 2024

Summary

Podcast Summary: The WAN Show – "Do We Have To Move Again?" (October 18, 2024)

Hosted by Linus Sebastian and Luke Lafreniere from Linus Tech Tips, this episode delves into significant issues in the technology landscape, including legal battles over piracy, cybersecurity concerns with smart home devices, and the ongoing challenges of expanding their business operations.

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1. US Appeals Court Ruling on ISPs and Piracy

The episode opens with a discussion about a pivotal US Appeals Court decision favoring major music publishers. The court ruled that Internet Service Providers (ISPs) must take action against users suspected of piracy, potentially leading to the termination of their services.

Notable Quote:

Linus Sebastian [00:55]: "A US Appeals court has sided with music publishing giants saying that ISPs should refuse service to users who are suspected of piracy."

Implications:

• Business Impact: ISPs may face increased liability, compelling them to implement stricter monitoring and enforcement measures.
• Consumer Concerns: Users might experience abrupt service discontinuations based on unproven suspicions, raising privacy and fairness issues.

The hosts express skepticism about the practicality and fairness of such rulings, highlighting potential ramifications for both service providers and end-users.

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2. Cybersecurity Threats: Hacked Robot Vacuums

Linus and Luke shift focus to cybersecurity, addressing alarming reports of Ecovacs robot vacuums being hacked. These compromised devices not only invaded users' privacy by accessing video feeds but also exhibited malicious behaviors, such as emitting racial slurs and targeting pets.

Notable Quote:

Linus Sebastian [67:30]: "Your vacuum is watching you and blasting out racial epithets."

Key Points:

• Vulnerability: The lack of server-side validation in the vacuum's security allowed hackers to gain unauthorized control.
• Manufacturer's Response: Despite being alerted by security researchers, Ecovacs declined to fix the identified flaws, advising users not to be overly concerned.
• Real-World Exploit: The Australian Broadcasting Corporation demonstrated the hacking vulnerability by remotely controlling a vacuum to spy on a household, albeit with consent.

Discussion Question:

Linus Sebastian [67:57]: "Should we be more cautious about..."

The conversation underscores the broader risks associated with smart home devices and the necessity for robust security measures to protect consumer privacy.

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3. Challenges in Business Expansion: Navigating Vancouver's Commercial Real Estate

A significant portion of the episode is dedicated to Linus and Luke's ongoing struggle to consolidate and expand their business operations within Vancouver. They explore the complexities of finding suitable commercial spaces that accommodate their growing team and diverse departments.

Notable Quote:

Linus Sebastian [04:42]: "We've kind of been growing out of this space for the last three years... it's going to be really expensive."

Issues Highlighted:

• Space Constraints: Their current facilities, including the old studio office and the Creator Warehouse, are insufficient for the expanding team.
• Real Estate Market Dynamics: The Vancouver commercial real estate market has softened, but suitable large-scale buildings are scarce and expensive to build out to their specifications.
• Climate Control Requirements: Unlike typical warehouse spaces in the region, their facilities require heating and cooling to maintain operational integrity, further escalating costs.
• Parking Limitations: Newer buildings often lack adequate parking, forcing potential employees to rely on less convenient transportation methods.

Notable Quote:

Linus Sebastian [15:50]: "Landmark status... essentially means you can't do jack with it."

Potential Solutions Explored:

• Separation of Operations: Splitting different departments into separate buildings, akin to their setup with the Creator Warehouse.
• Consolidation into a Single Large Facility: Despite the high costs, this remains a possible yet financially daunting option.
• Considering Location Shifts: Moving closer to major highways and population centers to alleviate commuting issues, though this may lead to increased property expenses.

Conclusion: Linus and Luke acknowledge that while owning property has saved them millions compared to leasing, the current market conditions and specific needs make finding a suitable expansion space extraordinarily challenging.

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4. SpaceX Makes History: Midair Rocket Catch

Transitioning to aerospace, the hosts enthusiastically discuss SpaceX's groundbreaking achievement of catching a rocket booster midair. This feat marks a significant milestone in reusable rocket technology, essential for future missions, including NASA's Artemis program.

Notable Quote:

Linus Sebastian [61:09]: "SpaceX literally catches a rocket midair... mission complete."

Details of the Event:

• Rocket Specifications: The rocket's first stage, the Super Heavy booster, reached an altitude of 65 km before initiating a rapid descent.
• Catching Mechanism: Utilizing mechanical arms known colloquially as "chopsticks," SpaceX successfully grasped the booster, a testament to precision engineering.
• Starship's Trajectory: While the booster was caught, the Starship spacecraft continued its journey, eventually splashing down as planned to conclude the mission.

Impact:

• Reusability: Enhances the sustainability and cost-effectiveness of space missions.
• Engineering Marvel: Demonstrates unprecedented control and coordination in rocket recovery operations.

The hosts express awe at the engineering prowess required for such an endeavor, likening it to impressive feats performed by smaller-scale drone operations.

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5. Technical Hurdles: VR Streaming Struggles

Linus shares his frustrations with technical issues encountered during VR streaming sessions. Despite running a capable setup with reasonable CPU and GPU usage, he experiences stutters and performance hiccups that impede smooth streaming.

Notable Quote:

Linus Sebastian [83:45]: "Do you see the fins? Can you make this full screen? You see the fins? That's not what catches it."

Possible Causes Discussed:

• Driver Issues: Potential conflicts with Nvidia drivers causing DSP latency spikes, leading to audio and system interruptions.
• Hardware Limitations: Despite a seemingly adequate setup, the VR machine may be struggling due to overlooked factors like intermittent hardware compatibility or software optimizations.
• System Overhead: The use of NVENC for encoding and additional processing for virtual avatars might be contributing to the load without adequate resource allocation.

Advice:

Daniel Owen (Dan) [84:05]: "DSP latency spikes can often be caused by Nvidia drivers."

The discussion highlights the intricate balance required in optimizing high-performance systems for demanding tasks like VR streaming and the persistent challenges even experienced tech enthusiasts face.

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6. FCC's "Click to Cancel" Rule

Linus and Luke briefly touch upon the FCC's new regulation mandating that companies offering subscription services must provide unsubscribe methods that are as convenient as the sign-up process.

Notable Quote:

Luke Lafreniere [103:11]: "The FCC makes canceling easy because Lina Khan is a boss."

Key Points:

• Consumer Empowerment: Enhances user control over subscriptions, potentially reducing unwanted recurring charges.
• Business Impact: Forces companies to streamline their subscription management systems, possibly increasing operational costs.
• Market Reaction: Some services may suffer due to reduced ability to retain subscribers through cumbersome cancellation processes.

The hosts ponder the broader implications of this rule on the subscription economy, questioning whether it will curtail exploitative practices or inadvertently harm legitimate businesses.

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7. x86 Alliance and Industry Cooperation

The episode concludes with a discussion on the newly announced x86 Alliance, a coalition aimed at standardizing and strengthening the x86 architecture's position in the computing industry.

Notable Quote:

Linus Sebastian [131:27]: "It's generally a good thing. Better. Stronger competitors means more competition for us, means better products for us."

Benefits Highlighted:

• Standardization: Reduces fragmentation within the x86 ecosystem, simplifying development and compatibility across devices.
• Industry Collaboration: Fosters cooperation among major players like AMD and Intel, leading to more cohesive advancements in technology.
• Consumer Advantage: Increased competition drives innovation, resulting in higher-quality products and potentially lower prices for consumers.

The hosts view the x86 Alliance as a positive step towards unifying the industry, emphasizing that such collaborations are essential for sustained technological progress.

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Conclusion

In this episode of The WAN Show, Linus and Luke navigate a spectrum of topics from legal challenges facing the tech industry to groundbreaking achievements in aerospace and the intricacies of expanding a tech-oriented business. They offer insightful commentary on the evolving landscape of technology, privacy, and business operations, interspersed with their characteristic humor and candid discussions.

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For more detailed discussions and the full podcast experience, listeners are encouraged to tune into The WAN Show by Linus Tech Tips.

Transcript

[Linus Sebastian]

This episode is brought to you by 1Password. Imagine what your brain could remember if it didn't have to hold onto a hundred different passwords. Free your brain from Remembering passwords. Get 1Password 1Password combines industry leading security with award winning design to bring private, secure and user friendly password management to everyone. Don't let security slow your business down. Go to 1Password.com TechNews to start your two week free trial. What's up everyone and welcome to the WAN show. We've got a fantastic show lined up for you guys today. Yeah, I forget what our headline topic was, so I guess Luke's gonna take it. This is wild. A US Appeals court has sided with music publishing giants saying that ISPs should refuse service to users who are suspected of piracy.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Someone's gonna get their parents pretty.

[Linus Sebastian]

In other news, your vacuum is watching you and blasting out racial epithets.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Oh. What?

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh, yeah. No, it's a whole thing.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I didn't know that part.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah. No, it's not good.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Oh, boy.

[Linus Sebastian]

The manufacturer thinks it's okay, but no one else does.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Speaking of things that are bad, in some ways. Are we moving? We moving?

[Linus Sebastian]

We could talk about the feasibility of that.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah. Also, you can talk to your dog now.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, you can talk. You can talk to your dog. You talk to your dog with AI. The show is brought to you today by Acronis, Squarespace, MSI, and of course, our chair partner, Secret Lab, our laptop partner, lg, and our rap partner, D. Brand, who wrapped our table. And wrapped my phone. And wrapped. Yeah, yeah. They just wrap things they don't like. They don't like melod. Melodious singing.

[Luke Lafreniere]

They've never wrapped you.

[Linus Sebastian]

They just rapidly.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Wow.

[Linus Sebastian]

Nice.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Does rap not have melodies?

[Linus Sebastian]

Nice. I mean. Yeah, it can. Oh, that's not the point. The point is that Luke thought this was the headline topic, which I find actually really interesting because we've kind of.

[Luke Lafreniere]

You want to. Should I pull back the curtain and let them know why? I thought this would be a good headline topic.

[Linus Sebastian]

What's the point of even having curtains anyway, right? Do they even match the carpet? Like, just not right now. I mean, same. Wow, this was quick. And goodbye Rails.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Anyways. No, it just seemed clicky.

[Linus Sebastian]

Okay.

[Luke Lafreniere]

It's also like an actual discussion.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, well, that was it. That was your curtain pulling back.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

Cheese.

[Luke Lafreniere]

It seemed clicky.

[Linus Sebastian]

Remind me not to camp outside of your apartment with binoculars because I'm not going to see anything. Okay. Apparently I'd see some stuff. So what I told Luke we could do on the show What I said we could do was we could go through the exercise of why it's really difficult for us to move because it's been a pain point for us for basically the last probably three years. Since we got the lab, we've known that we were growing out of this space that we're in right now, which is the old everything, you know, studio office. So we, we expanded on the one side, we expanded on the other side, we hit a wall there, there's a neighbor that's not selling. So that's it. That this is where we are here. And then we expanded to another unit elsewhere in our complex for a Creator Warehouse who handles all the merch. And then finally we, we were like, okay, well this is it. We either need to kind of separate our operations and have different departments and different buildings, kind of like we did with Creator warehouse, or we need to consolidate into one gigantic building. And the gigantic building was going to be really, really expensive. Not just because it's expensive to buy a building, but because the building you're going to get is going to cost an absolute fortune to build out the way that we do.

[Luke Lafreniere]

And there just aren't actually really that many buildings at that size is what.

[Linus Sebastian]

I said back then.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Oh, is that.

[Linus Sebastian]

But the market has softened a lot here in Vancouver. I mean, there's, remember, I'm talking industrial, I'm talking commercial. Right. Still. Well, let's have a look. Okay, let's go through the exercise that I go through every time I'm looking at commercial real estate and I'll talk about some of the things that can be really sort of appealing and some of the things that can be really challenging and why it's so hard to find something that's the right fit.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Because like for some context for viewers too. Right. Like we have. If you, if you think about the production team for videos that is pretty fragmented right now, literally none of the teams that might work together are actually close to each other. Even if it's writing in labs, you're at opposite ends of the building and there's a big set of stairs and many sets of doors in between. And it's very likely if you're going through those doors, you're disturbing somebody in some department. So it's like not really that small of a walk. If you're either labs or writing and you're talking to editing, well, I mean that's now a 10 minute walk or a two minute drive. How do we solve this? Well, the Lego pieces don't really click together very well. There isn't a lot of office space in the Labs building. There isn't enough space in general in the, in the studio buildings. Parking is a nightmare at either one of them. Yeah, just like. Okay.

[Linus Sebastian]

Anyways, now in fairness to us, it did look like the best solution for expansion at the time because building out something the way that sort of, I expect us to do it for our team is really, really expensive and that adds a lot to the cost. Sort of abandoning what we've got here and then consolidating somewhere else. For example, in the lower mainland. So in our area it is way abnormal. Basically unheard of. Unless you are like a food distribution company to have H Vac in your warehouse. So the fact that we have heat. Yes, because you know, you can't, it can't be so cold that devices stop working properly or whatever. But having air conditioning in an, in a warehouse space, pretty much unheard of in this area. Whereas all of our warehouse spaces are heated and cooled so that, you know, because we're not really using them in a warehouse capacity and we don't really have like just warehouse. I mean, I don't know, I say that we don't just have warehouse people working in them, but honestly I don't think that's a good excuse either. I think warehouses should probably be climate controlled sometimes.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Like if you're a forklift driver, you might have like a fan mounted on the forklift.

[Linus Sebastian]

Sure. But stuff like that, like that blows. Nice. That's pretty good. Basically what I'm trying to say is I don't really care who you are or how much money you make, you're worth air conditioning.

[Luke Lafreniere]

When we have things called heat domes.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah.

[Luke Lafreniere]

And you're in a big metal box, it'd be nice to be able to cool down.

[Linus Sebastian]

Now, in fairness to a lot of the building owners and business owners in the Vancouver area, it hasn't really been a problem until probably about the last five or six years. Like we used to have like one hot week of freaking summer. And so whatever, we're going to install tens, sometimes hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of air conditioning for like that one week. No, probably not. But we've made the plunge, which means that any building we move into, we have to put stuff like that into it, which adds a lot to the build out cost. So let's take a look and let's talk about some of the challenges that we run into. So Colliers is one of the sites that probably makes sense to use if you're looking for commercial real estate.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Sure.

[Linus Sebastian]

Let's have a look. Oh, oh, there's the. Look at this. See, this is what I'm talking about, Luke. When I would have pulled up this map, let's say, let's say two years ago, it would have been nothing. There would have been flipping. This is a terrible interface. Can you guys like be slightly.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Slightly less of a. Websites are brutal.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, they're.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I have always thought like, you know, if we could. If we could go back and instead of making floatplane, we should just made like realty software.

[Linus Sebastian]

I know they pay so much for.

[Luke Lafreniere]

It and it's so bad. It's kind of crazy.

[Linus Sebastian]

Freaking wild. Okay, so this is kind of the area that we'd be looking at. So here's where the office is now. And most of the team is living in, you know, kind of. These are the urban centers. You can tell from the white instead of the green. Green is like for grass and trees and whatnot. So you're gonna have people living in kind of Maple Ridge, kind of Langley. Uh, not too many people down in South Surrey, just because that's like the bougie area of the. Not the actual city. City over here. It's like the bougie burb.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Oh, what you mean like potentially like employees or what do you.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, yeah.

[Luke Lafreniere]

So there's a bunch of people in South Surrey. It's just really expensive.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, I'm talking about, like where people who commute to this office here are generally going to be coming from a little bit of Coquitlam, a little bit of Burnaby, a little bit of like further west. But the more we were to move an office kind of this way into Burnaby Marine Drive or like Richmond or something like that, the more expensive housing is going to get.

