Google Is Promoting Ad Blockers On YouTube - WAN Show April 25, 2025

Summary

The WAN Show: Google Is Promoting Ad Blockers On YouTube – Episode Summary (April 25, 2025)

Hosts: Linus Sebastian, Luke Lafreniere, and Dan Tomic
Release Date: April 26, 2025
Duration: Approximately 152 minutes

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1. Introduction

In this episode of The WAN Show, Linus and Luke delve into the perplexing issue of Google promoting ad blockers on YouTube, exploring the apparent contradictions and implications for content creators and viewers alike. Alongside this main topic, the hosts touch on a variety of other tech-related subjects, including Intel's CPU challenges, the remastering of the classic game Oblivion, leadership changes at Discord, and exciting merch announcements.

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2. Google’s Contradictory Stance on Ad Blockers

Overview:
The primary discussion revolves around Google's contradictory actions concerning ad blockers on YouTube. While Google seemingly allows and promotes ads for ad blockers like PIE on YouTube, it simultaneously restricts content creators from discussing or educating viewers about ad blocking within their videos.

Key Points:

• Ad Blocker Ads on YouTube:

  • Linus expresses confusion: “How can Google unilaterally remove my video about ad blockers, but then run ads on YouTube for ad blockers? This does not make sense.” ([02:22])
  • The hosts notice an increase in advertisements for PIE, an ad blocker service, which Linus suspects might be a retaliatory measure by Google after their video removal.

• Content vs. Advertising Policies:

  • Linus shares his frustration with YouTube's policies: “What's the policy distinction between me posting a video, talking about ad blocking on YouTube versus an advertiser paying for positioning for their ad blocker on YouTube.” ([07:10])
  • YouTube’s response indicates a separation between ad policies and video content policies, leaving creators confused about the rationale.

• Impact on Content Creators:

  • Linus discusses the hypocritical nature of promoting tools that directly undermine the ad revenue that creators rely on: “What I'm upset about is the hypocrisy that we are seeing from.” ([09:25])
  • The conversation touches on the broader implications for content monetization and the sustainability of creator livelihoods in an ad-blocker-friendly environment.

• Community Reactions and Host Stance:

  • Linus clarifies his personal stance: “I don't use ad blockers because I am a content creator. And it would feel pretty hypocritical of me to use ad blockers when I am both aware of and educate people on the impact that it has on content creators.” ([09:25])
  • The hosts emphasize that while they provide information on ad blockers, they respect individual choices regarding ad usage.

Notable Quotes:

• Linus: “This does not make sense.” ([02:22])
• Dan: “So making people watch it, it's more okay than having it be optional if the content is bad.” ([08:10])
• Linus: “What I'm upset about is the hypocrisy that we are seeing from.” ([09:25])

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3. Intel’s CPU Challenges and Market Position

Overview:
Shifting focus, the hosts discuss Intel’s recent struggles in the CPU market, highlighting the company's inability to captivate consumers with its latest offerings compared to previous generations.

Key Points:

• Classic Coke Moment:

  • Linus draws a parallel between Intel’s situation and Coca-Cola’s infamous New Coke fiasco: “Intel's having a bit of a classic Coke moment where the new Intel CPU is not nearly as beloved as the old Intel CPU that overheats and dies.” ([01:26])

• Performance Issues:

  • Concerns are raised about the overheating and durability of Intel’s newer CPUs, which are reportedly less reliable than their predecessors.

• Sales Performance:

  • Analysis of Intel’s CPU sales reveals disappointing rankings on platforms like Amazon, with older models outperforming the latest releases significantly. For instance, the Core Ultra 9 285K ranks poorly with only 37 reviews compared to AMD’s high-selling models.

• Leadership Changes and Workforce Reductions:

  • Intel CEO Lit Bhutan’s resignation and internal layoffs are discussed: “Bloomberg cited internal sources claiming as much as 20% of Intel's workforce could be laid off.” ([54:50])
  • These changes are part of Intel’s effort to streamline operations amid declining chip sales and production shortages.

• Market Impact:

  • The hosts speculate on Intel’s future, questioning whether upcoming products like Arrow Lake can reverse the company's fortunes or if deeper structural issues persist.

Notable Quotes:

• Linus: “No one's buying Intel's latest chips. Meanwhile, CEO Lit Bhutan announced undisclosed layoffs.” ([54:35])
• Dan: “20% of the workforce is like 20,000 jobs.” ([55:28])

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4. Oblivion Remastered: Reception and Modding Community

Overview:
The conversation shifts to the remastered version of the classic game Oblivion, examining its reception, technical updates, and the enthusiastic response from the modding community.

Key Points:

• Launch Success:

  • Dan highlights the remaster's impressive Steam launch with over 150,000 concurrent players on the first day, despite minimal advertising and being free on Game Pass.

• Technical Enhancements:

  • The remastered Oblivion utilizes Unreal Engine 5 for graphics while retaining the Gamebryo engine for game logic, resulting in improved visuals while maintaining classic gameplay mechanics.

• Modding Community:

  • The game has quickly amassed over 500 mods, with players eagerly customizing their experiences. However, some mods have introduced issues like resolution bugs, though fixes are available through community-driven solutions.

• Skyblivion Project:

  • Dan expresses greater interest in the Skyblivion project, a fan-driven effort to recreate Oblivion using the newer Skyrim engine, anticipating superior enhancements and mod support.

• Misleading Information Concerns:

  • Confusion arises regarding the Deluxe Edition's inclusions, specifically the Shivering Isles and Knights of the Nine expansions. The hosts discuss how initial perceptions were misled by the packaging, only to later discover that the base game includes these expansions despite unclear promotional materials.

Notable Quotes:

• Dan: “Anthem dropped it for a while after making a kick ass video on it.” ([78:34])
• Linus: “Oblivion's great. Bethesda also gave free keys to the entire Skyblivion dev team.” ([82:28])

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5. Leadership Changes at Discord

Overview:
A significant segment of the episode focuses on Discord's leadership transition, with co-founder Jason Citron stepping down as CEO and being succeeded by Human Sacchini amid speculations of an impending IPO.

Key Points:

• CEO Transition:

  • Dan reports that Discord CEO Jason Citron is stepping down to join a board and advisory role, with Human Sacchini, former Vice Chairman at Activision Blizzard and President of King Digital Entertainment, taking over as the new CEO. ([50:48])

• IPO Speculations:

  • The change in leadership occurs alongside rumors of Discord discussing an initial public offering (IPO), intent on expanding its user base and monetization strategies.

• Strategic Implications:

  • The hosts debate the potential impacts of these changes on Discord's future, including shifts in company culture, product direction, and competition in the chat and streaming market.

• Community Response:

  • Concerns are raised about the stability and future direction of Discord, especially with leadership from an executive known for creating Candy Crush, potentially altering the platform's focus.

Notable Quotes:

• Dan: “Jason Citron steps down to be replaced by former president of King, also known as the guys who made Candy Crush ahead of potential IPO.” ([100:48])
• Linus: “Why do you think 25 people type first? Surely if that other comment was there, they would be smart enough to not type first.” ([47:35])

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6. Exciting Merch Announcements

Overview:
The episode features several announcements related to Linus Tech Tips merchandise, including ongoing sales, new product releases, and special promotions.

Key Points:

• Shipstorm Sale Extension:

  • Due to high demand, the Shipstorm sale event on LTT’s store has been extended. Customers can benefit from deals on open box and pre-owned goods under the “Power Outlet” section, promoting sustainability by reducing waste. ([37:20])

• New Products:

  • Introduction of mystery screwdrivers: Customers receive $20 off by purchasing a screwdriver without the standard box, emphasizing speed in shipping due to tariff concerns. ([39:38])
  • Launch of the “Big Nerd Gaming” shirt and cargo pants, available in various sizes and styles, with high enthusiasm from the hosts for the designs. ([41:11])

• Merchandise Interaction:

  • The hosts engage in a playful exchange regarding merch messages, encouraging listeners to leave personalized messages with their orders for a chance to receive special shout-outs or responses. ([43:37])

• Promotional Offers:

  • Free shipping extended to all orders over $150 until Monday, 10 AM Pacific Time.
  • Discounts on returning customers for select items, ensuring affordability despite high demand. ([37:20])

Notable Quotes:

• Dan: “Here’s the question.” ([39:58])
• Linus: “With so many new deals and items, we extended free shipping to all orders over $150 until Monday, 10 AM Pacific Time.” ([42:30])

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7. Other Tech Topics and Discussions

Overview:
Beyond the main topics, the hosts explore a variety of additional tech subjects, including regulatory actions against major tech companies, the evolution of email systems, and the cognitive impacts of modern social media platforms.

Key Points:

• Regulatory Fines in the EU:

  • Linus discusses recent fines by the European Commission against Apple (€500 million) and Meta (€200 million) for anti-competitive practices concerning app developers and user data. Facebook Marketplace was notably excluded from these regulations due to having fewer than 10,000 business users. ([70:10])

• Smartphone Labeling Requirements:

  • Starting June 20, EU mandates that all smartphones and tablets sold must display labels indicating battery life, energy efficiency, and repairability ratings, aiming to enhance consumer awareness and promote sustainable practices. ([70:35])

• Email System Inefficiencies:

  • The hosts debate the persistent frustrations with email as a communication tool, despite incremental improvements like priority inbox and AI-assisted replies. They emphasize the inefficiency of email threads and the challenge of effective organization, particularly for individuals with ADHD or similar attention-related challenges. ([74:14])

• Cognitive Impacts of Social Media:

  • Discussing studies on media literacy, Dan and Linus express concern over the gullibility of younger generations and the proliferation of disinformation on platforms like TikTok and YouTube Shorts, leading to what they term "brain rot." They advocate for increased media literacy and cautious consumption of information. ([24:01], [26:19])

• Email vs. Modern Messaging Apps:

  • The conversation highlights the merits and drawbacks of traditional email systems compared to modern messaging apps, with a focus on user interface improvements and the continued dominance of platforms like Discord despite stiff competition. ([74:14])

Notable Quotes:

• Dan: “I don't think a privacy incident, almost no matter how big, is going to switch everyone because as much as people scream about it, I think most people unfortunately just don't care.” ([108:20])
• Linus: “Emails are still a major annoyance in business. Why hasn't anyone come up with a more efficient way to process email threads?” ([139:31])

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8. After Dark and Community Interactions

Overview:
In the "After Dark" segment, the hosts engage in light-hearted banter, respond to listener messages, and tease upcoming collaborations. This section showcases the camaraderie and unfiltered conversations typical of The WAN Show.

Key Points:

• Collaborations:

  • Announcement of upcoming collaborations with Kitboga and Badminton Insight, promising entertaining and engaging content for viewers. These collaborations involve unique formats, such as scamming interactions led by Kitboga. ([91:48])

• Community Engagement:

  • The hosts interact with humorous and sometimes tangential listener messages, including discussions on American cheese, misconceptions about the Fruit of the Loom logo, and the infamous Mandela Effect where listeners recall non-existent events or logos. ([115:10])

• Technical Troubleshooting:

  • An amusing segment where Linus and Luke attempt to troubleshoot display issues live, highlighting the challenges of technical problems in a spontaneous setting. ([95:02])

• Fun and Personal Stories:

  • The hosts share personal anecdotes and playful insults, maintaining an entertaining and relatable atmosphere for the audience. ([120:59])

Notable Quotes:

• Linus: “We shot a collab with Kitboga that was so much fun. There's gonna be videos on both of our channels.” ([91:52])
• Dan: “I'm gonna email, like, trying to find a university that has a psychologist that might work on something like this.” ([30:29])

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9. Conclusion

The episode concludes with a recap of the numerous topics discussed, emphasizing Google's contradictory stance on ad blockers and its broader implications for the YouTube creator economy. The hosts encourage listeners to engage with their merchandise and participate in upcoming events like the SoCal Tech Fair. The blend of serious tech discussions with humorous and personal interactions underscores the multi-faceted nature of The WAN Show, catering to a diverse audience keen on both in-depth analysis and entertaining banter.