[Luke Lafreniere]

And the warehouse.

[Linus Sebastian]

We have found that. Yeah, that too. So we found that this is a. This is a pretty good middle ground. If we could be more like here, that might be more betterer. But. Okay, let's. So let's.

[Luke Lafreniere]

You're very nicely close to the highway. Just to give some people some context there. Yeah, the.

[Linus Sebastian]

This is Canada's only road. Yeah, that's.

[Luke Lafreniere]

That's the road everyone memes about when they're talking about Canada.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah.

[Luke Lafreniere]

So being close to that is generally efficient for most people.

[Linus Sebastian]

Okay, so let's. Let's have a look. This is. This is what's in this area. This is hilarious. The first one that comes up is of course, the court ordered sale for the. The aspirational mall in Surrey.

[Luke Lafreniere]

So wait, Newlands is for sale?

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah. Newlands Golf and Country Club is for sale.

[Luke Lafreniere]

What?

[Linus Sebastian]

Dude. Okay, what if we.

[Luke Lafreniere]

What if we. What if we could bring like telemetry, golfing data and like, what if we made a high tech golf course?

[Linus Sebastian]

Okay, Luke.

[Luke Lafreniere]

And had an office there.

[Linus Sebastian]

Get this. The combined. The combined estimated value of creator, Warehouse, the studio and the lab is probably in the neighborhood of around 25 to 30 million dollars.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Okay.

[Linus Sebastian]

Okay, get this. How much do you think Newlands Golf and Country Club is worth? It is 111 acres with 90,000 square feet of building. To put this for some context, we're in about 40,000 square feet combined. What do you think Newlands Golf and Country Club is worth?

[Luke Lafreniere]

That's like pretty nice building and there's like kitchen on site. I'm assuming that has a cost. I'm assuming they're not just ripping that out. Oh, no, I'm not gonna look at chat.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, don't look at chat. Don't look at chat. They're gonna help you cheat.

[Luke Lafreniere]

My first hunch is like 350.

[Linus Sebastian]

350 what?

[Luke Lafreniere]

Mil.

[Linus Sebastian]

350 mil. Really? Try 40.

[Luke Lafreniere]

40 what?

[Linus Sebastian]

So what do you think? We move LMG. Let's buy Newlands to Newlands Golf and Country Club.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Wait, how is it actually? Is there something going on with it?

[Linus Sebastian]

Dude, I have no idea.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Cause how is it multiple times bigger than ours? The facilities are like really nice. Oh, man. What? How is it so cheap with that much land, Sue?

[Linus Sebastian]

So there's. There's like. Look, like I said, there's some stuff going on in the Vancouver area right now.

[Luke Lafreniere]

How do you get 112 acres?

[Linus Sebastian]

Some of the big money I think is moving.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Is it zoning?

[Linus Sebastian]

Is moving out. Okay, so we'll talk about that. Some of the big money though is moving out of Vancouver real estate because of some of the recent changes that the Trudeau administration has made to the way that taxes on capital gains work. So there has been like an emergency fire sale of some very high value assets and there's only so many buyers for a 40 million. So for context, that's about US$30 million. A little less like 29 or something.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Like golf pond, cooled computer.

[Linus Sebastian]

Right. How fun would that be?

[Dan]

Gaming PC in your golf cart?

[Luke Lafreniere]

We could overclock one of the. Oh no, you don't do that with golf. Never.

[Linus Sebastian]

Okay.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I was thinking baseball, like when it shoots the.

[Linus Sebastian]

So part of this is that it does seem like there is. There's a bit of. There's a bit of bubble bursting going on. Yeah, I think that part of it is a demographic shift. So you've got a. Because realistically, I'm probably one of the only people in my cohort that is like running a small, two medium, you know, like a business of this size.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

You know, most of the businesses in our area are run by boomers. And what's happening with boomers? They're retiring. Right. So when you retire, you either are looking to sell your, your, your business and retain the asset and keep collecting rent from it as like your pension, or you're looking to sell the building, take a big bucket of cash, spend it on, you know, some other crap, give it, give some of it to your kids, spend some of it on like a lakefront property over on the island. You know, whatever you want. You want the big bucket of cash and then you keep running the business for your pocket money instead of hookers and blow.

[Luke Lafreniere]

It's like cruise ships and painkillers. Sorry, I'm just trying. That's good. Thank you.

[Linus Sebastian]

Or you're selling both pieces and you're just like, screw it. This is so much of a nest egg that I must sit on this nest egg forever. Y. So I think there's some of that happening as well. And then the other big one that you already touched on is zoning. So this right here, why am I on the cam? This is. This is zoned essentially for operating as a golf course.

[Luke Lafreniere]

A golf course? Yeah. That's why I didn't think about it, because I was trying to think of the acreage. Because the. That amount of acreage here, if you turn that into five story walkups. Infinite money.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh, for sure. And to be clear, there is some development potential. You can see there's about 6 acres of non agricultural land reserve. So that means you basically can't do jack with it. Like you could buy a 50 acre farm for less than like a 1 acre residential lot in some cases. Okay, not quite. But the point is that this agricultural land reserve land is worth functionally nothing compared to. Compared to something that you could actually build residential or build industrial or commercial on. There's a whole lot of other red flags here. Landmark status. Oh, no.

[Luke Lafreniere]

What does that mean?

[Linus Sebastian]

You don't want anything with status. You don't want heritage status.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Fair enough.

[Linus Sebastian]

Landmark status.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I've heard of heritage.

[Linus Sebastian]

Heritage status.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Status.

[Linus Sebastian]

I don't know what landmark status is. I don't care. I don't want to know. That sounds terrible. Basically it means there's red tape that you're going to have to jump through if you want to do anything. Other than sit in the office there and run a golf course. Okay, what'd you find? What'd you find?

[Luke Lafreniere]

Historic place. I haven't got anything specific yet, but the first Google brings you to historic place, which I'm assuming is essentially the same thing as heritage status.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, you don't want any of that. You don't want any part of that. Okay, so we're not buying a golf course because you know, well, it's stupid basically. What else we got, what else we got here? Okay, so yeah, we're not, we're not buying the city block in Surrey that's been rotting since the 90s. We talked about that last week. You're going to find a lot of stuff that's for lease. And the thing is leasing. Yeah, it's an option if you can afford to buy. Though the fact that we have owned this has saved us literally. Literally.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I've liked that approach. I've supported that approach the whole time.

[Linus Sebastian]

Literally millions of dollars. Because your landlord, in the time since we bought the first three units, we paid a million dollars for three units. One of those units is now worth about 1.1 or something like 1.2. It's essentially quadrupled in value, which means that if we had leased it, our rent would have quadrupled, putting money in the pocket of our landlord when instead we were able to invest that money in our own equity that we can now use to cross shop something else. So if you can afford to buy, I'd like to buy. Even though with that said, the market is, you know, not going too great right now, but.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Sorry, one sec. Lomac in Flipling chat said we pay half a million dollars a year for our business property in Port Kells. For our lease of our business property in Port Kells. That's a lot of money.

[Linus Sebastian]

That's a lot of frickin money.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Half a mil.

[Linus Sebastian]

And the thing about commercial leases is they are way worse than residential leases. And I know residential rent agreements and lease agreements can be brutal. They can be so burdensome for the renter, especially if you live in an area where you don't have ample protections. But commercial, whole other level, they're what are called triple net, which essentially means that you pay for your rent and they get to advertise that lease rate which is going to be per square foot, you know, probably somewhere in the neighborhood of like 11 to $18 a square foot depending on sort of what you're looking at. So let's say 10 to $20 a square foot, then you have something Called additional rent. What's your additional rent? Go ahead and ask me.

[Luke Lafreniere]

What. Yeah, what is that? Is that like power and water?

[Linus Sebastian]

No, no. You pay your own utilities.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I have genuinely no idea.

[Linus Sebastian]

Me neither. It's whatever it is. I just pass through to you. Whatever property tax I pay, whatever building maintenance I might incur now, I as the landlord have to pay it up front. So if the building needs a new roof, I pay for the roof. But then what I do is I pass the. I pass the expense along to you and you pay me back yearly in installments for that roof for my building.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Oh, my God.

[Linus Sebastian]

That's how commercial works, baby. So. Yeah, yeah, commercial. Commercial leases. Absolutely brutal.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Apparently additional rent can go up by any percentage. Yeah. So additional rent is used to circumvent the maximum percentage increases for rent because if they can't increase the base rent, they just increase the additional rent by any percentage they want. So it could be. This is obviously not real, but it could be like 300% because they're like, ah, we need it to make up for whatever.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, yeah, Commercial. Commercial leases.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I also. I'm just like googling this stuff. I don't know if this is 100% true or not. Don't take this as fact.

[Linus Sebastian]

It's Shirley Times says never sign a triple net lease. You will not find a lease in the Vancouver area that isn't triple net. And that's. That's even now. Even now that things are a bit more of a buyer's market. I think our vacancy, last time I looked at the report for it was under 1% real vacancy. Because some of the vacancy is not even real. It's like it's fake because it's vacant now, but it's just pending. Yeah, it's absolutely brutal. So you pay the base rent, property taxes, building insurance and utilities, as well as other operating and maintenance costs. The landlord assumes no cost other than structural repairs. And structural. That doesn't mean roof. That means like the foundation. Essentially. Unless the building collapses into the sea, they are not responsible for anything.

[Luke Lafreniere]

And that whole.

[Linus Sebastian]

And you're paying the insurance, by the way, to cover if that happens.

[Luke Lafreniere]

The whole other operating cost thing is where you're getting killed. Because they can define anything that way. Other operating costs could be, I don't know, the landlord decides to pay himself $40,000 an hour.

[Linus Sebastian]

I don't know. Who knows?

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

Or they hire trades that are like their buddies to do any of the work.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

Pass that along to you. Yeah, that's not their problem. Yeah, yeah. So It's a whole. It's a whole thing. It leaves itself obviously glaringly open to abuse, but that's the system we have. Cool. All right, what else we got? Okay, we've got residential development, so of course not a Willowbrook park is for sale. Brother.

[Luke Lafreniere]

What is that?

[Linus Sebastian]

It's it like Willowbrook, like the shop?

[Luke Lafreniere]

Wait, what?

[Linus Sebastian]

Like the shopping center? Not Willowbrook Mall, the one like right across from it. Willowbrook Park. Willowbrook park is for sale. The whole thing. 200,000 square feet of retail. What? I know, right? 90 million, dude. And the number of court ordered sales that I've seen recently. Freaking wild.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Mayfair Industrial.

[Dan]

What's going on?

[Linus Sebastian]

Okay, so this running out of money. Yeah. So interest rates have been high for a while, long time. And it takes a while because your mortgage is going to be on 2 year, 3 year, 5 year, 5 year renewal term. Right. So.

[Luke Lafreniere]

So if you were on a fixed.

[Linus Sebastian]

So in many cases these properties are owned by people who are using them as a land bank. Essentially they're just parking their money in an asset that, unlike cash, isn't going to just inflation rot itself into oblivion. Theoretically. Land, gold, crypto. I'm not endorsing any of these particular assets, but typically assets, as long as they aren't hypervolatile ones, are a safer storage of wealth than just cash because there's nobody actively trying to deflate the value of it. So what's happening is all of a sudden if you, if you don't own the property outright, like if you, if you are, if you're just hoping that, you know your rent is going to cover your mortgage while the asset appreciates, that calculus, just like for many residential owners, is changing the second that you renew your mortgage and you're not getting essentially free debt anymore. So this land bank might be appreciating. Although in the case of Vancouver, as I mentioned, the market's softening, so it maybe isn't appreciating.

[Luke Lafreniere]

It's either not appreciating so much or.

[Linus Sebastian]

It'S, it's just stagnating and now it's costing you way more than you thought it was. So you're sitting here going, okay, well there's no upside to this. Let's sell Willowbrook Park.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Which to be clear, somebody. That's an outdoor mall. Yeah, that's the one across the street. Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yep.

[Luke Lafreniere]

So it's not. Some people were like ltt Mall. It's like, Yeah, I don't think it would be as interesting.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, not so much. This one's kind of interesting. You'll find a lot of the good land has been kind of developed. So what's left as development opportunities is going to be a lot of these like super weird shaped sites. This is a good shaped site. Four acres though of it are encumbered by a BC hydro easement. So you gotta watch out for. You gotta watch out for easements because that pretty much means two thirds of this BC hydro, which is our power monopoly, needs to be able to access. Drive on and access essentially. Yep. So that one. Yeah. Probably not super appealing. Okay, what else? What else we got here? Okay. Development office units. And this is. This is not going to be that relevant to us. Yeah, yeah. Residential. Residential.

[Luke Lafreniere]

You can put in property type and stuff. You could use the filters.

[Linus Sebastian]

Okay, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, sure.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Use the filters, tech man.

[Linus Sebastian]

Sure, I'll use the filters. I'll use the filters. All right, let's get. You know what? Let's. Let's look at. Let's look at office too. Why don't we look at industrial and office.

[Luke Lafreniere]

LTG Towers. Linus Tech Towers.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh, paved and fenced yard area. Oh, I can lease a yard. Oh, yeah, you're welcome. I'll just pay your mortgage for you. What else we got? Oh, man, this is far. This is really far. Also small. Too small. Brand new industrial facility in Port Coquitlam. This is too small. This is only about the size of the lab. So if the lab was big enough, then we could do that. So even now you can see with all of these options available to us, there's really not that much that would actually be suitable for us to move into.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Unless you just. Yeah. Make your own town.

[Linus Sebastian]

Dude, we don't want to be on Annette's island. Dan's given the.

[Dan]

No, thank you.

[Luke Lafreniere]

You don't want to be there.

[Linus Sebastian]

No, thank you. A, it's really far. B, it's like the traffic.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Burn your nostrils out for the rest of your life.

[Linus Sebastian]

That and it's like the kind of the old industrial like crappy island. It's like lots of sulfur and you guys play Anno. Anyone play Anno? Okay, so they put all the stuff that contributes to less beautification of your island. You know, you move it all onto steel smelting. Yes. Steel island. That's Anasis Island.

[Dan]

Essentially the rug of Vancouver. You just push everything under there.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, yeah. Okay. We can actually. We can actually change our listings to just things that are for sale to kind of narrow things down a little bit. Basically there's not actually that much. And part of the problem is that city center, dude, there's a big industrial park further down, like down here in Campbell Heights. That's pretty far from any population centers because like I said, most people are not living in South Surrey. So people are mostly living here, and they're living here, and they're living here. So the farther down south we go, the more challenging it gets. So Campbell Heights is down here.

[Luke Lafreniere]

There was one that seemed kind of interesting, but it keeps. As you're scrolling around, it keeps.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh, I'm sorry. The quad. No, that one's in Campbell Heights.

[Luke Lafreniere]

No, it was scrolled down.

[Linus Sebastian]

It's not that mall again, is it? No, we're not buying that mall.

[Luke Lafreniere]

No, no, no, it was scrolled down.

[Linus Sebastian]

Okay. Court ordered sales right here.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Though I don't know where you were looking at the time.

[Linus Sebastian]

I'm so sorry, Luke.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I'm not sure.

[Linus Sebastian]

Maybe you'll see it. There is. There is kind of an interesting one in Port Kells. So that's up in this area. So it's. It's kind of a sister building to the Smash Champs badminton center building. This is too far.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Dating right next to Smash Jams would be sick.