Final Thoughts:

• Google's Future with Ad Blockers:

  • The episode leaves audiences pondering the future of ad revenue for content creators and Google's strategic positioning in enabling ad blockers while maintaining its own advertising ecosystem.

• Tech Industry Dynamics:

  • Insights into Intel's market struggles, Discord's leadership changes, and the thriving modding community around Oblivion Remastered provide a snapshot of the ever-evolving tech landscape.

• Community and Engagement:

  • The hosts' lively interactions and responsiveness to community feedback reinforce the strong relationship between The WAN Show and its audience.

Takeaway:
This episode of The WAN Show offers a comprehensive examination of Google's paradoxical approach to ad blockers on YouTube, enriched by discussions on key industry developments and vibrant community interactions. Whether you're a tech enthusiast, a content creator, or a casual listener, the episode delivers valuable insights wrapped in engaging dialogue and humor.

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Notable Timestamped Quotes for Reference:

• Linus: “How can Google unilaterally remove my video about ad blockers, but then run ads on YouTube for ad blockers? This does not make sense.” ([02:22])
• Linus: “What I'm upset about is the hypocrisy that we are seeing from.” ([09:25])
• Dan: “20% of the workforce is like 20,000 jobs.” ([55:28])
• Linus: “Oblivion's great. Bethesda also gave free keys to the entire Skyblivion dev team.” ([82:28])
• Dan: “Jason Citron steps down to be replaced by former president of King, also known as the guys who made Candy Crush ahead of potential IPO.” ([100:48])
• Linus: “Emails are still a major annoyance in business. Why hasn't anyone come up with a more efficient way to process email threads?” ([139:31])
• Linus: “We shot a collab with Kitboga that was so much fun. There's gonna be videos on both of our channels.” ([91:52])

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This summary encapsulates the breadth of discussions from the April 25, 2025 episode of The WAN Show, providing a structured and detailed account for those who seek to understand the episode's key themes and conversations.

Transcript

[Linus]

The missing child is Lucia Blix, 9 years old. Please let her come back home safely. Thursdays, the kidnappers plundered meticulously. If money is what it takes to.

[Luke]

Get her back, we're gonna pay it.

[Linus]

The secrets they hide. You can't talk about this. You can't write about it. Are the clues. The mother's hiding something.

[Dan]

I know it.

[Linus]

To find her, tell me where she is. The stolen girl. New episodes Thursdays stream on Hulu. What's up, everyone? Welcome to the WAN show. We've got a great show lined up for you this week because how can Google unilaterally remove my video about ad blockers, but then run ads on YouTube for ad blockers? This does not make sense. This is Chewbacca. Chewbacca lives on kashyyyk. He does not make sense. Also, he makes credits in the news. This week, Intel's having a bit of a classic Coke moment where the new Intel CPU is not nearly as beloved as the old Intel CPU that overheats and dies, which is hard to deal with. What else we got this week? Mr. Luke Oblivion. Oh, my God. Really?

[Dan]

Oblivion happened. It was remastered. Bethesda released it. There's more to talk about other than that. But oh, my. Oh, my goodness, everyone knew that was gonna be a topic of mine. I blew the only one that I had for sure. And other than that, I don't know, they all kind of suck. Discord CEO is stepping down.

[Linus]

Whole load blown. Because it's like, you know, that reference and also Oblivion with the long loading times. Oh, loading simulator. Oblivion.

[Dan]

The loading times are pretty good. Now.

[Linus]

The show is brought to you today by Vessi, Squarespace and Notion. And of course, as usual, our rap partner, dBrand, our laptop partner, Dell, and our chair partner, Secret Lab. Let's talk about this. Google is apparently completely cool with adblock advertising on YouTube.

[Dan]

Are they cool with it or was it just there?

[Linus]

So there's a difference. You know how when there's like an inflammatory thing that you're reporting on?

[Dan]

Yes.

[Linus]

Whether you cosplay as a journalist or not, you sort of just have a moral, you might say, obligation to reach out and get the other side of the story.

[Dan]

So did we do so?

[Linus]

Because that's just kind of basic human decency. I reached out to Google, asking, yo, what's the deal with all of these ads that I'm getting for this service called Pie? So this is. This is PI ad block, which, I don't know, is maybe going to get the Wan show freaking TakedOwned by YouTube. Because you might remember this. Recently, we did a video, part 2 of De Google your life, where we talked. Yes. About the boogeyman ad block and how to use it on YouTube. Okay. So I'm. I'm showing this right now, but the only reason I'm aware of Pie Luke is because I keep getting fed ads for it on YouTube and talking to some of the other writers here. They've been apparently getting a lot of ads for PI as well. So let me. Let me. You know what? I'll actually read the document that our writing team so graciously prepared for us. Do you recognize these people? Sorry, what is this? Ah, yes. Okay. Mr. Jordan Block went and look at all this work he did for us. Boom. He's got the people's inter kit. Yeah, here we go. The people's Internet. Okay, so do you recognize any of these ads? These are all ads for pie.

[Dan]

No.

[Linus]

Okay, Well, I bet you guys do so far.

[Dan]

Still no.

[Linus]

Only thing I see is I have YouTube Premium, for crying out loud.

[Dan]

Yeah, I have YouTube Premium. I don't.

[Linus]

Well, I don't have YouTube Premium on my work.

[Dan]

Are these the people that read ads for everything? Is that the point?

[Linus]

Well, those are just like. Those are the. Like the ads for it. Those are the thumbnails for Google.

[Dan]

How would I recognize the people, though?

[Linus]

Because they're in the ads for the. They're in the ads for pie.

[Dan]

Oh, so it's basically asking if I've seen the ad before.

[Linus]

Yeah, yeah, I'm just asking if you've seen the ad before.

[Dan]

No.

[Linus]

Well, whatever, Honey Co founder Ryan Hudson is back with a new project, the PIE ad blocker, which seems to be advertising absolutely everywhere recently, including on YouTube. Google's Ad Transparency site shows that Pie has approximately 40 different text ads and 800 different video ads active in Google Ads. When we checked earlier today, 800 Pie says that you can block ads and get paid. Although the PI FAQ seems mostly concerned with distancing themselves from Honey slash PayPal. This discovery on my part comes just seven months after Google unilaterally removed our de Google Your Life Part 2 video for violating YouTube's community guidelines as potentially harmful or dangerous content, which, it turns out, translates to telling people how to block ads on YouTube. So I reached out to YouTube and by my standards, very politely asked, what the is this? I was a little frustrated by the experience, to say the least. I basically said, hey, so what's the deal with this? Like, what. What. What is the policy distinction between me posting a video, talking about ad blocking on, on YouTube versus an advertiser paying for positioning for their ad blocker on YouTube. And they basically went, oh, well, I don't know, you'll have to get me the, the, the, the ad ID of that ad. And I'm kind of sitting here going, well, what does that even mean? Why does it, why does it matter? Why do you need the ID of the spit? Like it felt like I was just being asked to jump through a completely unnecessary hoop. This is an ad for an ad blocker. So they have a domain. Presumably you Google the entity have an ad service that knows what the domain an ad that people click on goes to. Find one that goes to that domain and let me know. Right. Am I missing something here?

[Dan]

No.

[Linus]

If it, if it goes to this ad blocker, just find anyone. I don't care. It doesn't have to be the exact one. Why does this irrelevant detail Anyway, we jumped through the hoop. Uh, Jordan very helpfully found me an id. And also you can see, got that, that helpful little link that shows how many of these flipping video ads they have running right now, which Google could have easily done. They could have just gone and found that list and then shown me, responded via about any one of them, basically. So I, so I sent that over to them and they're kind of like, oh, well, Google's divisions have a lot of separation. So ads have a different set of policies compared to YouTube videos. And there is currently no policy against advertising an ad blocker, even though that ad blocker appears as content on YouTube.

[Dan]

What if, what if, what if, what if you buy ads for the deagle Google fi your life video?

[Linus]

Apparently, apparently that's kosher. What?

[Dan]

So making people watch it, it's more okay than having it be optional if the content is bad. It's more okay if you make people watch it than if you make it optional for them to watch. That's what is being communicated to me personally. That's what I'm taking from this.

[Linus]

And yeah, yeah, yeah. Katos points out that ads on YouTube videos. Ads on YouTube are videos on the platform, like in terms of how they work on the back end. So you 100% can upload a video to YouTube that contains instructions for ad blocking as long as you do an ad buy against.

[Dan]

I Wonder what other YouTube rules you can break. Like how far can you take that? Because there's a lot of things that I could think in Google Ads that are against YouTube terms of service.

[Linus]

Chewy. Our community, our community coordinate. I don't know what the heck his job title is. But whatever, he's cool. He says in chat, if you stop paying for the video to be shown as an ad, will it then get struck down? I don't know.

[Dan]

It's a good question.

[Linus]

I don't know.

[Dan]

I feel like no, but it's a good question.

[Linus]

I just. Look, I feel like this is one of those times when people are gonna find some, try to find some. Gotcha. So let me clarify my stance. I don't use ad blockers. That is a personal choice that I've made because I am a content creator. And it would feel pretty hypocritical of me to use ad blockers when I am both aware of and educate people on the impact that it has on content creators. I do not and have never said never use an ad blocker. You fucking monster. Horrible people. I have never said that. That has never happened. If you think it happened, you imagined it, or someone lied to you and told you that it happens. That is the only.

[Dan]

You said it to me behind the scenes.

[Linus]

That is the only way that those things could have been an experience that you had. We have explicitly provided instructions on ad blocking before on our channel. We've done a video on pie hole. We have the de Google your life video. We've discussed our histories as pirates before. We could afford to buy things extensively on the WAN show. So no, the big controversy is I said adblocks piracy because it is. And some people got butthurt that. That, that's pretty much what it boils down to. But I never said don't do piracy. I never said put away your eye patch and your tricorn hat. I just said, well, it's a form of piracy. You're circumventing the payment on the platform, therefore piracy. Kind of simple. It's actually really simple. So I'm not upset that Google is promoting ad blockers on a platform where I rely on ads. What I'm upset about is the hypocrisy that we are seeing from. And I get, I get it. Companies have silos, you know, they'll have different policies, they'll have different teams. There's all these, there's all these factors that I think people who have never worked for a larger company don't consider. It is not surprising to me that this happened. What is surprising to me though is now that it's been flagged, that it is not just, oh, duh, obvious that this should not be. Because if your policy is that because of user safety, potentially harmful or dangerous content, that My video showing people how to block ads on YouTube was removed. Not just. They contacted me and we had a conversation and we agreed to take it down. No removed. And then they contacted me. Actually, I think I read about it on Reddit first. I don't. I don't actually remember. The point is they just ripped the video down, so that's what happens there. But if you're running it as an ad. Well, I don't know. It's a different team. I don't know what. That doesn't make any sense. But hey, they had a good earnings call there. They're up how many points? I can't remember. We've got a couple other points here. It wasn't long ago, 2023, that Google sponsored a conference for ad block developers, and at least five Google employees gave presentations. At the same time that YouTube was getting more aggressive in dealing with ad blocking. Yeah, that doesn't surprise me that much. Unique username says not to be that guy Linus, but I don't think anyone ever used the word piracy for what you described. So at least some confusion is warranted, imo. I'm sorry, I just actually don't think it's that complicated. Yeah, it's circumvention of payment for the digital product.