[Linus Sebastian]

I would love it. But the problem with Port Kels is that it is best lunch breaks. Crazy expensive. Oh, crazy, crazy expensive. Way out in Delta. Yeah. Why do I even have Delta on the map? Okay, let's get. Let's get Delta out of here. We don't need to see anything in Delta. Yeah, I think that's about it. I mean, is there anything else you want to look at? You want to ask, like, why not that one? Because I'll be happy to. Oh, is it this one? 192 Business Center.

[Luke Lafreniere]

It wasn't, but let's look at it. Sure.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, we can look at 192 Business Center. So this one is very similar to Smash Jams. Pretty nice brand new building, right? Pretty sick. Okay, let's have a look. Ooh, look at that. Up to 50,000 square feet. 32 foot clear ceilings, lots of power, 200amps. Whoa. Get that high efficiency LED lighting. It's brand new buildings, man. Really nice. There's some very nice to haves, but there's a big problem with brand new buildings. You notice something here? They talk a lot about when it's going to be complete and how many dock and grade loading bays you've got and how close it is to Highway 1. Okay. How close it is to the airport. Ah. Okay, so here's our problem. How many parking stalls do we have?

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, this is very common with new buildings. They just don't put enough parking at all.

[Linus Sebastian]

Because you sell the building based on the square footage.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

That's the calculation that everybody is doing.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

But the parking stalls don't count towards square footage. So developers. And you know what? Part of this is honestly probably a good thing because less parking, less cars. If people were riding their bikes or taking transit more, that would be awesome. I can tell you right now not a whole lot of that is happening here. Yeah. It just. It just. It just isn't. So. So part of it is good. Aspirationally, if we were using more public transit. But the reality now is that that would accommodate maybe a quarter of our company right now. And my understanding. Don't quote me on this. My understanding is that Beattie, the developer of this property, worked out a deal with the city where they didn't have to account for any street parking.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

In their development. So they were able to effectively build right to the road, like, right to the travel areas of the road. So while in the building we're in now also has inadequate parking. Probably about the same ratio like a new building would have. Because they want to maximize the square footage they can sell. Ours at least has street parking. It's not ideal. Nobody likes walking, trudging to the building through the snow or whatever in winter, but that's fine. But we have. It's doable.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Whereas at least there is somewhere to put your car.

[Linus Sebastian]

This. You'd be. You'd be parking probably in the neighborhood of like, five to six blocks away. Which, if it's anything like SMASH Champs, which I actually did have to pace out because we were trying to figure out what parking would look like for a LAN event, for example. So at LAN events, if we can get the city on board at smash, which, by the way. Oh, we can talk about that. We submitted our package to them this week. We gave the city our package.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Did you know?

[Linus Sebastian]

We did.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Was it well received?

[Linus Sebastian]

I think so.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Nice.

[Linus Sebastian]

I think so. I think they were.

[Luke Lafreniere]

You ask them.

[Linus Sebastian]

They admired it was a good for you. So. So we gave them the package. We could talk about that a little bit more later, actually. I'm pretty excited to talk about Whale Land. But if it's anything like smash, it's. It's brutal. Basically. It's fine if you're coming in once a quarter for an event.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

But if you're commuting every day and you're like hiking from your car, you're going to need, like an electric scooter. In your car just to do the last leg of your commute, which is a little ridiculous. So that's problem.

[Luke Lafreniere]

There's a video upgrading every one of my employees cars with like a electric scooter storage. Sorry, Keep going.

[Linus Sebastian]

The older buildings will have more parking, they'll have more yard space, but they will lack a lot of nice to haves that are going to need to be upgraded that are going to cost money. The newer buildings are built with the new meta, which means you get a lot of more up to date nice stuff. Good power, good LED lighting. They're way more efficient in terms of keeping in heat and keeping out cold, that sort of thing, which is money. But they have no parking. What else we got here? We don't have to do this much longer if you guys are bored. Underground parking. Okay, so I find this stuff interesting. Ruker asks what about underground parking over in Floatplane Chat. Very little of it here. You know why?

[Luke Lafreniere]

No. Well like the water table or something.

[Linus Sebastian]

What I would. Okay, so a. I suspect there is something to do with that, but I don't know anything about the actual engineering of it.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Sure.

[Linus Sebastian]

What I can tell you is that the way that property values have skyrocketed here in such a short period of time has changed the calculus for underground parking in a big way. So it would have been not that long ago that underground parking didn't make any sense here.

[Luke Lafreniere]

It's really expensive.

[Linus Sebastian]

It's. It's. The last quote I got was about 100,000 Canadian dollars per stall. And that is going to be somewhat dependent on what kind of a building you're building and like whether you would have had to dig a big hole anyway versus if you're digging it just for the express purpose of putting cars in it. But pretty much until land values went to the moon here, it made way more sense to do the suburbia thing and just sprawl your parking lots. So what I suspect is we'll see a lot more of them in the future. But they don't really exist here, at least not now. Because it didn't make any sense. It was. The land was not worth so much that it was worth digging into it in order.

[Luke Lafreniere]

The only thing you'd see it for was apartment buildings generally.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I don't necessarily know why, but that was the thing.

[Dan]

Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

Schraff2k says you can always add nice to haves. You can't add more parking stalls. You can. Yeah. Arty Raff says rooftop parking. Yes, yes, that is technically possible, but you're going to have to re engineer the entire bloody structure to hold all the cars on the roof. So that's going to be. That's going to be requiring some budget. Yeah, some budget.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Just, you know, have a. Have a program where a certain percentage of the employee base gets. Gets free Ubers to work.

[Linus Sebastian]

I actually kind of like this one. It's really close to home. I've seen this before. But part of the problem is that while it does have a hundred thousand square feet of building on it, I don't think train. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. That's the rail. I mean. Okay, look. Okay, let me get to that. Let me get to that. It has 100,000 square feet of building on it. But those are the buildings. We ain't using those buildings. No, this is what we call in the biz a teardown. So that would help, you know, with mitigating train noise is you could, you know, double insulate your walls or whatever else. Like you could, you could actually solve it. It won't solve it, but it would, it would do a lot. But the cost of this because you're essentially buying $100,000 worth of buildings that you are going to then wrecked, makes this just not make any sense. I don't even think they have a price quoted on this one. I might have asked at some point, but I can't remember. But yeah, this one's. Yeah, interesting. But unfortunately, no. What's also cool about this one is it's over the 196th street border, which means that we'd be eligible for more film and production services tax credits.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I suspect whoever's selling it is hoping that whoever buys it wants the buildings to just store stuff from the trains in so that they don't need to be nice.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah. Unfortunately, that's not me. So get wrecked me.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yep. Yeah. Someone asked this, and I can think of some reasons why this might be rough, but there is. There are examples of this around the area. But empty land.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, there's not much. And a lot of what is a lot of what's empty land is alr. So you'll. You'll see it, you'll look at it and you'll be like, oh, yeah, we gotta look how many buildings we could put here.

[Luke Lafreniere]

What. What if we made. I mean, there's Clarkson's farm. It's doing very well.

[Dan]

What about a server farm?

[Luke Lafreniere]

What if we had line. Oh, what if we had Linus's farm?

[Linus Sebastian]

Ding the thing. You have to ding your own thing.

[Luke Lafreniere]

What if we did Linus's farm What's like, what's the minimum we would need to farm? It could be fine. You can do things like chickens and.

[Dan]

It'S like whatever, six pigs or something.

[Linus Sebastian]

It's less that how much minimum we would need to farm and it's more how much maximum other things could we do there? We couldn't have a production studio on a farm because that would devalue the production studio zoned land that somebody else bought before. Also, pretty much all of our farmland in the lower mainland is floodplain. And I don't know about you, but I'm not super into buying things that are going to be underwater soon or could be underwater soon. And we have had some very significant floods here. Our only road was wiped out for a substantial amount of time because of basically a lake that we were. We unliked and then it decided to relate itself.

[Luke Lafreniere]

It's fun when things relate themselves.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Breweries on ALR with their own hops have issues with the alr.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah. Yeah.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I mean, I can see that. No of a not small amount of people in BC that are aggressively skirting ALR rules. And I think if someone from the ALR just took a little drive around a lot of places in B.C. and cared at all, a lot of people would lose their setups. So it makes me care less when it feels like more than half of it is being abused and it makes me want to do it ourselves.

[Linus Sebastian]

I get such a kick out of the gigantic mansions, the Omega mansions on.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Farmland with no farming going on ever. Like, this is.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh, we got him going. We got him going. Here, boys. Here we go. Here we go.

[Luke Lafreniere]

At least my biggest thing is like, you should at least attempt. You should at least try put something there. Why is it just open grass field? You don't have horses? There's no horses. There's nothing else. You're doing nothing. How do they get away with this? I know the whole flip. I've heard the stories. I know the flip of you bring an outside company to plant some junk and then you have them also come pick it and you make $0 off of it. But the whole thing is so that you can have your stupid, probably disgusting, looking terribly designed building on this plot of land in the middle of nowhere that you live in and do nothing else and probably don't see anyone because you're xenophobic for some reason. Anyways. I hate anyways.

[Linus Sebastian]

Wow.

[Luke Lafreniere]

But it's all just. It's all a joke. I've also heard that a huge percentage of that crop just gets thrown away.

[Linus Sebastian]

Because they're just growing. Whatever. They're not growing based on what we need. They're growing based on.

[Luke Lafreniere]

And it's not being properly treated. It's just being planted and then pulled out of the ground at the end of the season.

[Linus Sebastian]

Right, yeah, that makes sense.

[Luke Lafreniere]

So, like, it's a lot of. It's junk. Like, it's just. It's this clear, obvious, insane charade. And there's parts of B.C. that you can literally drive around for a very long time where you're just going, mansion with no farm. Mansion with no farm. Mansion with no farm. Mansion with no farm for, like, ever. It's. It just. It really makes you not surprised when you drive around farmland in B.C. figuring out that there's more corruption in B.C. than like, practically anywhere. Because you're like, I wonder where do all the people live that. That have all this corruption? And then you drive around what should be farmland and you're like, oh, it's oops. All mansions. Like, okay. Anyways.

[Linus Sebastian]

All right, yeah, good chat.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I'll relax.

[Linus Sebastian]

So anyway, we still have our ear to the ground, and I suspect I'm talking as much to our staff as I am to our viewers at this point. We still have our ear to the ground, but it's. It's a challenge. Taryn sent me one actually, the other day that looked pretty cool. It's a little far from my house, which I'm not a huge fan of.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Move more videos. More videos.

[Linus Sebastian]

It would be far from a lot.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Of, oh, you have to set up your new house.

[Linus Sebastian]

I really don't want to move here. Let's see if I can. Oh, wait, not this one. No, this was me free content. This was me sending him the stupid. The stupid mall. Let me see if I can find it. Oh, yeah, Here we go. 5:85 North Fraser away. Honestly, it looks pretty cool.

[Luke Lafreniere]

One of the big problems is the really good solutions are going to be so far out and then they become bad solutions for other reasons.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh, yeah, that's right.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Relocating the whole company.

[Linus Sebastian]

Okay, hold on. You asked about empty land. That's a big problem for empty land. Is that far out? It's all really far out.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I know I've seen some locally, but it's probably like residential something.

[Linus Sebastian]

Smash champs was a completed building when we got it. Think about how long it took us just to do the tenant improvement. If we are building a building, it's like two to three years before we will actually move into it.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Just you spin up a new channel, let us build and tips lbt I. Clarkson's farm it.

[Linus Sebastian]

I can't find this for some reason.

[Luke Lafreniere]

What if you don't even hire a contracting company? What if you are the contracting company?

[Linus Sebastian]

What if you. Sorry. What if you don't?

[Dan]

I got a concrete mixer. We could do that in a weekend.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Let's do it. Let's do it.

[Dan]

We got a laser level in logistics. It'll be fine.

[Luke Lafreniere]

We can figure it out.

[Dan]

Yeah, we'll figure it out. Well, all the walls are just made of conduit. Linus said he likes conduit. We'll just make it out of conduit.

[Luke Lafreniere]

You never have any problems running cables?

[Dan]

No.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Might be a little loud.

[Dan]

No, you put insulation, like, in between in the conduit. In the.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh, my God.

[Luke Lafreniere]

We're figuring it out.

[Linus Sebastian]

This is why your CDO so smart.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Oh, no.

[Linus Sebastian]

All right, I am. I am sending myself. I'm sending myself the PDF. Here we go.

[Luke Lafreniere]

What if you make a crypto coin called apples, and then you mine apples?

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh, that's not bad.

[Luke Lafreniere]

ALR farming.

[Linus Sebastian]

I like it. Nice isn't nice? Okay, here we go.

[Luke Lafreniere]

All right.

[Linus Sebastian]

Here's the brochure. Yeah. Whoa.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Wow. I mean, it looks really nice.

[Linus Sebastian]

106,000 square feet.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Looks like parking all the way around the building. Is that correct?

[Linus Sebastian]

Look at them parking stalls. Are we backing a golf course?

[Luke Lafreniere]

Wow.

[Linus Sebastian]

Wow. You just take your lunch, you go play some golf.

[Luke Lafreniere]

You don't need to buy Newlands when you're right next to one Go. You should be like, we're live.

[Linus Sebastian]

Guess who's back. Back again.

[Dan]

It's really windy here.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

Okay.

[Luke Lafreniere]

There we go. YouTube is not kicked in. Flow plane is kicked in.

[Linus Sebastian]

Okay. Hey, my YouTube's not in. We're not sure what happened. A switch might have died, but. Or.

[Luke Lafreniere]

And the power went.

[Linus Sebastian]

Or. Big BC corruption.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

Might have not liked us talking about.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Someone heard me dissing their farm mansion. He wasn't growing.

[Linus Sebastian]

You shouldn't have done that, boy. All right.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Leave my hundreds of millions alone.

[Linus Sebastian]

Here's the. Here's this place.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Ironed this fair and square with cocaine and fentanyl deals.

[Linus Sebastian]

Here's this place that looks like it would be a pretty sick.

[Luke Lafreniere]

It looks fantastic.

[Linus Sebastian]

Pretty sick place to hang out.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Looks great.

[Linus Sebastian]

I mean, that. Look at this.

[Luke Lafreniere]

That's sick.

[Linus Sebastian]

Look at this presentation room.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Wow.

[Linus Sebastian]

Look at this presentation room. Look at this. Look at this meeting room.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Look how professional.

[Linus Sebastian]

Look at that.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Is it a loading base? Okay, so what's wrong with it?

[Linus Sebastian]

What's wrong with it is. Okay, so number one is it is anywhere from 50 to 100 farther away from me, which I don't like.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Sucks to be you. Yeah, what else is wrong with it?

[Linus Sebastian]

It's way farther for you too.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I will move, Tim.

[Linus Sebastian]

Burnaby. You're not gonna move to Burnaby.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I did once.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, and how was that?

[Luke Lafreniere]

Scars.

[Linus Sebastian]

My scars remind me that the past is real. You're not moving to Burnaby. Number two. It costs about double what our. What our holdings are worth. So I'll cough it up. Really?

[Luke Lafreniere]

Kind of. How else are we.

[Linus Sebastian]

Tax write off?

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

Easy, easy solution.

[Luke Lafreniere]

If a company is buying a building, it's you buying a building. So like it's. You're going to have to cough it up either way.

[Linus Sebastian]

Well, yeah, but no, the plan. The plan is to sell what we have. It's to trade, not to.

[Luke Lafreniere]

We're trying to get something better.

[Linus Sebastian]

Well, I don't think we need more space than we have.

[Luke Lafreniere]

No, it just needs to be in one roof.

[Linus Sebastian]

We do not use our space very efficiently. So.