[Dan]

Personal gain, right?

[Linus]

Like, that's what we call it. We don't call it theft because if you don't remove it or whatever, you know, whatever the rationalization is, right? Like if you don't actually remove it from the possession of the person who has it, then it can't be theft. I'm like, sure, okay. Like, it doesn't matter. It's all, it's all semantics, right? Like, that's the whole point, is that they. Someone has a thing, they set a price for it. You decided no and you took it anyway. So you call it whatever you want, right? But the point is that it is functionally the same thing. But is it really not the point today? Because I just don't care. I just don't care. You do whatever works for you. And if you have like a super guilty conscience or whatever, and it makes you like really mad when someone calls you out and is like, that's what you're doing. That's your thing. You go deal with that. You talk to your therapist about it, you talk to your mom about it, you talk to your friends about it.

[Dan]

Or just don't care, or just don't.

[Linus]

Care, or go on team you while you still can and order a tricorn hat and an eyepatch that's also an option.

[Dan]

Yeah. I think a lot of people are dusting them off right now. Oh, I'm big time, dude.

[Linus]

Did Netflix just raise pricing again?

[Dan]

I didn't. I feel like that is a statement.

[Linus]

I could say that anytime.

[Dan]

A question and answer. That is permanently true. Yeah.

[Linus]

We should.

[Dan]

I. Okay. I sent you this.

[Linus]

You should have an LTT eye patch.

[Dan]

It's a pretty good idea.

[Linus]

That's actually a really good idea. Dan, can you send it to the team?

[Luke]

Yes.

[Linus]

And try corn hat. And then you get. If it's a combo, then you get them at a lower price. And if you steal them from us, you get it for free, Which, I mean, is sort of.

[Dan]

That's kind of how that works.

[Linus]

That kind of goes without saying.

[Dan]

A group that did a price increase in a way that I think was really cool recently and I sent to you was Dropout. Remember that?

[Linus]

Yes, Dropout.

[Dan]

Why is my thing not working? Oh, it's Dropout TV. I was doing dropout.com. anyways, they had a video on it, and you can tell they did something right here. When the video on them increasing their pricing was, like, very well liked. And the comments are really positive.

[Linus]

Yeah, it was like one minute long.

[Dan]

Find was really short. Drop out.

[Linus]

Basically, they were just like, yeah, we're increasing pricing, but it's only for new people.

[Dan]

Here we go. Price change warning.

[Linus]

2 minutes at 1.75. So it probably took me a minute.

[Dan]

Yeah, it's. It's so short. Vlogbrothers responded with, just charge me more dork. And people liked it. This comment, you know when you have something special, when an announcement that you're raising your price has an overwhelmingly positive comment section, and it's legit, and it's because they did it in a cool way.

[Linus]

Well, they didn't even do it in a cool way. They just did it the way it should be done. Everyone else sucks.

[Dan]

Yeah, I think it was. Yeah. It goes up for new customers and it goes up for returning customers. So if you canceled and are coming back, it went up as well.

[Linus]

I will do you one better. Our returning customers keep their existing pricing, but we might have to change that at some point. That probably doesn't make sense forever, because.

[Dan]

What if someone's returning from 2017?

[Linus]

Yeah. Are they really a returning customer? I think the way that YouTube defines a new viewer to the channel is 90. It's either 90 days or 30 days or something like that.

[Dan]

I wouldn't mind having a buffer. That seems reasonable.

[Linus]

I think a little buffer Might be reasonable, but I think if someone's coming back after a year or whatever, they can just. Clearly, they're doing the thing where they buy for one month, download everything, then cancel, and then watch it, and that's fine, but then they can pay.

[Dan]

You can pay full price.

[Linus]

They can pay a couple dollars more.

[Dan]

Yeah.

[Linus]

It's not going to kill them.

[Dan]

I just wanted to point out because, like, again, we talk about how there's a lot of negative, so.

[Linus]

Okay, hold on, hold on.

[Dan]

It was three weeks ago, but I thought it was cool.

[Linus]

Okay. Deep Blue 7. I use ad blockers because I don't want to pay for the content. I don't.

[Dan]

Oh.

[Linus]

I don't use ad blockers because I don't want to pay for the content. I use them because I don't want companies to track me. And there's, like, a whole bunch more about why you use them. I'm not judging. Again, I can't make this clear enough.

[Dan]

At no point in time, we have.

[Linus]

Literally made videos on how to do what you're doing, and we've helped you about the benefits.

[Dan]

We will probably continue helping you.

[Linus]

We will. We will. We're talking about it right now. We're talking about it right now. I am mad because my video on de Googling your life, which included how to run ad blockers on YouTube, was taken down.

[Dan]

We're very annoyed that we weren't able to give you the info on how to block ads.

[Linus]

Don't interpret this the wrong way. I choose not to use them. That's a personal choice. You choose to use them for whatever reason you like, and that is your personal choice.

[Dan]

That's a legit reason.

[Linus]

And it's piracy, and I don't care. And you shouldn't care either if you don't care. Yeah, that's it. That's all. It's okay. It's okay. You know what? You don't need to talk to your therapist about it anymore. I will be that for you. We're gonna take whatever parasocial relationship we had and just. And we're gonna go like this. We're gonna turn it up to 11.

[Dan]

Oh, man.

[Linus]

All right. Our discussion question on this topic is, why didn't you warn us about PI? Linus?

[Dan]

Yeah.

[Linus]

Why didn't I?

[Dan]

Why didn't you?

[Linus]

Why didn't I?

[Dan]

Honestly. Disappointed.

[Linus]

I don't click on ad, so I don't. I didn't know what it was. I just. I just could tell that it was an ad blocker. So I call. I basically got mad at YouTube.

[Dan]

I was super sus. Because this is the first time I've ever heard of this.

[Linus]

Yeah.

[Dan]

And they say, get paid. And I was immediately like, oh, what's going on? So they say browse. You got to read the whole line. Browse ad free ad free with PI, ad block. And earn cash rewards for the ads you choose to see. I read some Reddit threads real quick and stuff.

[Linus]

Isn't this just brave?

[Dan]

I think it's kind of like distributed brave. I think.

[Linus]

Okay.

[Dan]

Put it on other browsers. I found this interesting. Featured by Google. Verified by Google.

[Linus]

Can you. Okay. Go. Go to the actual Chrome store, though. Is it actually don't link. That looks like an image. I don't think that's even. I don't think that even pulls like from the API or anything.

[Dan]

I did not play store.

[Linus]

That looks fake.

[Dan]

What am I doing?

[Linus]

What are you doing?

[Dan]

It's right here, though. It found it. Anyways, good job, Google. It didn't say featured on, but it does have a lot of rating.

[Linus]

That number of ratings though.

[Dan]

Yeah, they have a good record. I thought this was interesting. They flagged themselves as a non trader. I don't know if that's legitimate.

[Linus]

A trader. What's a trader?

[Dan]

So I had to do a bunch of research on this a while back because we had to flag Floatplane as a trader. But I think that's because we receive payment. They don't receive payment. But if they are sending payment, I feel like they would still be a trader. And I feel like they're trying to get away from this because it notes on the end there.

[Linus]

What if they're sending payment but they're not sending any to Russia or China? Are they still a trader?

[Dan]

Yeah, definitely. Yeah. T R A D E R To be clear. And it says for consumers in the European Union, please note that consumer rights do not apply to contracts between you.

[Linus]

And this developer chat knows what I want. Where's my ding?

[Luke]

Oh.

[Linus]

I'm like conditioned now. I'm. I'm the dog. I get it.

[Dan]

You need your.

[Linus]

I need my ding.

[Dan]

Yeah.

[Luke]

Sorry I missed it, Mr. Joke.

[Dan]

I didn't even think it was really like a joke.

[Luke]

I wasn't listening.

[Dan]

You're playing on the word trader. Yeah, but it was just like, that's classic ding.

[Linus]

That's classic ding.

[Luke]

Classic ding.

[Linus]

Classic ding.

[Luke]

You get a makeup ding.

[Linus]

Dan knows you get a makeup ding. Let's go.

[Luke]

Yeah.

[Linus]

Oh, that feels good.

[Luke]

I'm sorry.

[Linus]

That feels good.

[Luke]

I took that from you.

[Dan]

Okay.

[Linus]

What are we supposed to be talking About? What are you even talking about? Oh, traders, right. Trader. Trader Joe.

[Dan]

Sorry, dad. Say, I'm sorry I took that from you. It was way too funny. Oh, God. I took that from you.

[Luke]

I took it from you.

[Dan]

Okay. Sorry. Oh, man. Extremely normal employee boss interactions.

[Linus]

Oh, yeah. Jordan says as soon as I started writing this topic, we couldn't get a pie ad to come up no matter what we tried. Is Google watching the WAN doc? Hi, Google. No, probably not, Jordan.

[Dan]

Probably.

[Linus]

They just paused their campaign, apparently. I've watched a couple of, like. I've watched a couple of, like, videos that I'm not sure if I was supposed to watch about, like, how bigger organizations who do a lot, like tens of millions of dollars a year of this kind of advertising work and they are, like cycling through creative. They're like cycling through campaigns at a rate that is. Was already back then, like, unfathomable to me. Like the size of the teams that would need to work on this. And now that you can have agents that would do this kind of stuff, I'm sure that it's 10x100x what it was before. It's pretty wild. So probably they just had a campaign paused and they working on changeover or something.

[Dan]

This is not a topic, but there's a lot of really, really nefarious advertising going on right now, which is undisclosed advertising with fake AI creators talking about, like life change stuff.

[Linus]

Life change.

[Dan]

One that I saw, like puberty.

[Linus]

Are you going through the change? Do you have hair?

[Dan]

Yeah. Yeah. It's very new in places I haven't had it before. It's a lot.

[Linus]

Do you want to talk about it?

[Dan]

That would help. You are the therap. Look at me. Okay. Anyways, the one that I saw was one account that was constantly. It had. It was always women, but they're all different. And it was clearly not like a Stories account. These were clearly just AI generated. And it would talk about how they moved to this new country to get away from whatever. And this current one was like, oh, I moved to. The one that I saw, I think was I moved to Poland, I'm pretty sure, to get away from the Trump administration. And I was happy with all these different things. And I learned that by law you have to have a water filter. And my hair and skin has never felt better. And when I moved out of the place that I was in, I like my water filter so much, I was gonna take it. And then my landlord said, why don't you just look up this brand on Amazon? And I was like, wow, what A good tip. Undisclosed obvious ad at every single post from this one account because no one seems to look into it or care. The comments, by the way, the reason why I'm saying it's so nefarious. The comments, by the way, are all just fighting over political things. Nobody's pointing out this is clearly an AI generated content slop wrapped around.

[Linus]

Did you click on any of the commenters? Do they seem to be human?

[Dan]

I didn't click on the commenters, but they were all just fighting about it's, oh, Poland is this way because of whatever, Trump, blah, blah, blah, something, blah, blah, blah, whatever. It was all just political fighting.

[Linus]

I was reading about how brain rot seems to actually not be a figure of speech. Like, you know how when, when our parents were kids, they said that like, reading fiction was gonna rot your brain. And then when, when the Gen Xers were kids, it was watching TV is gonna rot your brain. And then for us it was video games are gonna rot your brain. But like, no, really, like scrolling through.

[Dan]

Shorts seems to be very.