[Luke Lafreniere]

To be.

[Linus Sebastian]

To be fair, we do our best.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, and it's been a incentive, been a growth over time and do things by necessity type of thing. If you're building something from scratch, you can know what you need. When we don't know what we need and we're just trying to make things work, stuff just kind of happens. I don't know.

[Linus Sebastian]

Like what we're sitting in right now was our neighbor. And then was the employee lounge. And now. And then was inventory or were those flipped around?

[Luke Lafreniere]

I think it was inventory. And then employee lounge.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I'm not sure.

[Linus Sebastian]

And now is wan. Show set. Because you just.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I don't know, things just happen.

[Linus Sebastian]

You have to move the puzzle pieces around in order to make everything fit together. So no, I don't think that we need more. I don't think we need more space. We just need a better planned out space. And so a hundred thousand. A hundred thousand square feet is a lot. The other issue with this one is this. I'll show you this, these two words, opportunity. That means scary. No, no, what that means. What that means is that it's leased already. This is not priced for owner occupier. So even though it only costs. So it costs only twice as much, it's closer to the city, which theoretically should have more value. It has a ton of parking. It's on like a nice big lot. And it's only. And it's. It's two and a half times as much space for only double the price. But that's because we can't occupy it. So whoever's there is going to stay there. And I would just own a building for my personal portfolio. LMG couldn't actually move into it. So there's always a deal breaker. It's. It's a bigger challenge than I think, literally.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Not being able to use the building is a pretty big deal breaker.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, there's always a deal breaker.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Can you ever talk to the tenant? Can you be like, yo, are you planning on staying here and stuff?

[Linus Sebastian]

Commercial leases on the one hand are sort of brutal for the person who signs them.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Financially.

[Linus Sebastian]

Financially. Because it's triple net. We talked about that a little bit earlier, but remember how I said that they're like way worse than residential? One of the things that's like, I guess worse about them or like more hardcore about them. There's more.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Can you like not kick the tenant?

[Linus Sebastian]

You cannot break them. There is no, like, what if I can't make rent? Or like, what if I need to renovate the building and kick you out? Or whatever. Like, essentially there's more paperwork for a commercial lease than there is for a residential sale. Essentially it is done. And I don't speak for every region necessarily, but here, here it's done. Yeah, that's it. So time as it is not done for now, we take e bikes between the buildings, keep looking. We, we keep our ear to the ground.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

We kind of, you know, watch what's happening with the market and we hope that at some point we can find something. But. And we're going to look at moving some departments around, you know, to have people who work together more, closer together. But it's, it is actually pretty tough. And part of the problem is, like you said, the way that we built this place out piecemeal means that it's not as flexible of a space. Monorail.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Monorail Monterey.

[Linus Sebastian]

Okay. Anyway, what do you want to talk about next?

[Dan]

Merch messages?

[Luke Lafreniere]

Train tracks behind the buildings. And then get those old bikes that you can ride on train tracks.

[Linus Sebastian]

Okay. Merch messages, apparently. Oh, oh, there's something really exciting for Merch messages, though. This is pretty. Oh my God. There's so many. There's so many announcements.

[Luke Lafreniere]

It's kind of too many announcements, guys.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, we might have to dial back the announcements, but. Okay, fine. First double sweet 16 livestream. We just hit 16 million subscribers on the, on the LTT channel and we're currently planning a stream for November for our 16th anniversary.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Nice.

[Linus Sebastian]

How did those things line up so perfectly? 1 million subscribers a year. Not bad. We're tentatively planning to look back at some of our most watched videos and do 16 builds that we're going to auction for charity on Jawa.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Wow.

[Linus Sebastian]

So that's coming up November 16th. Oh, no, for November. For our six. I don't know, sometime in November. Yeah. And now a segue to our sponsor. And it says, Dan will play a video. Hi, it's James from LTT Store. Anyone ever tell you don't clean your screen with your T shirt through their rules? Because we made a T shirt for exactly that purpose. A regular shirt would scratch. Since the LTT microfiber T shirt is made of soft fabric loops, it won't. This is for your car, your jar, your glasses, your phone. And it's got this soft and cozy jersey fabric interior. So you can just wear this puppy.

[Luke Lafreniere]

All day long as a certified glasses cleaner.

[Linus Sebastian]

This works.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Unlike you.

[Linus Sebastian]

It's made by nerds. You know that nerds always make good stuff. Here's how to order.

[Luke Lafreniere]

If you want sarcastic ads, Riley and James are just like, the way to go. That was fantastic. I had not seen that before.

[Linus Sebastian]

The best part is it wasn't satire.

[Luke Lafreniere]

It's. I've been wearing it the whole show. Yeah, you didn't even notice. Except for the people that asked if my shirt was wet.

[Linus Sebastian]

It's a real product. Now look, guys, that funny, that funny video aside, I do. I do not want to oversell this thing because it is not up to the regular standards of our regular T shirts. It is not as comfortable. It is literally made of microfiber cloth material. Okay. That means it has some disadvantages in terms of comfort, which I already kind of touched on. But it also has some advantages. Advantage number the first, it's really warm. It is actually, like uncomfortably warm if you are moving around a lot.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Like a sweater.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, yeah. It. It also means that, like, the sizing and the. And the drape are a little different, a little different than our typical shirts. So it ends up with kind of like a very fitted fit. I would say if you like our. This is me wearing our, like, my typical size. So if you like our typical fit, this isn't going to be it. You could maybe size up or you could just, I don't know, not buy the microfiber shirt.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I tend to wear xls. I put on the XL microfiber shirt. My arms didn't fit.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, yeah.

[Luke Lafreniere]

So it's a little tighter.

[Linus Sebastian]

Because it's not. It doesn't.

[Luke Lafreniere]

This is a 2 XL. I normally wear an XL.

[Linus Sebastian]

It doesn't have the same. It doesn't have the same stretch, you know, But. But here. Okay, let's do. Let's do a little experiment. Okay. I got a. Usually my face is greasier than my hands. Okay. So, you know, get that face grease on there. Okay. Oh, stop it. Okay. Okay. You guys see it? Pretty. You can see that. Pretty greasy, right?

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

Okay, watch this.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Boom.

[Linus Sebastian]

I don't even need to. I don't need to go find a cloth nowhere. I don't gotta.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I did notice, like, it seems like the microfibers, I guess, are like, a little shorter maybe, than in some cloths. So it might take a little bit more work, but it works.

[Linus Sebastian]

She's perfect. Look at that. She's. She's completely, like, new. Isn't that beautiful? Isn't that a beautiful thing? So it's as much a meme as it is a real product. It's one of those.

[Luke Lafreniere]

We'll enjoy it.

[Linus Sebastian]

It's one of those products that came about as sort of a. Like, what if we.

[Luke Lafreniere]

What if we do this?

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, we should do it for April Fool's. No, let's just do it.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I asked to make sure that we didn't order too many, and it sounds like that's probably true.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh, no. Yeah. No, we didn't order that many of.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Them, which might mean order now. You might not get one. Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

You might not get a lot of opportunities to get your hands on this, but that might be okay. Yeah. So anyway, if you're into it, I will say it's a conversation starter, I'll tell you that much.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I mostly forgot I was wearing it. I don't think it's that bad. Elijah in the chat said it gave him sensory issues. Your experience may vary.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah. Doing this doesn't feel great. If I was going to go in a jog in this thing, I think I'd be pretty upset. Doing this with your arms is not awesome. Have you tried that?

[Linus Sebastian]

Rub it against the elbows because it's microfiber. Right.

[Luke Lafreniere]

You'll like, rug burn yourself.

[Linus Sebastian]

If you want to know what it feels like, go find a microfiber cloth, one of those blue ones, and put it on yourself. Anyway, why don't we take a little break from announcements and do a couple merch messages? So the way to send a merch message is to just go to an lttstore.com, put something in your cart. You'll see a little box for merch message, and once you check out, it'll go to producer Dan, who will forward it to us or put it down there. Or who will reply to it himself, or who will send it to someone else internally. Let's show you what it looks like when he curates them for us.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Sorry. Digibrat said, can we get it with a Star Trek logo? I said, like, right when I sat down in it, I was like, wow, it looks like a Star Trek shirt.

[Linus Sebastian]

You can put your own Star Trek logo on it.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

We are not. We are not licensed by Paramount or whoever the heck. To Leah, there's. Yeah, that's not going to happen.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yep.

[Linus Sebastian]

Then again, you never know if you don't ask.

[Luke Lafreniere]

True.

[Linus Sebastian]

But it would cost way more. Do you really want it? Like, guys, there's a reason that licensed merchandise always sucks. It's because the money goes into licensing the brand rather than finding the finest microfiber rags.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Incredible. Expensive. Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

Hit us, Dan.

[Dan]

Sure. Hey, dll loving my precision kit. Already used it to fix my switchblade yesterday. Linus, what's your favorite genre of music to clean your house to?

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh. Oh, I don't know, man. I always. I always struggle when people ask me about my taste in music because it's pretty random. And I know, like, everyone says that. Everyone says, like, oh, yeah, I listen to, like, really random music, but, like, no, really. So I got some Maroon 5 here. I got some Tupac. I got some Michael Jackson. I've got some Ghostbusters. Ghostbusters theme music. Like, no, it's, like, actually, like, random. Like, you could just throw a dart that's. You know, Got some Annie Lennox in here. Like, I don't know. I'll listen to Shania Twain, you know, or like. Like Taylor Swift's first album. I'll listen to kind of like pop country.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Okay.

[Linus Sebastian]

I'm not into much country. Country. I came. I came across. Oh, man. Oh, what's the song called? Song Pillar. Seven pillars of something. I came across these guys.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Seven pillars of awesome.

[Linus Sebastian]

No.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Isn't that a thing?

[Linus Sebastian]

Sabaton. Seven pillars of wisdom. I came across these Sabaton guys when I was playing Beat Saber the other day, and it's like. It's, like, freaking awesome. The first thing that I thought when I. When I heard this song was like, there's no way that Adam Sondergaard from the writing department does not listen to these guys, because it's just like. It's like the most. It's. It's the most Adam thing ever. So, yeah, I don't know. Random. Legitimately random.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, I'm fairly all over the place as well.

[Linus Sebastian]

Well, I thought it was sea shanties. With you.

[Luke Lafreniere]

No, that's for the birds.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, I know, but I mean, that's what you're listening to while you clean the house. For better or for worse than it is.

[Luke Lafreniere]

It does play a very often percentage of the time. Yeah, it'll be that or like some local radio station. Just because, like, the radio clock thing that we use to make sure that they have music just like, plays radio stations, but I never listen to it. I don't really know what's happening or care. Nice. Yeah, I don't know. I think it'll kind of depend on, like, the vibe. Like, is. Am I speed cleaning? Maybe like metal or something? Just go for it. Let her rip.

[Linus Sebastian]

No metal. I don't really do. I don't really do metal. I don't really do, like, really like vocalists. I don't really find it appealing. That's probably my one thing.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, I think the metal that I listen to doesn't have as much of that. I'm not 100% certain, but I think so.

[Linus Sebastian]

All right, Dan, hit us. Sure.

[Dan]

Linus. I just had my second born last Saturday. Any tips to make it easier on the firstborn? They are both boys, so I want to build that brotherly bond, communication, you.

[Linus Sebastian]

Know, be honest, Talk about what's going to be good, talk about what's going to be not as good.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Always make sure you only have one of anything and make them fight for it.

[Linus Sebastian]

Okay. He's being a bit of an ass about it, but he's actually kind of not wrong. Because if you don't teach them to share, they're not going to learn later. So I. We. We go out of our way to buy one of things. In fact, you're going to see this. We've got an upcoming video where the kids asked for a karaoke setup. I am not a karaoke guy. I don't.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Bluetooth speaker and a phone.

[Linus Sebastian]

I don't know anything about it, but I was like, oh, well. There's an opportunity to offload the research for my child's birthday wish to one of our staff members. And all I have to do is make a video about it, which may actually be relevant because when I tried to do the research myself, I discovered that karaoke is one of those rabbit holes that's like dash cams where it's just flooded with AliExpress garbage.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Tons of products.

[Linus Sebastian]

You don't know which one's good and no reliable information. So we kind of came in and we're like, okay, we're gonna demystify anyway. When I Kind of have my hands on their eyes to be like, aha, reveal. I'm like, okay, you know how we do that thing where sometimes your birthday present is for everybody? Well, we're doing that again and that is something that we do on a.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Pretty cool way to do it, in my opinion.

[Linus Sebastian]

A pretty regular basis. Like this, you know, is your birthday present, but it actually doesn't belong to you. So another example of that is that water scooter thing, the underwater scooter. I bought that as a birthday present for my middle child, but I made it very clear when I gave it to the, when I gave it to her that she got to write it first.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Sure.

[Linus Sebastian]

And beyond that, everybody, it was for everybody to enjoy.

[Luke Lafreniere]

You can get some credit for maybe the idea.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yep.

[Luke Lafreniere]

If it like goes really well and was like, oh yeah, this is great. He's like, oh, thanks for, you know, requesting this or whatever. I don't know. Yep, that's cool.

[Linus Sebastian]

But you've got to, yeah, you've basically got a. You basically got to set the ground rules now and, and you've got to micromanage it. Like, oh man, I forget what kind of ridiculous passive aggressive thing one of the kids said to the other last night, but I was just like, hey, that's rude. What should you have said and what do you need to say now? You know, you need to apologize now, like, anyway, parenting. Okay, what's next? Oh, yeah, let's do another topic. What do you want to talk about?

[Luke Lafreniere]

Do we do no more? I want to. Okay.

[Linus Sebastian]

No, let's do a real topic.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Oh, I wanted to see it the whole show. Okay. SpaceX. Sure, let's go. SpaceX literally catches a rocket midair.

[Linus Sebastian]

That's pretty cool.

[Luke Lafreniere]

It's actually insane. SpaceX made history during its fifth flight for the company's two stage Starship vehicle this week, which is intended to take astronauts to the moon in the upcoming Artemis 3 mission, the rocket's first, and do many other things. To be clear, the rocket's first stage, the super heavy booster, the most powerful booster ever made, not only carried the upper stage starship spacecraft to an altitude of 65 km or 40 miles above the Earth, but successfully separated. And then it says slowly descended very rapidly descended towards. Extremely rapidly descended towards the launch tower. After a breaking burn, which looks sick. The 71 metre or 233ft, or some people are calling 19 story tall rocket booster used just three of its 33 engines. That's also not correct. To manoeuvre towards the tower's massive Mechanical arms which clasped onto the booster, sort of. I can explain that too, in a moment. Catching it in midair, sort of. The starship spacecraft itself climbed to an altitude of 89 miles, or 143km, and cruise towards the Indian Ocean, slowing itself from over 16,000 miles per hour to near zero as it splashed down in the water as intended. And it was cool how they did that, because while they didn't catch the starship, it kind of like positioned itself as if it could have been and then went into the water because they were still trying to test for telemetry stuff. So there's some details about this that aren't immediately apparent. Dan and I were talking about this before the show. Do you see the fins? Can you make this full screen? You see the fins? That's not what catches it. The chopsticks or the arms also do not pinch it.

[Linus Sebastian]

Right.

[Luke Lafreniere]

When they called it chopsticks, a lot of people imagined that it was, like, grabbing it and holding it with, like, friction or something. That's not what happened. Also, the fins that come out that you can see are not what caught it.

[Linus Sebastian]

Right.

[Luke Lafreniere]

There's these tiny little. In reality, they're like, bigger than a person, but the thing's 16 or 19 stories tall or whatever, so it looks insane.

[Linus Sebastian]

Apparently it did use three engines for the maneuvering, sort of.

[Luke Lafreniere]

It also used a lot more of that first. More than that first, and then went down to three.

[Linus Sebastian]

Thirteen, then three says Shammy Heel.

[Luke Lafreniere]

That is correct. So, yeah, there's there two. Again, I'm saying little. They're. They're not that little just in comparison to the structure. They're tiny. You can barely even see them. There's these two little tiny arms that come off the side, and there's sections of the chopsticks that actually go up to touch them. So what's actually connecting is very small. And, like, even the turn of the ship had to be perfect. So it didn't just have to be aligned, like, within the chopsticks at all. It also had to be turned to the, like, almost exact right angle. And they nailed it. I think I had a better angle of it. But realistically, you should just look it up yourself so that those people get the views. But there's cameras that are closer where you can see those little arms that actually catch onto the chopsticks. That was wild to watch. Super, super cool. Massive success there. First time they ever tried it, which is insane. And also, again, the starship itself, while it, you know, went into the water and blew up that was entirely the as tradition. Yeah, but, but watching how it like kind of came in and positioned itself nicely and then set into the water and then was like, cool. Mission complete. Fell over and exploded was wild. They had these little buoys in the water. Yeah. And you could tell it landed in the right spot because this buoy that I don't think they were controlling is just sitting there and it comes right into view. Nicely. But one of the. If you watch the footage of the buoy, one of the like fragments of the starship flies and smacks the buoy. Nice. So it was like pretty close. But yeah, that was, that was genuinely extremely cool to watch. And even if you're not super into space, stuff like this is. This is a mind blowing feat of engineering. Watching watching something 233ft tall come flying in at crazy speed and then just catch itself is nuts.

[Linus Sebastian]

I mean, I'm impressed when my little handheld drone hovers.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

You know, that's a lot easier to deal with.

[Luke Lafreniere]

This, this, this whole thing was. Yeah. Extremely, extremely fun to witness. I'm happy that it happened. What are we talking about next? What was our announcement topics?

[Linus Sebastian]

We moved the vacuum.

[Luke Lafreniere]

The vacuum? Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

All right. Your vacuum is watching. Over the past several days, there have been widespread reports from owners of ecovacs robot vacuums who say that their vacuums have started acting strangely, including screaming obscenities at their owners and chasing their pets. As it turns out, these vacuums were remotely accessed by bypassing their pin code, which does not use server side validation. Once hacked, these maliciously controlled vacuums gave the hackers control of the vacuum and access to its video feed. At least one hacking victim, a lawyer, expressed relief that the vacuum had only been used to broadcast lurid language rather than used to silently spy on the household. Yeah, ecovax. The company was warned about this issue by security researchers. Get this back. In December of 2023, after security researchers spoke out publicly, Ecovacs gave a statement to TechCrunch saying they would not fix the security flaws pointed out by the researchers and telling users not to worry excessively about this. Earlier this month, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation successfully demonstrated that they could easily hack an Ecovacs vacuum and used it to spy on a colleague's family without them noticing. This is in part because the vacuum doesn't play a camera recording warning sound unless it is being accessed from the ecovacs app. Note, this hack was performed with prior consent.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Okay, cool.

[Linus Sebastian]

This. I didn't know. I had never heard of them before. But ecovacs vacuums are some of the most popular in the world, primarily because they are very cheap. Our discussion question here is, should we be more cautious about. And then it just kind of trails off there. That's fine. The team didn't have a lot of time to put together the notes today. Yes, yes. Discussion question we should be more cautious about.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I think the camera flip thing that was made for the Logitech C920s. I don't know if it was actually made by Logitech or not, but do you know what I'm talking about?

[Linus Sebastian]

It comes in the box.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Little privacy screen.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, I just put all my C920s up that I got for the Land center last weekend because I finally got around.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Remember the newer ones do. My original one didn't.

[Linus Sebastian]

It comes with a little plastic clip and it goes on the front. And then it's a little flappy dog.

[Luke Lafreniere]

A flappy, physical little thing. Oh, man. If it was a physical little thing. No, no, that wouldn't make sense.

[Linus Sebastian]

I'm just not convinced that these robot vacuums actually save any time just because.

[Luke Lafreniere]

They kind of suck.

[Linus Sebastian]

Well, it's. They're helpful for me a do it. Maybe it's just because I've never had a house layout that's conducive to using them.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Mine barely is, but with the constant mess that birds create and the actual ease of cleaning that mess up, it's nice just having something on routine that'll go through and do a pretty decent job and then you can do a proper one every however long. Um, but having something go like every day or even twice a day to pick up, you know, the seed that they've thrown out of the cage or little bits of feather or whatever else. Elf whatever else is kind of nice.

[Linus Sebastian]

Okay. That's a fair assessment. I guess. For me, the issue was just at our old place, there were so many transitions and the sunken living room and the multiple floors and the super complex upstairs layout, it really doesn't solve a.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Lot of our problem. Yeah, it's mostly. It just. Mostly just helps the birds.

[Linus Sebastian]

I mean, there's a lot of people in chat that are saying they're super stoked on theirs. So there you go. And like, we've. We've worked with robot vacuum companies before that have had very impressive performance compared to the last time that I actually tried to use one at my house. So it's clear that they are advancing in a big way. It's just that our layout just doesn't work for it.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, I think for us, it's like we take a problem area and make it no longer a problem. So it takes cleaning from this like annoying thing that you have to do practically literally all the time to something you can do on a more reasonable schedule.

[Linus Sebastian]

I think part of it is also me just making the mistake of putting in wall to wall carpeting every time. Yeah, I should have just not done any wall to wall in the new place. That was really dumb. But Yvonne and I both like it on our feeties. But then we have hardwood in the bedroom anyway, so like why did we even.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Anyway, I am a wall to wall carpet enjoyer. But when the birds were at the vet not that long ago, we did like emergency hyper dep clean and we like borrowed Emma's dad's like deep carpet cleaner thing. Yeah, yeah. And went hard and it was gross. Yeah, carpets are gross.

[Linus Sebastian]

They're kind of not sanitary.

[Luke Lafreniere]

It's like, wow, there's a lot of stuff coming out of this.

[Dan]

They're fine if you just never check. It's like most things in life.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

Anyways, we should check out our sponsors.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

Sorry, Dan. Freaking out here. Acronis. As much as some people thrive when under a cyber attack, that is me.

[Luke Lafreniere]

That. That is legitimately me.

[Linus Sebastian]

I think we can all agree it's best to prevent them from happening in the first place. With Acronis Cyber Protect, you get access to a set of security, backup and recovery tools all nicely packaged into one platform with a single console and one click Simplicity. You'll be armed with cutting edge ammo to stop attacks before they can do too much damage, such as endpoint detection. And you can continuously monitor abnormal activity and use URL filtering to block access to potentially malicious websites. But as prepared as you can be, sometimes things slip through the crack cracks and disaster happens. But with Acronis, you'll be protected with GEO redundant cloud storage, so your precious files are automatically backed up to multiple locations. And getting access to those files is a breeze thanks to Acronis Instant Restore feature, which launches your backup as a virtual machine. Super cool. So bring your data protection and cybersecurity together with acronis [e-mail] Wanshow the show is also brought to you by Squarespace. In abstract paintings, you'll see a lot of shapes like triangles, circles, and of course, squares. But if you take a look at the Linus Media Group website, you'll see squares all over the place. It's almost like a conspiracy. But what's not too deep is how simple it was to build our site thanks to Squarespace, I see where we were going with this. Their Fluid Engine editor makes it easy for anyone to get creative with the details details of how their site should look thanks to simple yet intuitive drag and drop elements. And if you don't know where to start, their AI powered Their AI powered guided design system. Squarespace Blueprint lets you choose from a ton of professionally curated layout and styling options. And of course you'll need a personalized domain, which Squarespace has millions of for you to choose from. So if you're building a website for your business, they've got powerful tools for you to use like email marketing tools, direct invoicing through the platform, and a whole bevy of supported payment methods. So what are you waiting for? Start building your website [e-mail] when and you'll even get 10% off your first purchase. Finally, the show is brought to you by MSI. You know, sometimes your regular old 60Hz monitor is good enough for your basic needs. But imagine how amazing it would be to fill in Those spreadsheets on MSI's 49 inch QD OLED curve curved monitor. We're talking crystal clear equations and data entry thanks to DisplayHDR True Black 400 and clear Mr. 8000 Vesa Certified Performance. Oh, what's that? You want a game on this thing? Well, how does a 144Hz refresh rate and 0.03 millisecond grey to gray response time sound? It even has a built in kvm. So if you're working off your laptop, you can quickly switch between that and your gaming rig, all while using the same peripherals. You'll also get access to their Gaming Intelligence app to configure and customize your viewing experience. So whether it's for business or pleasure, MSI's new 49 inch curved QD OLED monitor is here to excite your eyeballs. Check it out using our link in the video description. All right. Oh, we're supposed to do merch messages. All right, Dan, hit me. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Hi dll.

[Dan]

My seven year old lately has shown interesting in computer science, especially cyber security. Considering getting him a PC to game on and explore his curiosity in the field. Any suggestions on how to safely or the operating system?

[Linus Sebastian]

How to safely. The operating system.

[Dan]

Sorry, punctuation.

[Luke Lafreniere]

How to do so safely.

[Dan]

How to do so safely.

[Luke Lafreniere]

What operating system they should use?

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh, I. Yeah, I'm looking at. I don't, I don't know what they mean by this, but throw them At Linux. Young Windows Parental management tools are still terrible. Like, they are sort of a disaster. Archer.

[Dan]

Get a new kid.

[Linus Sebastian]

Like you can set them up.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah. Give them arch. And then the parental management tools is. They won't be able to do anything.

[Dan]

Just disowned.

[Linus Sebastian]

That's kind of interesting.

[Luke Lafreniere]

And if they can figure out how to do it, then I guess they're old enough.

[Dan]

Maybe they'll be ready by the time they're 18.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Maybe they.

[Linus Sebastian]

Okay.

[Luke Lafreniere]

If. Honestly, if they're super into computers and stuff, I don't think giving them the like easiest thing is even probably gonna be what they want. I would throw them at some form of.

[Linus Sebastian]

Could we at least give them something that can kind of do some stuff out of the box?

[Luke Lafreniere]

Maybe recommend them to mess around with no GUI modes and stuff.

[Linus Sebastian]

There's seven.

[Luke Lafreniere]

There's seven. But they're expressing behind the cursed insider.

[Dan]

Security arch console to a cyber security kid. He's gonna feel like a hacker.

[Linus Sebastian]

Remember this is from a parent. You know, parents will see their kid.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Like, do you want to do cyber security?

[Linus Sebastian]

Like get their hands like covered in drool and like smear it on a piece of paper. He's interested in art. Like, you never know. Right. I'm not saying Eric is like that. I'm just saying it's. It's a possibility. There's seven. So like, I think it should at least have a gooey.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Sure.

[Linus Sebastian]

Like, don't be like that.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah.

[Dan]

He could just install it himself.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah. Or do it with him.

[Dan]

Yeah. Teach him how to install a gui.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah. That's fun.

[Luke Lafreniere]

That sounds like there's some games that feature hacking elements. I can't really name it. Off top my head right now. It's pretty old, but it was cool.

[Linus Sebastian]

What was. What was that, like educational, like platform thing?

[Luke Lafreniere]

Uplink.

[Linus Sebastian]

A blink. Thank you.

[Dan]

I loved that game.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

Still do.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Uplink could be hacked. Hacknet. Yeah. There's a. There's a website that is good for learning cybersecurity stuff that I also can't remember the name of right now. I'm just going to use chat for, you know, everything, I guess. Hack the box. There we go.

[Linus Sebastian]

What was that one that. Thank you. What was that one that came with a Raspberry PI that you would build.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Oh.

[Linus Sebastian]

And it had like a bunch of like sort of coding friendly games. Like it had.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I don't remember.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh man.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Kano. Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah. Kano. Kano.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Kano.

[Linus Sebastian]

Sure. Yeah. And I think you can just get the software. Like I don't. I think you can I mean, don't quote me on that.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Are they still around separately getting them into the Scratch programming language? Scratch is, in my opinion, genuinely a pretty solid way to learn the basics of things.

[Linus Sebastian]

Canal World is relaunching in partnership with Astro Safe and Fin. Okay, so that's something.

[Dan]

More.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, hit me.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah.

[Dan]

Some of my favorite content was the crazy multi monitor 16k gaming type deals. With the lack of SLI, are projects like that even possible? How do we push hardware peripheral limits?

[Linus Sebastian]

Actually, that project did not use sli. It used Quadro Multisync. So it had four individual cards that were driving the monitors individually. And then it had a separate fifth sync card that each of those cards was linked into that handled all the synchronization of the image. That's why it was a little, a little, a little wonky. That, to my knowledge, still kind of exists. But I think the challenge for us is that we want to find new things to explore.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I would also say resolution pumping was like a big thing back then. It's not really a thing anymore now.

[Linus Sebastian]

We all agree it's kind of stupid. Yeah, like, we're definitely going to do a video gaming in 8k on the 5090 or whatever when it comes out. But do we need to game at 16K? I don't know. Maybe not that.

[Luke Lafreniere]

That one dude who spends his entire life modding a cyberpunk will care.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, yeah, exactly. So, like, okay, like, we, like, one of the things that people love is us using, you know, wacky fans to cool things, right? So we had that one where we rented those, like, industrial fans and we hooked them up to that cooler master case with like a plywood duct and it like, blew the top of the case off. That was great. And then we had the one where we hooked up that, like, bigger, like, almost looked like a jet turbine fan to a computer and ran it off of, like, lipo batteries. But what you'll notice about those two things is that while they both had fans connected, there were sort of different things that we could explore. So the second one ended up being more about the lipo batteries and less about just the fan, you know, so we want, we want there to be something new for us to talk about. We did another, like, wacky fan video just now where we used a turbo to cool a computer, which is Alex and I sort of agree. Maybe the stupidest thing we've ever done. But the difference, the difference is that what makes it not jumping the shark is that there's new learning outcomes.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Okay.

[Linus Sebastian]

We discuss what a Turbo is. We discuss why a conventional one might not work and why we might want to use an electric turbo or a supercharger.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Exhaust fed?

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, normally, but you know, computer, I mean, it has exhaust, but not like that.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Just pulled your car up.

[Linus Sebastian]

We talk about the challenges with the high pressure and therefore high temperature of the turbo's exhaust air. I shouldn't say exhaust, but it's output. Because when you say exhaust in automotive terms, it sounds like the exhaust, not that. Like the output from the turbo, the fresh air from the turbo. So it. So the air is actually hot. So then we, we discuss intercoolers and we use an intercooler. And anyway, it's a really great video, but it's more than just taking a big fan and hooking it up to a computer because we've already done that and we try not to do the same things over and over.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Does Alex like traveling? Like, does he go to Computex? I don't remember. I don't think he was.

[Linus Sebastian]

I think Alex usually does. I don't know if he did Computex last time, but he, he does. Ces. I think there's a.

[Luke Lafreniere]

There's a maybe possibility if you guys are interested. Maybe. Maybe. I haven't actually asked any maybe that you could do.

[Linus Sebastian]

I think Alex did do Computex.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Fanless computer build, but in a wind tunnel and try to cool it that way and see what happens.

[Linus Sebastian]

I'd be down. There's another one I want to do. I want to. I want to put a computer in a hyperbaric chamber.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Oh, nice.

[Linus Sebastian]

I want to know what like denser air does.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, why not?

[Linus Sebastian]

I don't know.