[Linus]

And stories and whatnot seems to actually rot your brain. Like they're, they're, they're measuring very, very different cognitive outcomes for younger kids. I think we talked about this recently, but the, the really remarkable thing, sort of having lived on the Internet for my entire adult life, has been watching the intelligence of humanity go like this and the intelligence of bots go like this. And I feel like we are dangerously close to the meeting point, or maybe even past it, where for certain members.

[Dan]

Of society, I think we're touching where.

[Linus]

The best bots, or even a mediocre bot, seems a lot more like a rational human being than a lot of people I encounter online.

[Dan]

And part of, part of the problem, there needs to be 2x speed on TikTok to double the brain rot. That party that hurts me so much, that causes me physical pain. Part of the problem is that they're all wrapped up in human disguises, I guess. And to have your deception detector running 100% of the time is not a thing most people do.

[Linus]

They're saying. They're also saying that Gen Z is supposed to be the most gullible generation ever. Ooh, yeah. This is on this on Politico. Basically just talking through how the sources of information that they go to are so full of disinformation that they just have. No, some of them, obviously not all you guys watch the WAN show, so you know what's up. But yeah, well, anyway, the point is.

[Dan]

Free therapy, let's go.

[Linus]

But these platforms are so full of disinformation. And the test that they did was apparently it was about 3,000 students. And they showed them footage of like, rioters or not riders, sorry, ballot box stuffers. And we're talking about sort of election fraud and voter fraud. And of the 3,000, three of them correctly identified that the footage was not in fact from America, but it was from Russia. Oh.1%.

[Dan]

There must have been language in the, in the footage.

[Linus]

No, no, there wouldn't be because it's just like talking, talking over it.

[Dan]

Text.

[Linus]

Oh, I don't know.

[Dan]

If you show a ballot box, it's got to be like writing on it or a flag or something.

[Linus]

Anyways, anyway, three of them apparently thought to like reverse look up or Google it or just not take it for granted. I don't know, dude. It's. It's kind of. It's kind of scary. And to be clear, I think that. I think that a lot of our audience. And as much as this is sort of for a really stupid reason, I think a lot of our audience is pretty well trained to look for multiple sources. Because for us, choosing a component for our gaming rig is like, really, really important. And as, as. As many problems as there are, tech coverage is still somewhat okay. Like, I don't think it's. I don't think it's been polarized the same way that political coverage has. There's certain areas where. I think there's a lot of that. I think on like, the Apple versus Android side, things have devolved into the point where you can kind of not even really have a conversation.

[Dan]

It's not so much that with consoles anymore, it's just depression.

[Linus]

Yeah, yeah, there's.

[Dan]

They used to fight, now they're just sad.

[Linus]

Yeah, so. So I really, I'm not, I'm not necessarily talking about our audience here. I think, I think that. Not. I think that I've seen a lot of evidence over the years that our audience is a cut above the average YouTube, you know, commenter, because I read a lot of comments on our channel, I read a lot of comments on other channels, and I don't know how to say this any more tactfully than I. That I'm about to say it, but, you know, the general population on YouTube is pretty stupid. Right? Whereas there's. Other than a few outliers, it's, It's. It's usually pretty well reasoned discourse on our videos by comparison. And I don't know if you, if you disagree, then by all means insult our audience.

[Dan]

The only reaction that I had wasn't.

[Linus]

I'm just their therapist. I'm not their friend.

[Dan]

Might be better. My reaction is that you're looking at YouTube as a whole, that might be a better reflection of like, society.

[Linus]

Well, no, I know, that's. That's exactly what I mean.

[Dan]

Yeah.

[Linus]

That's why I'm saying, like, these, these issues with, you know, a lack of media literacy, you know, not being able. Not being able to tell the difference between, you know, someone with journalism credentials and someone who just claims that they're a journalist every once in a while, but doesn't demonstrate any of the, you know, obvious care and attention to journalistic standards. Right. Like not being able to tell the difference. I think the folks that are over here can probably tell the difference better than the general population.

[Dan]

Yeah. One thing that I've been wondering about, I've like, actually been thinking of emailing, like, trying to find a university that has a, I don't know, psychologist that might work on something like this and email them and see if they'll get back to me. But I genuinely wonder how much of it is the physical repetition because, you know, how like, people that get addicted to smoking, some of them will need a replacement for the physical act of smoking, not the nicotine. And something that I've been wondering about is all of these apps work the same. Like, it's the infinite scroll concept that you've actually pushed back on in the past, but the infinite scroll concept of like, you know, Facebook works that way, Instagram works that way, Twitter works that way, Threads works that way, TikTok works that way.

[Linus]

Everything works that way.

[Dan]

Infinite scroll, dude, you're trying to. Sitting on your phone, you're trying to.

[Linus]

Get some product information, dude.

[Dan]

Yeah.

[Linus]

And every website is designed for. You have to scroll, scroll forever to find any information about.

[Dan]

Genuinely wonder how much of the addiction is just going doing this forever. Well, people that will do this for five hours, which is not that much.

[Linus]

Of an exaggeration, like, like near idle games where you basically just like click a thing or tap a thing or so.

[Dan]

Your, your brain is barely functioning and you're doing some form of physical input and people will talk about how you come out of it like in a. In a haze. You don't even remember what you were doing for the last time or whatever. So, like, how much of that is.

[Linus]

The, the old TV concept of clicking through the channels?

[Dan]

Like how much of this is literally just you swiping your phone? Because it's, it's weird to me how ubiquitous it is. There isn't any side scrolling one. They're all the same thing. All the apps work the same way. And when you're like, oh, I should get off Instagram and you load up Twitter, then you go do the same thing again. You're not actually escaping because they all act the same way, so they keep self referencing.

[Linus]

Now what is it about sliding our finger that is lower friction than tapping our finger? And I mean figurative friction, by the way. I want to make this abundantly clear.

[Dan]

Tinder is not the same.

[Linus]

We're not saying Tinder's not as popular. We're not saying we're like better than other people. I doom scroll loop, doom scrolls.

[Dan]

There's doom scrolling.

[Linus]

We get doom scrolling happens. We get caught in it too. We're just take this for what it is. Two fish caught in the net talking to all the other fish in the net going, how the F did we get in this net? And what the F is up with this?

[Dan]

I have to keep. I'm very proactive about trying to set up tools to help me avoid it when I can. I will actively, like, if I, if I notice it starts to get bad with a certain app, I'll just remove it from my phone completely for at least a minimum period of time. I try to set up alarms, but sometimes those sock.

[Linus]

Yeah. And you can. Oh, man. See, I was thinking about this the other night, what the market would be, because it's the, it's the classic XKCD standards strip, right? Like, why do so many standards exist? Because everything else is imperfect and there's so many different standards. We should just have one that's like the one standard to rule them all. And then you just have another standard.

[Luke]

Right?

[Linus]

Okay. So I was thinking, like, realistically, the last thing the world needs is another Android skin. But that video on the Light Phone 3 that we did recently, which is like that super basic phone that just does calling and text. You can take pictures and send pictures and that is it. I got like 700,000, 800,000 views or something like that. So there's clearly interest in dumb phones. But what people were really frustrated by with that particular phone was that, like, it's kind of useless. Like, you can't, you can't pay for parking. You can't, you know, use it as a digital wallet. You can't send WI FI messages. So you can't Send messages on WhatsApp or Facebook Messenger. Like, it doesn't run apps. And, and I was thinking, like, if there was a justification for a new Android.

[Dan]

Oh, My God.

[Linus]

To exist. What's up? Oh, you got a PI ad when you wanted to look at the. Yeah, okay. There you go. How many users have. I can't remember the video.

[Dan]

924.

[Linus]

Yeah. Even more now. So people are clearly interested.

[Dan]

People care.

[Linus]

And I was thinking that would be a justification for a new skin of Android or for a new handset maker to make a. Like, a Detox phone, but that actually has basic functionality. So, like, one of the things that you were talking about setting alarms for, like, using apps, and you can do that on basically anything. You can say, like, oh, I want to limit my screen time to one hour of this a day or whatever, but as far as I know, they all just let you click add more.

[Dan]

Yes. Or dismiss or whatever. And another big problem that I have is this sameness between the apps because you can't. You can't do, like, I'm gonna limit my social apps to this amount of time. So. Okay, what do you do? Like, five minutes. YouTube has scrollable shorts, Instagram has scrollable shorts. TikTok has scrollable shorts.

[Linus]

And a lot of creators upload to all of them anyway, X has stuff.

[Dan]

There's so many different things. There's so many different things.

[Linus]

So much stuff. They've got so much stuff. They're going to need more than 1x pretty soon. 3.

[Dan]

3. Yeah.

[Linus]

There we go. So, you know, what about that. You know, what about a phone where you have to have. You literally have to have an accountability buddy who.

[Dan]

I would love it.

[Linus]

Who keys in a pin, and when you set it, you actually cannot look at Twitter again that day.

[Dan]

Amazing.

[Linus]

You can't.

[Dan]

Yeah.

[Linus]

Period.

[Dan]

Yeah.

[Linus]

Because the only solution for me was literally to remove the apps from my phone.

[Dan]

Yep. So I did that with Twitter and Twitter's still off my phone. It's been off my phone for quite a while now. But the problem that I have is, like, I'll have a stupid app because one person that I know, that's the only way that they communicate, and then that app probably does other crap as well. And then I'll find myself just, like, accidentally diverted and then, oh, whoa, how long just went by? Then it's like, darn it. So sometimes you can avoid those things more easily, sometimes you can't. It is what it is. But, yeah, it sucks. I really want to figure out, and it would be cool to me if someone made a video on it. I don't know if it makes sense to be an LTT video or not, but, like, what is the theory behind why this stuff is so addictive. I know like humans are generally addicted to information and it's like absolute information overflow to be able to just scroll and there's new stuff all the time. It's why scrolling on the TV was popular back in the day. But I think, I think there's a physical element to it as well with the actual scrolling. I know there's a common perspective that comes up of like, oh, I'll just keep scrolling until I find one more good one. But then what, what, how do you define a good one? So then you end up just scrolling forever. There's like, there's all these little concepts to it but it would be, it would be interesting to, to know because I haven't personally seen addiction is to stimuli, not information. I think ah, I feel like we're gonna get in trouble because we're talking about non tech stuff that we don't know anything about and then people are gonna be like you should have known every single possible fact about this again every time by the way. But I thought it was both but I don't know.

[Linus]

Cool. Why don't we talk about whatever it is we're supposed to be doing right now?

[Luke]

What are some announcements?

[Linus]

Oh, let's do announcements. So I would like to give a massive shout out to our team at MIBC who's been handling the shipment side of the ship storm. They have managed to keep pace with the unbelievable demand that the free shipping on orders over $150 lttstore.com promotion has generated. Shout out those guys. That is why the Shipstorm sale event has been able to be extended. Because our concern, as I explained when we first launched it, was that if we didn't end it after a little over a week, I think was the original time frame, they would be so backlogged that we wouldn't be able to get things over the border before that May, the second deadline when tariffs, I mean at this point, may, may not. They could be this amount, they could be this amount, who knows. But that was the date that we were working off of and the numbers we were working off of indicated that pricing would have to go up quite significantly anyway. We were worried that that would be the last day we'd be able to ship stuff out but they have kept up so incredibly that not only are we extending the ship storm sale event, but we actually have some new things to add to it. The power outlet is apparently what we're calling our B stock. So at the power outlet you can get a great deal on open box and pre owned goods.

[Dan]

That's a pretty good name.

[Linus]

We reduce waste. Everyone wins. So we have open box backpacks. You can get a brand new one, but it's missing the box. For 179 USD, no cosmetic wear. You can get a used like new with minor cosmetic wear and used a grade with moderate cosmetic wear. And we've got. Oh, that one's sold out apparently. Oh, okay. All we have left is new boxes. Well, the point is we classic LTT store introduced that deal. Oh boy. Well, hold on. There's got to be more, right? There's. Oh, there's a used backpack between both of you to show off. Well, we should probably get this to the shipment team so that they can put it up for sale because apparently the rest of them are sold out.

[Dan]

Cool.

[Linus]

The least expensive tier apparently sold out really fast. Followed by the like like new tier the following day. Y'all blew us away. We still have some new open box ones available, so you can save about 70 bucks on a brand new OG LTC backpack.

[Dan]

Here's a question.

[Linus]

Just note that these are OG backpacks with either the old style carabiner zipper or without carabiners and just regular YKK zips. Okay. Sorry, what is that, sir?

[Dan]

It says boxless, but I'm assuming it's still gonna come in a box.

[Linus]

I wouldn't assume anything.

[Dan]

Okay.

[Linus]

It might come in an envelope. Oh, really big one.

[Dan]

Wow.

[Linus]

I don't know.

[Dan]

I'd be impressed.

[Linus]

I'm sure it'll get there in one piece. And if it doesn't, good job. We also brought back mystery screwdrivers, but with a twist. Basically, we're moving these screwdrivers so fast we don't have time to pack them. And also we're in a hurry because tariffs because we got to get them out before May 2nd. So we're giving you 20 bucks off if you buy a screwdriver and included standard or noctua bit set without the usual screwdriver box. So that's what makes it mystery. It doesn't have a box. All mystery screwdrivers will ship without a box. Look at that. We don't have time to pack these screwdrivers. Blah, blah, blah. Sales of final will ship without a box. Possible colorways are noctua beige or noctua brown, but it is the same quality screwdriver. Okay, what else we got? Is that. Is that it for. Is that it?

[Dan]

Big nerd gaming?

[Linus]

Oh no, we have it.

[Dan]

Big nerd gaming. Okay, Are you like big nerd gaming?

[Linus]

If you watched Secret Shopper part one?

[Dan]

Hilarious.

[Linus]

We're pretty sure the guy on the phone said beginner gaming, but that's not as much fun as what we thought. He said big nerd game, which is bigger gaming. So we can click here and we can see the design.

[Dan]

I'm gonna be big nerd gaming.

[Linus]

Dude. Why is Sarah such a chad? Because this looks awesome.

[Dan]

It looks great.

[Linus]

This looks so good. We are ready to go. Well, we're ready to go as soon as we ship these out by June 27th. Yeah. All orders containing this are expected to ship later. This is a print to order shirt, but super, super exciting. I'm super excited. And finally. Oh, my God. Oh, my God. Cargo pants are back in stock. Cargo pants are back in stock. Yeah. So that's cool. So we have different waist sizes. We don't have another inseam yet, so. Yeah, just the one, I guess. Yes. I think at some point we do want to add another one, but still.

[Dan]

Out of luck for me.

[Linus]

Just waist sizes for now.

[Dan]

We'll get there.

[Linus]

Okay.

[Dan]

I got more shirts. I'm wearing one of my new tall shirts now. I will get pants eventually.

[Linus]

With so many new deals and items, we've extended free shipping to all orders over $150 until Monday, 10am Pacific Time. This is likely going to be the last time we can extend this promotion since we need to make sure that your orders get shipped out and get over the border on time. Make sure to take advantage of these deals and the free shipping before it's too late, especially if you're in the US you can find it [e-mail] great. Great work from the team. They really pulled it together getting some of these items, some of these restocks up on the site.

[Dan]

The big nerd gaming was a Victor design.

[Linus]

Was it? Oh, he did a great job.

[Dan]

Fantastic work.

[Linus]

Oh, I. I gave credit to the wrong person. It was so good. I thought Sarah did it. Wow. Well, that is a high compliment indeed, Victor.

[Dan]

It's good stuff.

[Linus]

You might call yourself victorious.

[Dan]

That's my ding.

[Linus]

You stole that from me.

[Dan]

That's my ding.

[Linus]

You stole that from me. All right, what are we supposed to be doing now?

[Dan]

I don't know.

[Luke]

How about a merch message?

[Linus]

Sure.

[Luke]

He's so sad.

[Linus]

Hi, dlo. I finally should explain what merch messages are.

[Luke]

Oh, yeah, I don't know what's.

[Dan]

I pirated your dig.

[Linus]

No, if you pirated it, I would still have it.

[Dan]

I privateered your ding.

[Linus]

No, because I would still have it. You stole it.

[Dan]

No.

[Luke]

You wouldn't download a ding.

[Linus]

Merch. Messages, whatever, just go on the store and in the cart. You can leave a merch message. Producer Dan will get it and he will forward it to me and Luke. Or he will just not. It's quite possible that he just won't. Yeah, you get nuts, but you'll get your order in the mail anyway. All right, all right. Hit me. Sure. Hi, DLL.

[Luke]

I have finally upgraded my graphics card from a GTX 970 to a 9070 XT. Question. Do you have any tips on an open world game for single player? Best regards from the middle of Sweden. It's 1 Celsius outside 1 C2 and.

[Linus]

Open world single player game. I mean. Okay, sure, I'll bite. Play Freelancer. It's not gonna. It's not gonna push that hardware. Not gonna push your hardware. But it is a great underrated game.

[Dan]

That's cool. I like it.

[Linus]

That completely runs out of gas in the last 10% or so because they clearly ran out of budget. But, boy, is it a hell of a ride up until that point.

[Dan]

That's sick.

[Linus]

Super great answer.

[Luke]

Now we've got some Flow Plane announcements and a couple others.

[Linus]

And he's going to say, how about Oblivion Remastered? There you go. Was that what you were going to say?

[Luke]

Morrowind?

[Dan]

Morrowind? Why not Morrowind Remastered? I don't know. If you haven't played it before, it's still good. Yeah, you could. You could do that. I think Modern, with the updates and stuff, Cyberpunk is pretty sick. Try that out.

[Luke]

More announcements?

[Linus]

Oh. Oh, just one. What? No, we can't do more announcements. That's too many announcements. They can't. Announcements are like half the doc. We're just gonna have to come back to announcements later.

[Dan]

I think we're supposed to do the Flow Plane 1.

[Luke]

Now we gotta do the Flow Plane 1. We can come back to the rest of them later.

[Linus]

Fine. If you're a big nerd gamer or a beginner gamer, get yourself an early screening of Secret Shopper Part 2 on floatplane, which I am about to make live right now.

[Dan]

Why would we do this?

[Linus]

I'm about to make live.

[Dan]

No, don't. Don't, don't, don't. It says don't share your screen.

[Linus]

It does? Linus.

[Dan]

Sorry.

[Linus]

Please share your screen.

[Dan]

What?

[Linus]

It says to share my screen and set the video to public. Don't read this out loud. I bet you read that out loud. Stop reading these out loud. Look, Luke, you literally can't follow instructions.

[Dan]

All right, yeah, let's Just do it. Yeah, why not?

[Linus]

Okay. This was supposed to come out Sunday per our 48 hour early release advertisement. However, Bjorn, the editor, and Plouffe, who owns a monitor, pushed through and delivered it for you guys now.

[Dan]

Nice.

[Linus]

So be ahead of the YouTube viewers as they have to wait over 90 hours to watch episode two.

[Dan]

Why does he want you to share your screen when you do it?

[Linus]

Why do you want to share your screen when you do things?

[Dan]

But I.

[Linus]

Are you concerned about this?

[Dan]

Yeah.

[Linus]

Up here. Like, why does that matter?

[Dan]

We've just never shared this. It's probably fine. I've just never thought about it or looked at it. See, Dan, that's what. That's what.

[Linus]

Here's the floatplane cms.

[Luke]

I tried to cover it with something and I was too slow.

[Dan]

Just don't click anything else.

[Linus]

Do things here. You want me to click here? How dare you. You want me to click here?

[Dan]

No, just. Yeah, just don't.

[Linus]

How about here?

[Dan]

No.

[Linus]

How about legal agreement? Nobody click there.

[Dan]

No.

[Linus]

Should I click? Joe says don't look.

[Dan]

Yeah, there's things you like.

[Linus]

Everyone close your eyes.

[Dan]

Things that would be a major legal problem if you clicked on them.

[Linus]

I'm not going to click.

[Dan]

I'm just saying.

[Linus]

I know how the cms. Dan, give me my CMS back. Okay. Public. Boop.

[Dan]

Why take the risk? I don't know.

[Linus]

Life is about risk. Take risks or be boring forever.

[Dan]

That's true.

[Linus]

Boom. Save.

[Dan]

I don't think this was.

[Linus]

I don't think that works thing, though. Change is saved. Oh, yeah. Okay.

[Dan]

Well, sure you don't upload things to.

[Linus]

The flow plane, Dude, I haven't done.

[Dan]

It in forever, you know.

[Linus]

Haven't done it in forever.

[Dan]

Yeah, we added the changes saved thing just because people didn't trust us.

[Linus]

Well, yeah, it was you. Yeah. Good. You should.

[Dan]

It was fair feedback. It was fair feedback.

[Linus]

I want a confirmation that my changes are saved. Nothing else is good enough. I mean, if you grayed out the save, then we wouldn't have this problem because I would click save and it would stay grayed out.

[Dan]

Yeah, but the fade and then come back is indicating that.

[Linus]

No, but I haven't changed anything. No, that's old meta. If that was ever the meta. And the current meta is that I wouldn't be able to save if. If I haven't made a change.

[Dan]

Yeah, things on the CMS don't keep up with current meadows.

[Linus]

No, they really don't.

[Dan]

Things on the CMS keep up with. Does it work?

[Linus]

Yeah. People are saying it's not Live yet.

[Luke]

It just went live.

[Linus]

Chewy says, give it a minute.

[Dan]

Yeah, just say.

[Linus]

He says, give it a minute.

[Dan]

It's a global thing. This is one of the reasons why we don't want to show the same thing happens on YouTube.

[Linus]

Yeah.

[Dan]

Is normal.

[Linus]

Yeah. Why do you think 25 people type first? Surely if that other comment was there, they would be smart enough to not type first. Yeah, but it doesn't show up for them or they're done.

[Dan]

Also, not everyone gets at the same time. It has to.

[Linus]

No, that's what I'm saying. That's. That's the point.

[Dan]

No, you said it doesn't show up for them.

[Linus]

Yeah.

[Dan]

Oh, I thought you meant the other comments. Because the other comments also might just not show up. Yeah, because the comments and the video are on different.

[Linus]

He's called. He's all caught up. Anyways, the first one that doesn't know. And we need a narcissist shirt.

[Dan]

Like, separately.

[Linus]

Yeah. Or like we do drops. Oh, we let people vote. We let them buy the narcissist shirt or the doesn't know shirt.

[Dan]

I wonder how many people would just walk around with a narcissist shirt. I feel like.

[Luke]

I feel like I'd have one of those.

[Dan]

I feel like if, like, what's a brand that would do this? What's some, like, really expensive Louis Vuitton.

[Luke]

Would just have a purse that just says narcissist. I feel like it would be an artist collab.

[Dan]

I feel like they might.

[Linus]

There is, but I feel like it.

[Dan]

Would be more like a streetwear brand.

[Linus]

No way.

[Dan]

Like a streetwear X something collab where it just said narcissist on it.

[Linus]

People are giving suggestions in floatplane chat. I don't know if any of these are valid, but they're saying supreme. Balenciaga.

[Dan]

Balenciaga, I feel like would do it.

[Linus]

Off white Marc Jacobs.