[Luke Lafreniere]

That's cool. I love stuff like that.

[Linus Sebastian]

We also still have pending. Actually, maybe I shouldn't talk too much about these because these might take us a while to execute. Nevermind. The ideas. Doc is like, we're not out of ideas. We, we got. We got.

[Luke Lafreniere]

The oldest thing on it is wonder how old it is.

[Linus Sebastian]

I have no idea. I'd have to go back to like every revision. That's not bad.

[Luke Lafreniere]

You know what could be kind of fun too is like my, my three worst ideas. And you do like you. You have the writers vote on like what the three worst ideas in the doc are and you do all three of them in one video. You just do like.

[Linus Sebastian]

I don't know. I'm kind of down anyways. I'm gonna send that to myself.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Sick. Let's go. Yeah. What are we on? We're on topics. Okay, sure. SpaceX catching the rocket. Ready Talking about that, I fanboyed enough. I could go on for hours. It is what it is. Linus struggling with his stream. Oh, Linus is having streaming issues with his VR PC.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah. So I was. I did a. I did a VR stream last night, and I don't know what it is about this machine, but it was perfect for a long time. And now whenever I stream, I get this, like, stutter in VR and I don't feel like the load I'm putting on it is super crazy. I'm running an index, so it's high resolution, but it's not up there with the best headsets these days anymore, not by a long shot. And I'm streaming at 1080p, you know, 6 megabit. But when I use NVENC. Oh. One of the things that is a little bit challenging is I'm using LIVE for, like, a virtual avatar. So it has to. Yeah, it has to do some compositing. But, like, I don't get it because CPU usage sits around like 40% GPU usage is what it is. And if you're using NVENC for encoding, it should, like, be fine. But I think I'm gonna have to. I think I'm gonna have to rebuild it. Elijah says, I promise it's your cpu. Your GPU is trying to comp and ends up with more overhead on it. It happened with my old computer. That. That's possible.

[Luke Lafreniere]

When's the first time you ever overclock something?

[Linus Sebastian]

I have a 3600, so it's not a super high core count machine. So it's possible that I am running into some CPU issues.

[Dan]

DSP latency spikes.

[Linus Sebastian]

What now?

[Dan]

DSP latency spikes can often be caused by Nvidia drivers. It hits the audio and causes hitches like that or little pops.

[Linus Sebastian]

It's not audio. No, the audio.

[Dan]

No, no, no, no, no. It interrupts the system badly and causes really weird issues like that.

[Linus Sebastian]

Interesting. And this is what, an Nvidia driver.

[Dan]

Issue, you said most of the time it is Nvidia drivers. You can use something like. I don't know, there's tools out there. I think it's called process. No, DSP latency monitor or something.

[Linus Sebastian]

Okay, I have another theory.

[Dan]

Latency mod. That's it.

[Linus Sebastian]

This Windows install. Oh, yeah, I mean, has made its way all the way from Windows 7. Okay, I didn't know that. Okay. But through Windows 8.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I didn't know that. And I was going to say start.

[Linus Sebastian]

There through 10 through 11. It is now 11.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Did you 8.1 it.

[Linus Sebastian]

I don't remember. I had never. I had never intended to Windows 11 it. But one of my kids just like, clicked, okay, upgrade at some point.

[Luke Lafreniere]

And I good, it's free.

[Linus Sebastian]

And I was like, okay. It has had at least three different motherboards, so I may just need to reformat my computer.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, it's.

[Linus Sebastian]

It's my VR machine.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah. So I think from the original video where I built it, I just, like, grabbed a drive and it, like, already had Windows on it.

[Luke Lafreniere]

So it's probably from a completely different system originally.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh, yeah.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Then it's had multiple different motherfuckers.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh, 100%.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Nice.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah. So that might also be it.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah. I will say I through fake shade at Elijah. I will say Elijah was the only person to set the screensaver in the young people try Windows XP video. The way I would have done it.

[Linus Sebastian]

I couldn't.

[Luke Lafreniere]

That video was extremely fun and, oh, deeply infuriating at times.

[Linus Sebastian]

The CD dual case. Yeah, I know. That actually killed your soul. Like, I talked about. I talked about this with Luke after. If you don't know how they work, there's a spine on it.

[Luke Lafreniere]

There's a spine, there's a spine.

[Linus Sebastian]

If you don't know there's a clear.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Pivot point, you open at the opposite end.

[Linus Sebastian]

Luke, if you've never close your laptop.

[Luke Lafreniere]

How do you open it? I don't know.

[Linus Sebastian]

Even some cardboard boxes can be a little bit challenging, even though you can clearly see which way it's supposed to open because of the way it, like comes over and in or whatever. I don't think to someone who's never seen one before, I don't think it's immediately obvious, even though I know how to open them. I have struggled with CD jewel cases, especially when they're brand new.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Crack it open.

[Linus Sebastian]

Well, yeah, I like, I know the techniques like a nut, but I'm talking about, like my whole life, like, at some point in my life, I didn't know that. And like when they're brand new and they're like, they're. They're kind of sharp. And the first time they were ever put together, I don't know, maybe they're a little crack.

[Luke Lafreniere]

They can be little hard to get, a little hidden. They can be also a very obvious hinge on one side.

[Linus Sebastian]

I'm just saying. I get it, I get it. But it was a little hard. Yeah, it was a little hard to witness.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I do think. And I noticed today, actually, after we talked, I swear I didn't steal it, but I noticed one of the top comments. The second comment from Daniel Owen Tech. Daniel Owen Tech. Okay, cool. Is now check if they can use Windows 11. Most of my high school students have no idea how to do anything on a PC that isn't in a browser. And watching the video I was actually surprised. I think my rose tinted glasses were like cracked or something. I thought it was going to be harder for them to do these things. I forgot how much it would prompt you with like, oh, you tried to do something. What do you want to do with these things? Yeah, you inserted a thing. Here's all your options.

[Linus Sebastian]

I forgot how much that Windows XP was pretty sick. Yeah, yeah, it was.

[Luke Lafreniere]

It was definitely more positively since watching.

[Linus Sebastian]

It was a turning point for Windows for sure because 98 was. It was simple but you couldn't do that much. Yeah, like 98 was really easy to use. I was not stoked on the move to XP and how like overcomplicated the start menu was now and stuff like what is all this other crap? I just need my programs. Like what, what? You know, like. And obviously my recollection of this is pretty spotty given that that was a hot minute ago when I was quite young. But I remember not having a problem using 98se and then XP was like the only reason that I kind of got good at using it was because I was at a stage in my life where it was fun to just like, you know, explore and spend the ample free time that I had because I didn't have a job. You know, playing around with it just.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Was fun then way it was.

[Linus Sebastian]

It was fun. It was fun.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I think it actually was just fun. I think it didn't get in your way. I think it had a lot of ease of use that modern operating systems have. You know, maybe not as much as the most modern ones, but it had a lot of ease of use built in. It wouldn't get in your way and you could do a lot with it. It was very cool that way.

[Linus Sebastian]

You know what else is cool? We should do a couple more announcements.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yes, I want to see the shirt.

[Linus Sebastian]

A lot of people have been requesting a smaller version of the LTT backpack.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Here it is, the commuter pack.

[Linus Sebastian]

A backpack built to support your day, every day, your day. Organized pockets for all your tech and essentials ready for you to access in seconds. No more rummaging. Our most portable backpack yet. With a 20 liter capacity, built to last with durable water resistant reprieve canvas, a rivet reinforced top handle, YKK zippers and a certified validated dual layer bottom. I Didn't know you did.

[Luke Lafreniere]

That's hilarious.

[Linus Sebastian]

Product is still in final development. Final specifications may change.

[Dan]

Oh, my gosh.

[Linus Sebastian]

But you can sign up for it at lttstore.com pages commuter signup and I am really excited about this thing.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Are you going to cut into it?

[Linus Sebastian]

No, I'm not. It's not necessary. We already did that. This is it. It can hold.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Love this pocket.

[Linus Sebastian]

It can hold a shocking amount of stuff considering how much smaller it is than the OG Backpack. We have external water bottle holders on both sides, so it. That's. It was more of an ergonomic choice than thinking that anyone needs to carry two water bottles.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Some people do, sure.

[Linus Sebastian]

But it was more to do with depending on which way you like to swing your bag off to grab your water bottle. We wanted to have the option on both sides, but I use this side for my precision screwdriver kit. And also get this. So you can see the bag there. Yeah. See the pocket there? There's a little hidden zipper here.

[Luke Lafreniere]

What I didn't know about that.

[Linus Sebastian]

I keep my mouse in there.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Okay.

[Linus Sebastian]

Pretty cool, right?

[Luke Lafreniere]

I didn't expect the hidden pocket to be that big. I didn't expect you to pull a mouse.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh, man.

[Luke Lafreniere]

It like. Yeah, you got to need it secondhand because it wants to be more streamlined so it tries to close a little bit.

[Linus Sebastian]

Like the OG we have our RFID protected passport pocket back here, I believe. Oh, no. It was going to be accessible. Accessible from both sides. I killed that because I didn't think it was necessary. It's got a sunglass pocket. I have a ton of stuff in mind right now. Sunglass pocket in there.

[Luke Lafreniere]

It does not include a fancy dangly thing made by Linus's children.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh, yeah, no, that's not part of the bag. And then it's got kind of a pocket of holding, just like the OG one. So I've got a bulky sweater in there. I've got a tech sack in there to help with organization. That's about it because it is a significantly smaller bag. So that sweater, you have organized your pockets after that took up the whole thing. And then in here, we've just got, you know, kind of a variety of pockets, including one for the screwdriver. Got a little magnetic thing on here to kind of, you know, keep them from getting all flappy doodly. And then just like the original bag, it's texture first. Right. So, ah, these go all the way down, which they didn't in the initial revision because of the interference with the water bottle pocket. But we found a new way to construct it so that they can. And we've got one, two sleeves so you can have like your laptop and your tablet or your big laptop and your smaller laptop. And then we've also got space on this side for your one or two chargers and then.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Or a mouse or something.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yep. Or a charger and a mouse or something like that. And then we've got this. Cannot get the angle right on this. We've got a black zipper pocket right here. So you can, you know, put some. Some low profile things down there as well. The ergonomics are really good. I would say it is as good, if not better than the original one. Especially if you have a smaller frame like your body. The frame of your body. And it's going to be. Have we announced pricing?

[Luke Lafreniere]

I don't know.

[Linus Sebastian]

Given that the team hasn't. I'm not gonna say it.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Not in the blurb that we have. And I don't see it on the site right now, personally.

[Linus Sebastian]

Was there a blurb? Sorry, Did I hit all the points in the blurb?

[Luke Lafreniere]

I don't know.

[Linus Sebastian]

Neat. Well, anyway, cool.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Not yet. The official answer is not yet.

[Linus Sebastian]

The official answer is not yet. Okay, well, it's gonna have a price.

[Luke Lafreniere]

It will. Yes, it will have that.

[Linus Sebastian]

LMG GG Commuter. Dan, do you mind throwing that in all the chats?

[Dan]

Yep.

[Linus Sebastian]

All right. Okay, fine. Do you want to.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I get to see it? Yay.

[Linus Sebastian]

All right. Our just did that.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Really darting all over the place.

[Dan]

I'm trying to copy the link.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, I mean, it's not like it was 12 characters. You can.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Oh my goodness. Okay.

[Linus Sebastian]

This one's for all the floaters out there. Yesterday, Sarah went live on floatplane designing a shirt with suggestions from our floatplane subscribers. The result, A design that Luke has not yet seen.

[Luke Lafreniere]

No, I was busy working. I didn't get to see it at all.

[Linus Sebastian]

And I have also actually not seen.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Oh, cool. So it's as far as my understanding goes, it's a bit of design by committee. So there was input from the audience, but she did the actual design work. And you have to be a float plane subscriber and then log in with your floatplane account on the store to be able to buy it.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh, okay. So Dan, if you want to copy this one as well. Okay, I.

[Luke Lafreniere]

That's so sick.

[Linus Sebastian]

What am I looking at here?

[Luke Lafreniere]

It's a float plane with a little dino hanging off it. I think that's actually so cute. Wait, is it on the back?

[Linus Sebastian]

Do you want to zoom in? Yeah.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Oh, okay.

[Linus Sebastian]

That is adorable.

[Luke Lafreniere]

The wings, bro. Oh, he probably chewed the wing off on this side.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh, my goodness.

[Luke Lafreniere]

That's my assumption.

[Linus Sebastian]

Hold on. Someone says they see bread.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Bread.

[Linus Sebastian]

I don't see any bread.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I don't see any bread.

[Linus Sebastian]

Did. Did she hide bread in it?

[Luke Lafreniere]

Is there hidden bread, Dan?

[Linus Sebastian]

No way.

[Dan]

I don't know. I was doing my job.

[Linus Sebastian]

Bread plain. What are you guys even talking about? I think no. Is it made of bread? Is that why there's a bite out of it? Baguette wing? Is it?

[Luke Lafreniere]

Oh, because he made it?

[Linus Sebastian]

No, I think the little. The little marks like a baguette. Is that. Is that. Is that intentional?

[Dan]

That is probably a stretch.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah. Yeah. Guys, I don't know about that. What little marks? Yeah, those little marks there, they kind of look like baguette marks. No, I don't think so.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I don't think that is. That is a reach indeed.

[Linus Sebastian]

The planes landing like the pontoons were supposed supported to be bread. I don't know what you guys are talking about. Anyway, fan fiction now. Thanks, Floatplane. Enjoy your exclusive T shirt. It is only available to Float Plane subscribers, so if y'all want to leave a merch message, this is your chance. Lmg fpmerch 10. Well, yeah, we sold out of them.

[Dan]

Yeah, we don't get to wear them.

[Linus Sebastian]

Sorry, Luke.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I guess I'll have to have some shirts that aren't talls. All right.

[Linus Sebastian]

Okay. Sorry, Luke.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Okay.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah.

[Luke Lafreniere]

They're so nice, dude. Oh my God. Every day that I don't have a clean one or I'm like too lazy to do the laundry again because like the. The T shirt one, the non long sleeve one, it's probably. I had it for like two weeks. It's probably gone through the laundry, no joke, like 10 times. And then I went to. I did my thing where like, you know, I try to let the audience buy stuff before I request it. They're gone.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, sorry.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Okay.

[Linus Sebastian]

We didn't order that.

[Luke Lafreniere]

There's some long sleeves left. But the short sleeves, they only have short. Medium, large, extra large, extra extra large, and triple extra large.

[Linus Sebastian]

You mean small are all gone? Not short.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Oh, right.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, all good.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Specifically not short, actually.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yep. Sorry about that.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I'll get them someday.

[Linus Sebastian]

Okay, the last announcement is, do you still need your original LTT backpack carabiners replaced? We have contacted all the backpack buyers we think. But we want to call out our form one last time if. In case there's anyone who missed it. All you need is your order number and just go to LMG GG carabinerform to request it. It'll be closing soon, but if you missed the deadline for the form, trust me, bro, we still got you. You can message support. We know this took a long time. We've learned a lot. But whether you own a backpack or not, we hope you feel that. We've honored our commitment to do right by our customers, and we have finally delivered carabiner replacements to everybody with an LTT backpack.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Speaking of things that aren't right.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh, no.

[Luke Lafreniere]

This dog specific Chatbot, an AI powered pet collar called the Shazam Band. I wonder if they're gonna get sued. Uses sensors and speakers to allow your pet to talk to you out loud in a human like voice. The collar comes with 30 different voices with associated Personas such as Southern Belle and Mafia Boss.