[Luke]

Be a microphone print, and it would cost, like, a thousand dollars a foot.

[Dan]

No, it would just be made in China. Then they'll just tell everyone that it cost $1,000.

[Linus]

Artie says Vetemos would do it. I don't know. I don't know any of these.

[Dan]

I don't even know who that is. Because. Because I don't. Because I don't know.

[Luke]

Nick owes you a email about the shirts.

[Linus]

Oh, does he?

[Luke]

Yes.

[Linus]

Okay. There's no way Kanye would do it. That would involve admitting that he's a narcissist. I don't think any actual narcissist would.

[Dan]

Just sell a shirt that said Kanye on it. And it's effectively the same thing.

[Luke]

Very good, sir.

[Linus]

Very good. Big narcissist game.

[Dan]

Or with a particular symbol. But we won't. We won't. Well, we can. We got merch messages.

[Linus]

What kind of car would he drive, Luke? Why don't you tell me? No, no, don't tell me. No, no.

[Dan]

I could.

[Linus]

Anyways.

[Dan]

Merch messages. I think we need merch. Mess.

[Linus]

Yeah, hit me with a merchant.

[Dan]

One more. I don't know. One more. One more.

[Luke]

Hello, L.D.

[Linus]

Hello.

[Luke]

Yeah, Linus. How happy were you with your Qualcomm laptop? Need a new laptop for traveling and light photo and video processing block ads. Buy [e-mail].

[Linus]

It was okay. I'm actually not on it right now. Man, it is a dude. Did you check out the Framework short circuit by any chance?

[Dan]

No.

[Linus]

So, investment in Framework disclosure, the Dell that we used as our battery life comparison was. Insane. No, but, like, insane. Are you. Are you checking it out right now? Okay. See if you can find the battery life. See if you can find the battery life comparison. Blah, blah, blah. Unboxing. Yeah. Dude, dude, dude. This is. This actually blew my mind. Okay? Our battery life test, for whatever reason, is a little unforgiving, right? Like, we always, literally always test lower than what the manufacturer advertises.

[Dan]

Which is fine, as long as the test is consistent.

[Linus]

Yeah. It raises serious questions for me about what exactly it is that manufacturers are testing. Because, like, there's only so many things that you can disable. We're already in battery saver mode. We're already at 200 nit brightness. Like, what are you guys even doing?

[Dan]

We're doing 1080p playback the entire time.

[Linus]

Disable your Bluetooth, disable your WI fi. Like, come on. Come on. What are you even talking about here?

[Dan]

They're probably trying to simulate a balanced workload.

[Linus]

Anyway, the point is, we got it in the chamber. We're doing Battery Saver mode, 1080p playback over Plex 16 hours. That's incredible.

[Dan]

It's wild.

[Linus]

Why would I need a Qualcomm?

[Dan]

That's a pretty good point.

[Linus]

Raises serious questions for me. It's not that I didn't like the Qualcomm. It's not that I didn't enjoy my time with the Snapdragon X. It's just that if, like, the. Are the current gen intel mobile chips low key? Really, really, really good.

[Dan]

It's a Pro Premium. How expensive is this laptop? Dell Pro.

[Linus]

That one's really expensive. Yeah, but a big part of why that one is so efficient is that it's using that chip. And I think Dell also does some really cool things with their display for. For optimal efficiency.

[Dan]

These are not cheap.

[Linus]

I mean, Snapdragon X is not cheap either, but that is more expensive. That's like probably starting at around 2,200 bucks or something.

[Dan]

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Linus]

No, Dan told us to do more talks.

[Luke]

My mic wasn't live, so you're just crazy.

[Dan]

That's why I'm trying to take control of show Dan.

[Linus]

It's my job, Lou.

[Luke]

Maybe new Year.

[Linus]

Okay, what are we supposed to be doing?

[Dan]

Intel.

[Linus]

Speaking of intel, they're having a bit of a classic Coke moment. Intel just dropped a new 200-boost BIOS profile for their Aero Lake CPUs. Like the Core Ultra 9 285K, letting you safely overclock without killing your warranty. Early benchmarks from Derbauer indicate that it can boost gaming performance by anywhere from 4 to 19%. But here's the twist. For laptops, most people are still buying older Raptor Lake chips, 13th and 14th gen, because they're cheaper. And on the desktop, nobody seems to give a hot gosh darn about the limited AI uses for the new chips and therefore the new chips at all.

[Dan]

I don't. I think that's for laptop.

[Linus]

Oh, for laptops. Wait, what? Why are we talking about laptops, for crying out loud? Okay, well, whatever. The point is that no one's buying Intel's latest chips. Meanwhile, CEO Lit Bhutan announced undisclosed layoffs. But prior to that, Bloomberg cited internal sources claiming as much as 20% of Intel's workforce could be laid off in an effort to drive greater simplicity. Amongst other sweeping cultural changes at Intel, Intel's also facing unexpected production shortages for its older Intel 7 process node as demand for these more affordable chips continues to be strong.

[Dan]

20% of the workforce is like 20,000 jobs.

[Linus]

So, okay, some of the stuff that I had kind of put in, some of the stuff that I had put in maybe didn't make it entirely into the dock, but basically, yeah, the Intel. Oh, yeah, right, right, right, right. I remember what I wanted to do, so I wanted to go on, you know, a site like Amazon. Okay, Amazon top selling CPUs. And see how deep we have to go in this list to find anyone who's buying these desktop core ultra 200 series chips. Is anybody buying these things? Oh. Crystal asks, what's a Coke moment? A new Coke classic moment. Yeah, Coke Classic. New Coke. So in. Back in, I think it was the 80s, Coke released new Coke, and everyone hated It. And then they got rid of it and they brought back Coca Cola Classic. That's why it says Classic, because that's just like what it was before or something, but also with corn syrup now. So I don't know. Whatever. The point is Coke Classic. And then sales skyrocketed. So there's like kind of a conspiracy theory that they made New Coke suck on purpose so that they could increase sales of Coke Classic. I'm not sure if I subscribe to that, but that's.

[Dan]

It feels like 17D chess. I don't know.

[Linus]

Apparently New Coke was terrible. I never tried it.

[Dan]

Let's dramatically risk the entire company for a crazy move.

[Linus]

Okay, so happens. But here we go. We finally reached an intel chip. At number eight, it is a 12th gen. At number nine, we have another intel chip, a 14th gen processor. More Ryzen. More Ryzen. We have a 13th gen at number 14th place. We have a 14th gen. At 16th, we have a 14th gen at 18th. Okay, we're at number 25. Is a micro tick switch of some sort. Core Ultra 7 265K at 29th place. To be clear, they're still selling a few of these Things. It's got 188 reviews, which is something. But when we compare that to, you know, like the 1200 F, a chip that clearly, you know, used to be a little higher with 1400 reviews. Yeah, it's, it's, it's not a lot. It's not a lot, folks. A hundred reviews on the Core Ultra 9 285k. Just 37 on the 245k. Clearly people do not care about these things.

[Dan]

Thousands, A lot of AMD at the.

[Linus]

Top on chips that people actually buy. Like the 7800x3D, like here. Let's find, let's find something. Oh, wow. This is embarrassing. The 9950X. Okay. This is a. This is an almost $800 CPU is outselling Intel's current gen like value gaming chip, the 265K. It's not even close. That's embarrassing. More. More performance, you know, with, you know, overclocking or whatever. BIOS boost to two hundreds. Boost profile. Great. But it just doesn't. It doesn't seem like enough. It seems like Arrow Lake is just dead in the water at this point. We're on the. We're on the US site or. I think so. Wait, did it go to dot ca. I hate it when it does that. Forces you hate it when it does that. Yeah, no, that was. This was my Fault. I clicked the wrong thing. I did click a CA link. That's my bad. Well, anyway, still, my point stands. All right.

[Dan]

Sucks to suck.

[Linus]

Noki asks, do you think the ultra CPUs were made on purpose for laptops, but had to release them as desktop variants to satisfy a quota of some sort? I mean, that's basically, as far as I can tell, been what's driven Intel CPU development since they released like Core. And that was, that was back in like the mid 2000s, was they, they recognized that power efficiency was going to matter a lot. And then the only times that they have sort of deviated from that are when they like sucked and had to, had to juice up power just to get performance decent. They've been very mobile first for 20 years.

[Dan]

Oh yeah, definitely.

[Linus]

Don't forget about, don't forget about server. But that's the funny thing is like enthusiast desktop is this one kind of little island of not caring about power consumption in a sea of server caring about per core power consumption a lot and mobile caring about per core power consumption a lot. So we just get whatever's kind of left over.

[Dan]

We're also like the worst market for them out of those three, probably, unfortunately.

[Linus]

Oh yeah, the most vocal and cranky and least loyal. Like you look at mobile and enterprise, right? Like they just have regular hardware refreshes that they just, they just buy and they don't feel like validating another vendor. I mean, that's how intel has managed to be behind in server performance for years at this point, but still maintain greater than 50% market share until I think it was just like one quarter ago or something like that. There's more to it than just that. But a big part of it is once you're, once you're bought into an ecosystem, you just, you just reorder it. You just get the new one. Well, good luck, Intel. Chrome might be for sale.

[Dan]

Yeah, and I don't know if I love the list of people on the buyers. Where's our article for this top?

[Linus]

You go ahead and do it.

[Dan]

Since Google was ruled a search monopoly in last August, the Department of justice is now seeking a plethora of penalties, including forcing Google to sell Chrome. OpenAI is 100% interested in the browser, promising an AI first experience. That editorialization on the side, we all definitely want, Everyone wants that. People have been begging for that. For sure. We all for sure.

[Linus]

I love how when I click in a Google Doc and I just try to position my cursor at the top, it opens up AI bullshit.

[Dan]

It's like, hey, can I help you with this? Oh, wow. Yeah. I mean that one. Everybody gets one, right?

[Linus]

How could you possibly help me with this? I haven't started typing yet. It's a document. It's not even a response to an email. It's a document.

[Dan]

We're all super excited about this. Thank you very much. OpenAI. I think actually this would be great if you did this. Please. Actually, you know what? Maybe it's good if they do, because then other browsers might do it.

[Linus]

Hold on, hold on, hold on. Maybe it doesn't do it in the document. Maybe it only does it in emails.

[Dan]

I'm pretty sure it does it in the document.

[Linus]

I swear it does too.

[Dan]

Maybe there needs to be content already in the document.

[Linus]

Does it for on G Suite.

[Luke]

No, it does it for my Google Sheets as well.

[Dan]

Yeah, it does it in the document. Might be because you don't have content in there yet or anything. I'm not sure. But anyways, maybe they do this and then everyone hates it and other people use other browsers and that might be good for the world or something. We'll see. But. But anyways, they're 100% interested in the browser.

[Linus]

No, no, no. Yeah, I have help me write and generate document. They show up right at the top when I have entered nothing into this document yet. Because that's what bothers me. I'm not actually that bothered by AI assisting tools as long as I can just ignore them because I don't really personally need them. But if I have not entered anything in the document yet.

[Dan]

Yeah.

[Linus]

What could you possibly be hoping to auto complete generate document, Help me write templates and more. To be fair, I'm gonna generate a document.

[Dan]

No, I'm gonna generate a document.

[Linus]

Generate document.

[Dan]

Yeah, it's. It's a wizard. That's why it's able to help.

[Linus]

Oh, well, I hate it because it's.

[Dan]

Supposed to help people with writer's block. That's why it's still there even if there's nothing.

[Linus]

But they already have the templates button.

[Dan]

The thing that drives me nuts.

[Linus]

No, this is stupid. No, I've maintained it. Stupid. Generate document asks me if I want to do what? Party planning. Hold on, what does it have do I want to do? Party planning, A newsletter, A planning document wizard.

[Dan]

It doesn't just stop there to launch.

[Linus]

New Strawberry and Matcha. Whatever.

[Dan]

Yeah, do it.

[Linus]

No, I won't.

[Dan]

You want that for sure?

[Linus]

I don't want it.

[Dan]

You want Strawberry Matcha.

[Linus]

Okay, I got templates, meeting notes, account plan, blog Post wizard business proposal.

[Dan]

Right, Thanks. I don't like it either, but they're different things. The thing that drives me nuts is that all those options are in line with your cursor at the top of the screen.

[Linus]

Oh, yeah, because. So I can't click. Get out of the way.

[Dan]

So annoying.

[Linus]

Anyway, like, I don't even. I don't even mind. I don't even mind this up here.

[Dan]

Yeah, that's fine.

[Linus]

Like, fine, whatever, Be there. But. Oh, you know what? That's probably it. I just don't have it activated. There we go. That's the problem. Oh, God, you're gonna make me pay. Yeah, right? Yeah. I mean, I do pay for it. Pay for it on my stupid work account. Do we have to keep G Suite forever?

[Dan]

You don't pay for it.

[Linus]

Oh, Linus Media Group Incorporated does. Sorry, no, we don't pay for Gemini.

[Dan]

No, we had to. They. We got into a little bit of a, you know, Luke interacts with sales employees at large companies. We had some back and forths and they didn't give us as much of a discount on our G Suite thing as we had last year because they were really trying to push us to pay for the AI thing. But we did. We did not. We did not pay for AI tools. And I based. They were very pushy about why. And I told them and we're good.

[Linus]

They were pushy about why.

[Dan]

They're like, why they're so helpful. Why don't you want the AI tools? And I was like, well, because I.

[Linus]

Them.

[Dan]

Trash. They're so bad.

[Linus]

It's not even so bad.

[Dan]

I didn't say trash.

[Linus]

They're in the way.

[Dan]

Yeah, they're.

[Linus]

I am trying to get work done.

[Dan]

They're invasive, they're often not helpful yet, blah, blah, blah, blah. Maybe it's a thing in the future, but it's. It's not right now. And it's a really expensive per employee. So like getting the actual value out of that when there are so many free tools out there.

[Linus]

Yeah.

[Dan]

That take almost no additional lift.

[Linus]

Yeah.

[Dan]

And in. Are a lot of cases better.

[Linus]

Yeah.

[Dan]

Gemini's doing well right now, but I mean the. Whoever's winning the race is. Is constantly changing. Anyways. OpenAI is interested in buying Chrome.

[Linus]

Oh, cool.

[Dan]

They also, they. They even just buy access to Google's search index with an exec stating in an email that was revealed in the trial. We believe having multiple partners and in particular Google's API would enable us to provide a better product to users. OpenAI has reportedly considered buying Its own chromium based browser hiring former Google developers Ben Good Gur. Huh? Oh wow. And Darren Fisher, who helped bring Chrome to market Yahoo. Of course. Why not?

[Linus]

Yeah. Does Yahoo still exist? How does Yahoo still exist? I don't understand.

[Dan]

Who knows? I feel like that'd be a wild.

[Linus]

Company to work for every once in a while. Every once in a while I end up on like Yahoo Finance because I need to see like, like the history for a particular stock or whatever. Yeah. Who is using Yahoo?

[Dan]

I don't know. Yeah, See someone said Yahoo Finance is great. Yeah. It's like the one thing people see.

[Linus]

I still have Yahoo Email. My dad uses their email.

[Dan]

Anytime I see anyone with a Yahoo email, I am, I have a really strong like throwback moment. Like wow. Like you really, you just have really just dealt with that for a long time, haven't you? Like dang.

[Linus]

That's not what you were going to say at all. We all know what you were going to say.

[Dan]

No, they're a very strong person. We all, because they have, they have dealt with.

[Linus]

We all know what you're gonna say.

[Dan]

Why don't you just say consider they considered the impact on everyone.

[Linus]

Say it.

[Dan]

If they changed emails and how they might be harder to contact. So they just, they just stuck through it and, and, and kept using. It's good. It's good.

[Linus]

Very strong.

[Dan]

I'm impressed.

[Linus]

Tears streaming down their face.

[Dan]

Anyways, Yahoo is looking to run its own browser because why not either through developing or buying one? Yahoo search. Brian Provost estimated Yahoo's search market share could jump from 3% to double digits if they're able to buy Chrome.

[Linus]

Wow, double digits.

[Dan]

I would hope it would jump to double digits also.

[Linus]

Isn't that just saying that we're gonna use the Chrome browser to advantage our own search product exactly the same way that Google's doing it? Am I missing something here? I'm sure I'm missing something here.

[Luke]

Wasn't there a South park episode about this? Walmart, Jim's Drugs. It's just gonna happen to Yahoo.

[Dan]

Yeah, honestly. Also, Yahoo estimating that they have 3% market share seems stunning to me. I don't know if that's true.

[Linus]

I mean, how much of the population of the world is Japan? Because doesn't Japan use Yahoo Right or something?

[Dan]

I forgot that might be a thing.

[Linus]

Handyman says Google is a monopoly. Others are not. But the thing is that like the same behaviors that turn you into a monopoly are like just as wrong when you're not the monopoly. But while you're building Toward being a monopoly. That's like kind of the whole idea of antitrust.

[Dan]

There's been a little talk of spinning off Chrome into its own independent company, as Google has contended that Chrome can't survive on its own. Or. Sorry, there's been little talk. Not there has been a little talk. Perplexity actually agrees and would rather Google keep Chrome instead of being forced to sell it to another company like OpenAI. Perplexity is a competitor to OpenAI. Just to be clear. However, if a sale is forced, Perplexity would like would be down to buy Chrome as well. Obviously they probably just don't have the.

[Linus]

I'd be down to buy Chrome if I could afford it. We should get. We should get all YouTubers together.

[Dan]

We can make our own browser if you want and buy Chrome surprisingly easy.

[Linus]

We should just buy Chrome.

[Dan]

Nice. Why?

[Linus]

If every one of our viewers contributed $1, YouTubers could buy Chrome from Google and then we could own Chrome. Why? Because Chrome is what you use to watch YouTube.

[Dan]

Okay. But you can watch on other platforms.

[Linus]

If you are a dinosaur and you're not already watching on your phone or your TV or Firefox. Yeah, well, people don't watch YouTube on Firefox. They watch Floatplane on Firefox.

[Dan]

So we'd only be buying it for like millennials that are still using computers.

[Linus]

Yeah. Oh yeah. To buy their airplane tickets. No, that's a thing.

[Dan]

No, I agree.

[Linus]

Yeah, that's a thing.

[Dan]

Do not make me buy airplane tickets on a phone, dude.

[Linus]

No, I can't.

[Dan]

I will go on a computer.

[Linus]

I can't. We were shopping for Yvonne's getting a new car.

[Dan]

Big purchases need big screen.

[Linus]

We were shopping for it and I was trying to look at it on the phone and it's fine, but I can't compare. I need to compare. So we ended up at her desktop with the nice big ultra wide monitor with the spreadsheet with all the links.

[Dan]

You were talking earlier in the show about how Gen Z is much more gullible. Is this part of why the tools that they have don't naturally lend themselves to like, comparisons?

[Linus]

And they're not, maybe they're just not accustomed to making comparisons. I could kind of, I could kind of see that, like the friction to make a comparison on desktop. I mean, we've had arrow snap on Windows almost non existent, like 20 years.

[Dan]

The computer almost wants you to do it.

[Linus]

Yeah, you just, you take your one thing and you throw it on the one side, you take your other thing, you throw it on the other side.

[Dan]

Yeah.

[Linus]

And you make comparisons whereas phones.

[Dan]

No, it sucks.

[Linus]

Yeah.

[Dan]

It's a bad experience.

[Linus]

Terrible.

[Dan]

Switching tabs in your browser and your phone sucks.

[Luke]

Unless you have Samsung Dex.

[Linus]

Oh, come on. That's a very high friction. To go take your phone somewhere and plug it into something and.

[Dan]

Yeah.

[Luke]

I mean, I'm not being serious.

[Linus]

I see, I see.

[Luke]

You should be serious about our sponsors.

[Linus]

Yeah. BBB99 says split screen on a phone is awful. It really is. Like, let's try it.

[Luke]

I try it.

[Linus]

It's one of those things that I basically ignored anytime I was reviewing a phone.

[Dan]

Yeah, it sucks.

[Linus]

I just don't use it. Like what? I want an even smaller screen. You got to be kidding me. Me.

[Dan]

Cool. I can look at the tire on this one car and the tire on this other car and compare it that. That way.

[Linus]

Yeah, I think that's actually a pretty good point. Yeah. And like no. Ad ados in floatplane chat says no, they're just lazy people. Don't want to self educate anymore. I don't think that's it. I think they think they are self educating. So we're trying to figure out like, what is the. Like you've identified the disease, but we're trying to figure out like, you know, what infected them.

[Dan]

Yeah.

[Linus]

You know, like, where did this disease come from? Why? Apparently there is Dex wireless. Okay. You could do that, but you're still.

[Dan]

Just sitting at a computer. It's not the point.

[Linus]

And the habit, the habit of whenever you do things. Hold on.

[Luke]

I'm sorry.

[Linus]

The issue is that they don't have the habit of going and sitting down at a computer to do something. So they're not going to do that regardless of whether it's sitting down at Samsung Dex. Or sitting down at a gaming desktop or whatever else. It's just that. But that was our habit when we needed to do something. When we needed to buy something online, we would go to the computer. So it's just ingrained in us. I can buy things online and if I'm just grabbing some hooks for my wall to hang things in my garage, whatever, I'll just go. I'll just find the first thing. Because it doesn't make much of a difference if I pay $3 for it or $5. Like, yeah, on one of them I'm paying 66% more. But I don't, I don't care. I'm making a quick decision. Okay, I found this. It ships into. Okay, boom, done. Google pay, done. Right. But for something like you said, flights, vehicles, houses, I'm at my desktop. I gotta be. And that's just like not a thing for the younger. The younger generation, apparently. So good luck on your sale of Chrome Google. Our discussion question, is consumer welfare really the best lens to look at antitrust through? If breaking up Google only results in different bazillion dollar companies turning surveillance capitalism up to 11?

[Dan]

Yeah, it's interesting that it's like extremely ethically gray. AI companies and Yahoo for some reason are the only ones seemingly jumping on this.

[Linus]

I mean, yeah. Who would want to own all your browsing data other than someone who wants to capitalize on it? Right. Like, there's no good guy is going to want Chrome.

[Dan]

Yeah. You're not going to make a pricing model for Chrome itself.

[Linus]

Like, that was my point with the YouTubers buying it and being like, why? And that's exactly it. Why. Yeah, there's no reason. Unless you just like want to own the Internet and own Internet standards and all of that.

[Dan]

Yeah.

[Linus]

What are we supposed to be doing right now, Mr. Dan oh, sponsors. The show is brought to you by Dennis oh Vessi. I wear sandals all the time, but our sponsor Vessi wasn't having it. So they sent Dennis to my house to uncover the truth behind my sandal obsession. It took him over 20 seconds to put on my sandals. Meanwhile, he can slip right into a pair of Vessis. Maybe the sandals can keep your socks dry. Nope. Another point for Vessi style. Well, here I think the winner's obvious. Vezi has all kinds of styles. Sneakers, slip ons, boots and more. Oh, and their weekend sneakers. Dennis's favorite travel shoes. He's worn them everywhere from strolling through Thailand to racking up 20,000 steps a day in Tokyo. With a thicker, cushioned midsole and a relaxed fit, they'll have your feet feeling like it's the weekend all year round. Visit vessi.com wanshow for 15% off your first pair at checkout and start exploring with confidence. The show is also brought to you by Squarespace. You don't have to be Mr. Leather Jacket to build something.