[Linus Sebastian]

Cool. That actually does sound kind of cool.

[Luke Lafreniere]

How much insight the Shazam Band actually has into the emotions or thoughts of the animal wearing it. Spoiler alert. Big old guess, but zero. Yeah. Judging by its demo, the device appears to use some amount of situational cues, such as what the animal is currently doing or the behavior of nearby human beings to inform its responses.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh, good. So it's spying on us. Real good then.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah. Every part of this is perfect. The caller optionally includes GPS tracking and text notifications include the animal gets lost or winds up in danger or starts following random strangers around talking to them, which would be crazy. The base version costs $495. The enhanced version cost for a Bluetooth speaker with junk AI.

[Linus Sebastian]

Are you kidding me?

[Luke Lafreniere]

The enhanced version, it probably needs a subscription, too. I don't know. The enhanced version costs $595. And there is. Yes, there's optional subscription fees that cost 200 to 300 annually after the first year. So do you want to have a entirely fake relationship with something that you only have in order to have a real relationship with it? Wouldn't that be cool?

[Linus Sebastian]

Wow.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Do you want to be actually completely not in tune with what your dog is thinking or just feeling at all?

[Linus Sebastian]

Just imagine.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, you know, there's been a bunch of this type of stuff. Like, there's been this trend where people try to use chat GPT to, like, talk to their future selves, and they're getting, like, really emotional over it. And I'm like, that's not you. That. That's not you at all. You're talking to a robot. Please stop. Oh, my goodness.

[Linus Sebastian]

Anyways, Citizen Bean says, personally, I use dog psychics. This may be a product for Dennis. Some people do actually go to psychics to tell them what their animal is thinking.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yes.

[Linus Sebastian]

This would be cheaper than that in the long run and probably just as accurate. Actually, probably not even. Because if you actually know anything about animals at all, you can probably tell something of like, what its attitude.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I guess you would bring it. Yeah, that makes sense.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah. Might I make a suggestion?

[Luke Lafreniere]

Dog psychic has high animal.

[Dan]

Dog is the psychic.

[Linus Sebastian]

If you. I mean, it would have to be for the psychic to form a link with it.

[Dan]

Where was the hyphen?

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh, can I make a suggestion? If you have $600 to burn. Hey, there's always the Lux backpack.

[Luke Lafreniere]

It won't talk to you.

[Linus Sebastian]

Unfortunately, it has no AI whatsoever. But there is one review for it and buddy is stoked. So there you go. It's got. It's got a whale on it. Okay.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Oh, that's kind of. I actually didn't know that. That's kind of sick. I love that. So many products in the store just have so many reviews. Like the screwdriver and the water bottles and stuff have an insane amount of reviews. And then that backpack just has one.

[Linus Sebastian]

We only just started shipping them recently.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Oh, okay.

[Linus Sebastian]

We've been taking orders for like a year, but it took a long time to get it done because of all the issues with our backpack supplier.

[Luke Lafreniere]

The ScrewDriver has over 8,000 reviews.

[Linus Sebastian]

In all seriousness, the luxe backpack, I think we have like three left in stock because we over ordered compared to what people pre ordered, but not by that much. And then it took a lot longer for us to get them and we kept taking orders. So by the time they actually arrived, I think we only had like 10 extra. So if you want one, actually do order it right this second. If you don't want one, then I don't know if we're ever going to make one again. So. Yeah. Cool. Good chat.

[Luke Lafreniere]

This. This Guy makes a $600 backpack but won't build Linus Town.

[Linus Sebastian]

I know, right? Well, maybe if people bought more six hundred dollar backpacks I'd be able to. Did you ever think of that, Luke?

[Luke Lafreniere]

That's where you have to store. Your ID card is in your 600 back.

[Linus Sebastian]

I mean, it makes perfect sense to me.

[Luke Lafreniere]

You get randomly ID'd on the street.

[Linus Sebastian]

Someone asked how many Lux backpacks we sold, and this seems like the kind of intel that would be really stupid to like talk about publicly. But I'm curious, so I'm gonna look and then I'll decide after I see it if I'm gonna disclose it.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Nice. In other news, I'll do A topic while you're looking that up. The FCC makes canceling easy because Lina Khan is a boss.

[Linus Sebastian]

Okay. This is actually the coolest thing ever, and I love it. And every country needs to do this, and I don't say that that often.

[Luke Lafreniere]

A lot of stuff she's doing is sick. The FCC has released a final version of its new Click to cancel rule, which requires companies that offer subscription services to provide methods of unsubscribing that are at least as convenient and easy as their sign up method. A service you signed up for with an app needs to allow you to cancel via app or online. A gym you signed up for in person needs to allow you to cancel by calling or online. The new rule will take effect in around six months. Very cool, Very cool. Very nice discussion. Question is, can some subscription services even survive without leveraging the ADHD tax? This will hurt some of them for sure. If for no other reason, then because this law comes in, I think people will pay a little bit more attention. They'll go like, oh, I wonder what things I'm subscribed to now that it's easy to unsubscribe and then go, we can help. Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh, yeah. How is the. How is the. The Twitter block function change not in the doc? I totally slept on that this week. I even went through and was looking for stuff to add and I just totally forgot about it.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I don't know. I basically, people you blocked can see your stuff now. They just can't interact with you. Is that right?

[Linus Sebastian]

The funny thing about that, to me though, this is where I'm a little confused about it. I don't understand what difference it makes.

[Luke Lafreniere]

It doesn't make a difference at all.

[Linus Sebastian]

Because block was not like protected tweets. It was just, they can make another account. Yeah. You could have another browser tab that's logged into a different one or isn't logged in and then you could see it there.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah. This being the straw is very confusing to me. The MCG said Blue sky got over half a million users.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah.

[Luke Lafreniere]

And I've seen a bunch of people.

[Linus Sebastian]

Okay.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Bots.

[Linus Sebastian]

No, go ahead.

[Luke Lafreniere]

No, I don't know.

[Linus Sebastian]

No, I don't think that's actually the issue. I don't think that's why people are migrating to Blue sky in droves right now. I think it's actually more to do with that they updated their terms so any art you post on X just belongs to them for AI training.

[Luke Lafreniere]

How is that not a bigger story?

[Linus Sebastian]

I don't know.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Okay.

[Dan]

We're just Used to it by this point.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah. So there's no opt out anymore. If you post something on there, it just like belongs to them to use.

[Luke Lafreniere]

What if it's already on there?

[Linus Sebastian]

I don't know.

[Luke Lafreniere]

That should be super illegal.

[Linus Sebastian]

Well, I mean, there's a lot of things that should be super illegal, but that's true. I don't know. Sure. Yeah.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah. Crystal thief said it's not just that, it's the AI crap. I hadn't heard of that at all. I had only heard of the blocked thing.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, the block thing. Honestly, doesn't that seems like kind of fundamentally not understanding how the block function worked? Like, if you're sort of mad about this change, it just doesn't. I don't really understand how it makes a difference.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Apparently Lux sold out.

[Linus Sebastian]

It did? Oh, balls.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Jim said Lux sold out. I was going to order it as my Christmas gift myself next month.

[Dan]

Well, I'm thinking about that as well.

[Luke Lafreniere]

You were?

[Dan]

Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

Merry Christmas then, I guess.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Kind of seems like something you might do, actually. Might have think about it for a second.

[Dan]

Might have been for somebody else. I don't know. Oh, I haven't quite decided. That's why I've been dragging my feet on it for so long. It's a lot of money.

[Linus Sebastian]

It outsold Luke Newcomb, I think. Let's see if I can find it. Yeah, we.

[Luke Lafreniere]

That was a weird decision. That was done.

[Linus Sebastian]

I wear it like every weekend.

[Luke Lafreniere]

So does I wore it. I don't think I've told you this story. I wasn't planning on leaving the house. One day, Emma's car was at the shop, suddenly ready to be picked up. She needed me to go get it. I went to go get it. I didn't think about what I was wearing. I was wearing the Luke Nukem shirt. I walk up and it's this like, random tire shop, and there's one of the worker dudes just sitting outside on a tire, just chilling. And as I walk up, he's like, Luke Nukem. Eh? And I'm like. I look down, I'm just like, yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

I mean, even I don't wear shirts with my face on them.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Oh, it was so brutal.

[Linus Sebastian]

The name, yes, but the face, really? Gilmore D. Says, I'm wearing my Luke Newcomb shirt right now.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Hell yeah. The thing was, they had a bunch of different color options before they decided on one. So they gave me like, those ones.

[Linus Sebastian]

Basically.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah. So I have like a bunch of this shirt, but I can't wear any of those.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah. So Luke Newcomb sold. Let me see if I can find.

[Luke Lafreniere]

There's also like a reference from one random obscure WAN show that never came back. And then we sold shirts on it like weeks later. It made no sense.

[Linus Sebastian]

Sarah brought me over to see the draft of the design. She's like, I have no idea what you want, but is this it? I'm like, yeah. I mean, we sold 129 Luke Newcomb T shirts. So you personally own probably like a solid 4% of the total Luke Newcomb stock of the world.

[Luke Lafreniere]

We didn't sell those.

[Linus Sebastian]

I know. Okay, but I mean, you, but you. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Luke Lafreniere]

The second you said stock.

[Linus Sebastian]

So Luke Newcomb's shirt was also outsold by meme face sequin pillow clearance.

[Luke Lafreniere]

That's actually sad.

[Linus Sebastian]

Outsold by got fish pullovers. Outsold by red dad hats.

[Luke Lafreniere]

You know, if I knew we were going to do it, I could have like kept the meme going for longer.

[Linus Sebastian]

Outsold by sweatband sets.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I don't take fault for any of this.

[Linus Sebastian]

Olive beanies crushed it. Yeah, even our, even our ABC book character plushies outsold the Luke Newcomb shirt. Unfortunately.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I like, I'm pretty sure I've actually bought some of those.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, those are, those are pretty nice. Okay, for if you guys are curious, we ordered 240 lux backpacks and they are now sold out. So not like a smash hit or anything, but when you compare the revenue number to other things that sold, you know, 200, 250 units, it's. It's pretty substantial. Yeah, it's like order 50 more. I don't even know that we'd be able to bring it back because the only reason we were able to do a production run of it was because we took pre orders for it. Which we kind of learned our lesson because some people toward the end were getting kind of irate about waiting so long for it. But you know how we are. We're not going to ship it until it's ready. But the only reason we were able to commit to a production run of it was because we, we took pre orders for it. And then we would have to produce like enough to meet a minimum order quantity. We wouldn't want to take pre orders for it again. So I don't know how we'd justify it.

[Luke Lafreniere]

What is the rarest LMG merch item?

[Linus Sebastian]

The rarest?

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, I don't know if we could technically know because we sold stuff before.

[Dan]

There was that patch hoodie that you did, but that was not necessarily like. That was.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, I mean, one in like Fluke.

[Dan]

Kind of chance, right?

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, the. The ones that, like, had rare patches on them. I mean, some of the. Some of the Lambo stuff where we've only done 70 minus one units. That's. That's pretty rare.

[Luke Lafreniere]

We don't say that anymore.

[Linus Sebastian]

What? 69 units? Nice.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Okay.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I didn't know.

[Linus Sebastian]

I'm mean, I was like, are you.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Avoiding this for a reason? Wasn't true. Thought you'd be in Drake for a second. More than 92.

[Linus Sebastian]

Pretty much. Pretty much. Anything that we. Pretty much anything that we order, we have to order hundreds of. So. Yeah, some of the pins. Some of the pins in the. In the, like, rgb.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah. I was wondering, like, maybe going all the way back to, like, the. The original logo shirt. Like, way back. Or the Keep on Digging shirt.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh, the. Like me in a box coming out of it, like one. I think only, like, four of them exist or something like that. From the Cafe Press store that we set up back when I was at ncix. I ruined mine very recently, actually.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Oh, no.

[Linus Sebastian]

I washed it and just the ink had not aged well and it just completely disintegrated in the wash. Go on. Yeah. Bummer. All right, what are we supposed to be talking about, Dan? Are we supposed to be doing Topics?

[Dan]

You have five and a half minutes left until 8:00.

[Linus Sebastian]

Twitter blocks. Blocking is in the. Is in the doc.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Oh, hello.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, well, I totally. I totally missed that. Great work, everyone who worked on the doc on that.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, so that.

[Linus Sebastian]

My bad.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Some users are calling this a win for stalkers, while proponents argue blocked users could already view public content.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, okay. No, we need to talk about the U.S. a U.S. appeals court has sided with music publishing giant Sony, Universal and Warner against ISP Grande Communications, concluding that Grande purposefully ignored customers who were engaging in copyright infringement and should have taken action up to and including the termination of the accounts of some of these customers. Another isp, Cox Communications, is attempting to appeal a similar ruling to the Supreme Court. Cox argues that copyright infringement notices sent on behalf of record labels aren't reliable and that forcing ISPs to disconnect users based on unproven piracy accusations will cause great harm. A Supreme Court brief filed by multiple ISPs argues that the ruling against Cox imperils the future of the Internet by exposing Internet service providers to massive liability if they don't carry out mass Internet evictions. It further argues that this decision potentially harms other residents at the disconnected address who may have had no involvement in the infringement.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Your parents are going to be so mad.

[Linus Sebastian]

This appeals court ruling is crazy. Crazy. There are. We have not even touched. We have not even scratched the surface of the potential problems with a ruling like this. Like, imagine being an educational institution. You're the IT admin. And now it's your job to have an absolutely bulletproof system for making sure that nobody downloads any copyrighted materials or what, your Internet goes out. Because the ISP is not going to want the liability. Do you have any idea what kind of damages they seek for every. Every single instance of copyright infringement? The numbers are ridiculous because they don't. They don't go based on like, that movie would have been 20 bucks or whatever. Like, it's like. It's crazy. They want like tens, tens of thousands of dollars per instance, right? So ISPs are going to be. If this. If this happens for real, ISPs are going to be trigger freaking happy to just cut off anything that looks like it could possibly be anything that could get them in trouble. This is freaking wild, dude.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Vpn.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh, yeah. Hey, Dan, do you have our PIA affiliate thing?

[Dan]

It's automated, unfortunately.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh, it's. It's automated. What does that even mean?

[Dan]

It appears during banner after dark randomly.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh, I just mean, do you have the link? Do you want to put it in the chat?

[Dan]

Oh, oh, oh, okay.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah.

[Dan]

I thought you wanted me to put it on screen.

[Linus Sebastian]

Now, look, a VPN is not a silver bullet for, like, cybersecurity or whatever. That. That's not a thing. But. But it will make it so that they can't tell that you're downloading pirated stuff. It will do that. So. Thanks, Dan.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

Dan, can you also throw the carabiner link in? There's a couple people asking about it.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Sure.

[Linus Sebastian]

Just to make sure they get it. Thank you so much. You're wonderful.

[Luke Lafreniere]

All right, should we. After dark it. I'm running on little time.

[Linus Sebastian]

Let's do it. It's after dark time. I just tasked Dan with, like, two things, though. So how's he gonna switch us to after dark mode? He would have to be some kind of magic man. Oh, he did it.

[Dan]

Doing the.

[Linus Sebastian]

What a guy.

[Luke Lafreniere]

What a guy.

[Linus Sebastian]

What a guy is a little harder.

[Dan]

And then we do see and. Sorry.

[Linus Sebastian]

He's on it.

[Dan]

I'm trying to do two things.

[Linus Sebastian]

Let's watch him work.

[Luke Lafreniere]

If you ever had this many people judge you at once.

[Dan]

Yeah, I've been to a family reunion.

[Linus Sebastian]

Got him.

[Dan]

Is it magenta? I actually haven't looked. There it goes.

[Linus Sebastian]

Nice.

[Dan]

You're gonna do it. Thank you.

[Linus Sebastian]

Nice.

[Dan]

All right, that should be the links and everything else. Let's get through some of these now.

[Linus Sebastian]

We'll put him away. Cool.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I'm good.

[Dan]

Hey, Landuke and Dinus, saving for a commuter backpack. Question for the small boss. As a cereal fan, have you tried milk bar in Vegas or la? It's not an alcoholic bar. They have cereal milk ice cream.

[Linus Sebastian]

I'm gonna have to try that at CES this year. I have not heard of that. Milk bar.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Cereal bar.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah.

[Luke Lafreniere]

That sounds genuinely more interesting to me than.

[Linus Sebastian]

But you can just get them at the grocery store like nutrigrain.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Oh my goodness. The second I said cereal bar, I was like, this is going to come back to me. I don't know how, but it will happen.

[Linus Sebastian]

Fast.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Conferring. You're going to see yes this year.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh, yeah. I got to go. Yeah.

[Luke Lafreniere]

It's just a thing.

[Linus Sebastian]

I think it's just a thing. I think that. I think that I tried real hard to not have to go and. And nothing against the team, but I need to go.

[Luke Lafreniere]

He's got to go.

[Linus Sebastian]

I got to go.

[Dan]

Like on purpose. G'day, lld. I have a new job as a senior FS dev. I assume that's full stack. The tech department is less than a year old and doesn't follow best practices. How would you suggest I push for change? Leading by example.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Most tech departments that are year olds aren't going to follow best practices. Also, spoiler alert, most tech departments that are any amount of years old aren't going to follow best practices. Yeah. Try to lead by example. Do what you can. Push for certain pieces of change that you think are going to be most impactful. Work with, I don't know, your managers, whoever else in there to try to. There's this thing that if you want to get stuff done, propose solutions or options.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah. Don't just complain about stuff and keep realistic expectations.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah. Because your manager probably has 10 trillion things to do. Because most companies don't have enough. I find most companies either don't have enough or they have like about seven times too many. There doesn't seem to be a lot of like right in the middle. So try to. Yeah. If you're like, you know what, I'm going to look up a few different good options for doing this thing. I'm going to A, B and C. These options show the pros and cons, show the one that I vote for and I'm going to hand this over. You're very likely to get something done compared to like, I don't like me or just not saying anything and hoping that it gets fixed magically. That's, that's the. That's a real fun one. I love that. Everybody loves that. It's very useful. It works really well. Stop complaining. But yeah, I wouldn't sweat. I wouldn't sweat it too much. It's pretty common. But yeah, moving on.

[Dan]

Hi, dll. Who do you think will be the main benefactor of the newly announced x86 Alliance? AMD? Intel software vendors or end consumers?

[Linus Sebastian]

AMD and intel, actually. I think other members of the ecosystem will benefit as well just from not having to deal with like a diverging X86. Actually, I think it's kind of a win. Overall industry cooperation and standardization is probably the only reason that you can even plug the same USB devices. Not probably is the only reason that you can even plug the same USB C cables into Apple and PC computers. It's generally a good thing. I don't, I don't necessarily know that it's going to be the. I don't think it's necessarily going to mean that x86 wins forever, but I think it will strengthen x86, which in general is good. Better. Stronger competitors means more competition for us, means better products for us. I'm into it. It's pretty wild seeing Pat Gelsinger and Lisa sue like on stage together. Like what timeline is this? All we needed was Jensen up there and I'd be like, okay, I quit. I'm done. This is, this is peak tech industry and it's all downhill from here. Yeah, weird. Okay. Cuz you know we're gonna get new colors.

[Luke Lafreniere]

The weird blue one get purple.

[Dan]

Hey, lld, would the float plane exclusive shirt be a permanent fixture on the store or is it a limited run?

[Luke Lafreniere]

Very short term is drop. Yes.

[Dan]

Any earbuds you'd recommend?

[Luke Lafreniere]

There's a lot of videos on earbuds on the short circuit channel.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, I mean I love my AirPods Pro Twos, the AirPods Fours with ANC. Actually, if you. If, especially if you don't like the silicone tips. I was floored by how decent. By how decent the ANC was. It's decent, it's solid. I was very surprised by that.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, I've heard that from a lot of people.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah.

[Luke Lafreniere]

The FP shirt is already selling out. Is it. Is that even a thing? Is that possible? I thought it was like a.

[Linus Sebastian]

What. How do we sell at a pre sale?

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah. What are you talking about? Uh, they look like they're here to me. Oh.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh, there may be some colors of blanks that we only have a limited amount of. We might be clearing out our olive blanks.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Oh, black? Large.

[Linus Sebastian]

No.

[Luke Lafreniere]

That seems rough.

[Linus Sebastian]

Huh? Um, maybe we should find out. Cool. Dan, you want to hit us with another one in the meantime?

[Dan]

Sure.

[Linus Sebastian]

Fifteen me.

[Luke Lafreniere]

What? If possible. Because he's calling someone, I think.

[Dan]

Sorry.

[Luke Lafreniere]

If possible, one for me. He's calling someone.

[Dan]

If teams is so bad, why can't you make your own home chat system?

[Luke Lafreniere]

Oh, God.

[Linus Sebastian]

That'S a stupid question.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I'm in pain. Oh, man. What do I even say? I mean, there's a lot.

[Linus Sebastian]

Mumble.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, nice. Hold on.

[Linus Sebastian]

Hi, Mr. Nick, you're live on the wan show. Oh, wait, hold on. Oh, why is my speaker so quiet? Hello, Sleeping baby on my lap. So I'm talking quietly. Oh, he has. He has. Sleeping, slipping baby. Okay, people are wondering about why the dinosaur shirt is selling out. Because it's a pre sale. Right? I would have to confirm.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I know we're pretty light on blanks.

[Linus Sebastian]

We have some coming in right now. Ah, okay. Duly noted. Thank you. All right, bye. See you later. Have a wonderful. Oh, and he's gone. Well, have a wonderful something I guess he'll have to imagine. Love to imagine what I'm wishing him a wonderful of.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Well, if you want a large, I guess you can get all of. And if you want a double XL or triple xl, I guess you can get a black.

[Linus Sebastian]

And if you want to look, inventory management is hard. Okay.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Screwed. And if you want a blue so it matches the site, I'd like to.

[Linus Sebastian]

See you do it better.

[Luke Lafreniere]

God. Okay, we're working on making tools to make it easier.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, I know.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

Hit me. Dan.

[Dan]

That's kind of all I have for the curated. There's a couple more here maybe. Let's see. Was wondering where the stuff on the store gets stored. I'm guessing you don't have it all on site with you guys.

[Linus Sebastian]

We use a third party logistics company that's actually run by one of my former colleagues from ncix. It's on Andes Island. Actually, we talked about Andes island earlier. Yeah, and we. We actually did a pop up there once when we launched the backpack because it was impractical to move. Because the backpack is so large, it was impractical to move like a significant number of them to somewhere else to do it. So we just did it out the back of their warehouse.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I remember that.

[Linus Sebastian]

I think it would actually be kind of cool to do a tour of it or something. But maybe not. I mean, it's not high tech. Like, it's. It's pretty low tech.

[Dan]

I've never even been there.

[Linus Sebastian]

I've only been there once for the backpack pop up.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Have you, like, a tech quickie on, like, how do you get things? And it goes through, like, the logistics process when you order something.

[Dan]

Which is super cool, by the way.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah. Except that, like, again, ours is pretty low tech.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yep.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Only there's a way to order some. There isn't. We know, like, our blanks. Our blanks are our own blanks. And we don't have a blue one until, like. We don't have one.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah.

[Luke Lafreniere]

We can't. We can't just, like, order some. There are blanks and we don't have a blue one.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah. But we have a microfiber shirt, and.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I don't think you want that shirt in blue. Blue microfiber with the design on it. Yeah. I also would like the full blink shirt to be in blue. It's not going to happen because we don't have blue blanks.

[Linus Sebastian]

We sold 150 microfiber T shirts today. I don't think our inventory is going to last very long on those. That is freaking hilarious. You guys are hilarious. You know that, right? Like, do you actually know that, though?

[Luke Lafreniere]

I seriously wonder how many of them are selling because they look like Star Trek shirts.

[Linus Sebastian]

You think so?

[Luke Lafreniere]

They, like, really kind of do.

[Linus Sebastian]

They really kind of do, don't they? Especially with, like, the way the light kind of catches them. Like, they really black collar there. What? That was not intentional.

[Luke Lafreniere]

No, I know. I didn't see it at all.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah. And now I cannot wear it.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Then I was like, whoa, I can't.

[Linus Sebastian]

I can't unsee it.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah.

[Dan]

At least you guys aren't wearing red.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh, damn. I got my. I tried to do the.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, yeah, yeah, sorry.

[Linus Sebastian]

Okay.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, we aren't wearing red, so we'll survive the night.

[Dan]

Yeah. And I guess I got one more curated. That's probably about it. Hi. LLD Paradox Interactive admitted last week that releasing Skylines 2 in the state that it did was a mistake. Do you think this is indicative of a larger intolerance for unfinished games?

[Linus Sebastian]

I think that one was also kind of a unique situation where the original game had changed so much from its original release state that they were kind of in a. In a difficult position where, yeah, there were problems, but also one of the biggest problems was that the modding and the modding ecosystem for the original game was so good and so vibrant that they actually, like, they had kind of no Hope of matching the feature set of the new game, but also of the old game at launch. Like it was always going to take a long time, but they also like screwed it up by having technical issues and stuff. I. Yeah, like, it's clear they screwed up. I mean, the CEO said as much. But I don't know that if it's. I don't know if that it's because people are generally less tolerant of unfinished games so much as it's.

[Luke Lafreniere]

That.

[Linus Sebastian]

That was a pretty unique situation. I do think though that people. People don't understand what beta means anymore.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah. Oh, did it launch in a beta?

[Linus Sebastian]

No, I don't think it even did. I do think people's expectations of anything they can use are pretty high.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Oh, yeah. So to be fair, companies poisoned that.

[Linus Sebastian]

Well, 100%. 100%.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Minecraft is in beta for like a decade.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah. Insomniac says it's the Sims problem. Every new release is so basic. It doesn't feel like a finished game until there's a bunch expansion packs. Yeah, yeah, totally.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Civ to a lesser degree, suffers that. I find most Civ games are better after one or two expand expansions.

[Linus Sebastian]

Demi says there were basic features and functionality missing. Give me my bike lanes. Yeah, yeah, 100%. Like they. I can see where the ambition was in city skyline 2. City skylines 2. But it's clear that there were blind spots. I don't know. I don't know what they could have done other than just eat it and work on it for longer.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Sometimes isn't an option.

[Linus Sebastian]

Top Gear Lux is not coming back. For those of you planning on buying for family on Christmas, it is October 18th. I just told you, we just sold the last of the inventory. Where do you think new ones are going to come from that this may surprise people. There are legitimately people that this is going to surprise. But the items on our store are not just rebadged AliExpress stuff. I know, right?

[Luke Lafreniere]

The water bottles are rebadges, right?

[Linus Sebastian]

Yep.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yes. But even then we do our own production runs. We don't just like go to the corner store.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

And buy one and then put our label on it.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

So production lead times are long.

[Luke Lafreniere]

We have our own lid. But like most. Most of the things that people know the store for, our own things, our own shirt blanks, screwdrivers, backpacks, all that kind of stuff is our own engineering.

[Linus Sebastian]

That wasn't always the case. Desk pads and water bottles carried the store for probably like a year and a half, two years. But nowadays the revenue Is.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Didn't we make. Aren't the desk pads your own thing? That's not a rebrand.

[Linus Sebastian]

Their own design. And they're to our own specific.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Okay.

[Linus Sebastian]

They are our own custom.

[Luke Lafreniere]

That wouldn't mean that rebrand then, though.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh, okay. Yeah, it's our own spec and our own thickness, so. So it's. We're talking the OEM versus odm. So this is oem and then the. I would say the desk pad is odm because we gave the design guidelines.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, that's its own product.

[Linus Sebastian]

It's probably in between.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Not as much so as a screwdriver.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah. No, not even. Yeah, not even close.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Different category.

[Linus Sebastian]

I know. It's like six months, still not a re.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Batch.

[Linus Sebastian]

Can we maybe get another pre order? Says Top Gear? It's like, dude, if you want something, you gotta, like, you gotta order it. I. Oh, man. I don't know. Because it was made by our old backpack supplier, who, spoiler alert. Isn't the one making these. There goes the water. And that, my friends, is why you close the lid on your water bottle.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Hey, we have some cloths that aren't going to be very absorbent. Oh, well, hey, we have some cloths that are more absorbent.

[Linus Sebastian]

Hey, we've got a Dan. So, yeah, we have. We have a new manufacturing partner for our backpack products. And I don't know if they're going to be able to source exactly the same apple leather material. There's definitely some. There's definitely some differences in terms of how we had to optimize the construction for the thickness material so they wouldn't have that knowledge. We'd be basically doing product development on it again, which. What, to sell another couple hundred units? I. I don't know if it's going to make sense. And besides, I'm sure all the people who actually bought it, because, you know, they were like, hey, this is a thing that I like.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Maybe you make a Lux commuter bag. I can set it back. I was getting it out of the water. Oops.

[Linus Sebastian]

Thank you. I can't.

[Luke Lafreniere]

There we go.

[Linus Sebastian]

And besides, I'm sure the people that did buy it are gonna like, knowing how exclusive it is. Like, it's not numbered or anything, but it's. It's pretty darn exclusive. Heck, you guys, it's not that good. What did you even do? Brutal. Why'd we even move it? It's not like the electronics were in the water.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I didn't know how. What.

[Linus Sebastian]

It was Yvonne's. Yvonne's always like that. Like, water will get like near some. Something. She's like, oh, this is the electronic. I'm like, yeah, but this is plastic housing. It's okay.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

She's like. I'm like, no, it's fine.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I don't trust all the cables that much. This is true.

[Linus Sebastian]

This is fair.

[Luke Lafreniere]

We've had these for a long time.

[Linus Sebastian]

All right.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Through some stuff.

[Linus Sebastian]

All right, Top Gear. All right, Top Gear. I will. I will ask the team if it's a thing we can do. Okay, I'll ask.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Oh, Top Gear. No.

[Linus Sebastian]

What?

[Luke Lafreniere]

He just looks so sad.

[Linus Sebastian]

I know. He looks so sad. He's, like, got, like. Like, tears streaming down his face. Crying emoji, like, geez. Okay. Like, I don't know, man. It's. It's kind of a funny thing because the number of people that are upset that the flannel shirts are gone, the plaid flannels are gone, and I'm like, dude, they were, like. They were rotting in our inventory. We had to blow them away. If you guys like stuff, buy it. If you don't like it, then don't complain that it's gone.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I do think that sometimes we have a really funny way of handling seasons.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh, dude. We don't do them because when stuff's done, it's done and it's in and it's in.

[Luke Lafreniere]

The store season for flannels showed up, and now we don't have flannels.

[Linus Sebastian]

100%. 100%, man. No. Yeah. Not even lying. Not even lying about that. All right, well, hey, thanks for. Thanks for watching. We'll see you again next week. Same bad time, same bad channel.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Bye. I was so ready for that.

[Dan]

Ready for what?

[Luke Lafreniere]

That outro came in so fast after I said bye.

[Dan]

I'm getting efficient at it. Sit there waiting, waiting to jump.