[Dan]

That'S amazing.

[Linus]

Our sponsor, Squarespace gives you the tools to make launching a business a breeze, even if it's just your side hustle. Instead of dragging your feed on coding a site, you can literally drag and drop the designs with our sponsor, Squarespace. Squarespace is an all in one website platform. You can set up invoicing, marketing, scheduling and more. And you can even check out their new AI website builder. It helps to simplify your design process by providing custom Design suggestions, text and images. And they have tons of beautiful layouts and styling options, so you can always find one that fits your needs and will look great on any device. They also support all major credit cards and many other popular payment methods. It's so easy. We built our website on Squarespace too. Linusmediagroup.com There it is. Look at that. So start building your site today and get 10% off your first purchase by visiting squarespace.com wan finally, the show is brought to you by. Notion Is your chief of vision not seeing what you're seeing? Okay. Our sponsor, Notion, keeps your work docs organized and in sight, so you're never short on clarity. Notion combines your notes, docs and projects into one space that's simple and beautifully designed. It's the place to connect teams so you're always on the same page. The fully integrated Notion AI Assistant helps you work faster, write better, and think bigger, doing tasks that normally take you hours in just seconds. You can even automate tedious tasks like summarizing meeting notes or getting insights from PDFs and images. With Notion, you don't need to bounce between six different apps. It's seamlessly integrated with Google Drive, Slack, GitHub, and more. Notion is used by over half of Fortune 500 companies, helping teams stay on the same page by reducing emails, cutting unnecessary meetings, saving time, searching for work, and lowering costs on extra tools. Try Notion for free when you go to notion.comwan that's all. That's all lowercase letters. Notion.comwan to try the powerful and easy to use Notion. It also isn't all lowercase because, like, it would also just work if it wasn't. Right. So there's that. I don't know why they asked me to clarify that. It's been a very long time, I think, since any browser has been case sensitive.

[Dan]

Yeah.

[Linus]

All right, what else you want to talk. You want to talk about oblivion? Or did you kind of already? Or like, what's your. What's your dealio there?

[Dan]

We can. There's more announcements. How do we want to deal with that?

[Luke]

Yeah, why not?

[Linus]

Oh, no, no. We already. Guys, we have to do actual topics at some point. Why are you pressuring me?

[Dan]

Let's talk about Oblivion then.

[Luke]

Okay.

[Linus]

I have to pee.

[Dan]

Where's the Bethesda Shadow Drops? The Oblivion Remaster. And everyone liked that. Kind of. There's some sources here from Gamespot and PC Gamer. A lot of places have talked about this. The notes say, like an arrow to the knee of my free time. The Oblivion Remaster was announced and released with one trailer and two game engines, which I'll explain in a moment. It got over 150,000 concurrent players on Steam on the first day despite having effectively no advertising and also despite the fact that it is free on game pass. Reddit r. OblivionAbominations has gone wild with all of the characters that people are making. Oh yes, Oblivion character creator is fantastic. Wow. Someone made pot of greed.

[Luke]

Oh boy.

[Dan]

Oh man. Oh, nice Squidward. Let's go. Ooh. Anyways, good stuff. Oblivion's great. Bethesda also gave free keys to the entire skyblivion dev team, it says in here, to make them feel a little less sad about wasting years of their lives. Many, many, many years of their lives. Also, someone posted this, which honestly, I didn't. I might this weekend, but I didn't. The first thing, the literal first thing that I heard about it that wasn't just a rumor was that NPCs didn't have schedules anymore. And what I really liked back in the day was being a sneaky little thief guy and stealing everything. And my favorite quest chains were the Dark Brotherhood and the Thieves Guild. And by far my favorite quest chain in a Morrowind was in regards to the the factions was the Thieves Guild. So without schedules, I was like, what the heck? And then somebody corrected that for me and apparently they do have schedules. So I don't know where that rumor came from because once I first heard that I looked it up and found it quite a few people saying it, but they do seem to have schedules. I think the confusion there might be tied into that one trailer, two engines comment that was made because the UE5 engine is just dealing with the graphics. The game logic is still being ran by. What is it called? Gamebryo. I think it's gamebryo, the the engine that was originally used for Oblivion, which has created in my opinion, a pretty fantastic result actually, because I was very standoffish. I first of all, I was I'm even with it being out now and now I do own it. I was much more interested in and still am much more interested in the skyblivion project that's still coming this year and I'll probably be diving in more so to that. I'm going to dabble with this remaster, but I don't know if I'm going to like fully try to beat the game or anything. And I'll be. I'll be more interested in the the Sky Oblivion remaster. But yeah, there was a bunch of things that put me off. There's the schedules thing. I. I heard that in the EULA they talked down on mods, but apparently they're. They're not against mods at all. And Nexus mods, I believe already has. Like. I think Barrington was saying last night that they already have like hundreds of mods for the game and it's been out for days.

[Luke]

I've heard a lot of them are. Are drag and drop because it's the same like core engine in a way.

[Dan]

That makes so much sense.

[Luke]

So it should be a little more approachable than something like. I think SE took a while to get in because it was slightly different. And then Skyrim VR also was very difficult if I remember.

[Dan]

Yeah. So there's 529 mods already, which is pretty wild. And there's some things that is like kind of broken. Like I couldn't go to 1440p. Oh, I already clicked away from it and now it's on steak.

[Linus]

Why are you on steak?

[Dan]

I must have clicked an ad.

[Linus]

I thought you're vegetarian. Gambling vegetarian.

[Dan]

I eat unknown mushrooms or something. Anyways, there. Yeah, but. But apparently there's like an INI fix that you can use to. To solve that and stuff. But anyways, it seems cool and something that I really appreciate about it is that it has the same quirks that it used to have because the underlying engine is still gamebryo despite UE5 taking over the. The visualization stuff. There's some funk on. Like how the color palette and lighting works is different and more tame than the original Oblivion because there's. Oblivion was like bloom up the bloom everywhere and everything's glowing all the time. So if you want that back, you can mod that back in. I think the game probably looks better.

[Linus]

I washed more than just my hands. I washed my whole arm here, check out.

[Dan]

You did?

[Linus]

Yep.

[Dan]

Why?

[Linus]

Cool.

[Dan]

But yeah, it seems. It seems cool. I am still more interested in skyblue via and I recommend that you guys still look forward towards that project and maybe don't tap yourself out on the remaster because skyblivion, in my opinion, just looks better. That team is being very gracious right now. I think they've made multiple posts about.

[Linus]

Thank you for not shutting down our project that we've been working on for years. We will never make fun of your games again, even though they are trash. Well, they used to be good.

[Dan]

This one was.

[Linus]

Some of the newer ones are not as good, but thank you so much. Also, are you ever going to do a new elder Scrolls game remaking Oblivion doesn't really count. That's what we were doing.

[Dan]

They did have an outside studio did the work on this. Virtuous. I think it's virtuous.

[Linus]

Was that Linus found a quarter in.

[Dan]

The toilet, Something like that.

[Linus]

That would be a great reason.

[Dan]

But yeah, I don't know. It's cool. I think there's a lot of people going with the, like, this is an example of how new games suck now.

[Linus]

And I mean, Oblivion kind of sucks. It's literally the original horse armor.

[Dan]

It is the original. There's new horse armor. Oh, that was the other reason why.

[Linus]

I did that was my discussion topic.

[Dan]

Jump on it right away. Was that they sold horse armor. Again, I don't know if. Did you see this?

[Linus]

No.

[Dan]

Oblivion Remastered. So if you look at the Steam page. Oh, hold on. This is not lying. Let's go. If you go to the Steam page and you scroll down, they make it look like the Deluxe Edition is needed for the expansions.

[Linus]

Oh, interesting.

[Dan]

Because you go up here and you're okay, I'm buying Oblivion Remastered. Yeah, I scroll down. It doesn't say up here like, oh, it includes the expansion, by the way, by the Deluxe.

[Linus]

Oh, my God.

[Dan]

They want these two options.

[Linus]

US$50 for this game.

[Dan]

It's a lot.

[Linus]

Or is it less than that? Is it 40?

[Dan]

I think it's less than that.

[Linus]

45. I don't know.

[Dan]

Whatever it is, either way, you scroll down, you see this. And this is the first time that I saw Shivering Isles and Knights of the Nine mentioned at all personally. But no. So I was like, okay, so if I want Shivering Isles and it's the Nine, I have to buy horse armor. Effectively.

[Linus]

Hilarious.

[Dan]

That sucks. So I refused to buy it originally because I was just like, there's no way. I'm not doing that. No chance. Turns out the base game does have the expansions, but a ton of people didn't even know that because this is super misleading. So bought the Deluxe Edition effectively just buying some armor, some weapons and horse armor, along with an art book.

[Linus]

And technically, what they're saying is true. The Deluxe Edition does include the expansions.

[Dan]

Yeah, it does.

[Linus]

So this is.

[Dan]

They just don't point out, like, and.

[Linus]

Digital Deluxe content technically is some armor, weapons and horse armor. Everything they say is true.

[Dan]

To me, there's a lot of misleading stuff.

[Linus]

This is. No, no, I'm not saying it's not misleading. I'm just saying it is technically factual.

[Dan]

The. The in the border. I know they say Digital Deluxe content on the Right. And then over here it says includes, but the border around the base game is different than the border around the other two things.

[Linus]

100%.

[Dan]

Like, it really feels like it is. And I don't think. Yeah, like under here you look at what it includes. It details the base game. And then way separate from that, it says Shivering Isles and Knights of the Night expansion.

[Linus]

It really does.

[Dan]

And it's just. I don't see it mentioned anywhere else that it does include those in the base game. So that was another reason why I held off. But then I figured out, yeah, it was just misleading, but it does include it. So, no, I didn't get the Digital Deluxe because screw that noise. I'm not buying horse armor.

[Linus]

How will your horse be armored? The funny thing about horse armor in the game, and one of their justifications for it was that it is in fact purely cosmetic. It does not, in fact armor your.

[Dan]

Horse and your horse can get attacked.

[Linus]

Yes, very much so. Your horse would like, become very unalived.

[Dan]

Literally. Doesn't help you. They states all DLC was included in their presentation when they Shadow dropped it. So this is piss poor self education. That's a hilarious take, in my opinion. Because you're now saying that everyone that should buy this has to watch their presentation.

[Linus]

That is a comically bad take, which.

[Dan]

Is actually hilarious and not how, like people work or really anything works. That's brutal.

[Linus]

Risky. We love you. Thank you for subscribing to Floatplane, but that is a terrible take.

[Dan]

And again, I did end up figuring out how it worked and did end up buying it. So I think the self education was fine.

[Linus]

It just shouldn't be that hard.

[Dan]

Yeah, it's a little ridiculous, but it's doing super well. They have tons of players and I think they should be happy. I'm just. I am at least partially holding back for the skyblivion version, which I. I will be very excited about.

[Linus]

I had to put my ointment back on.

[Dan]

I knew because I saw it on you earlier, but I was prepping just. Anyways, it's fine.

[Linus]

My ointment.

[Dan]

Aha. I got him. Lmg Sammy. I bought the Deluxe edition because I thought the horse armor meme was funny and I wanted the cool armor, but I don't know how to get it. It's a quake.

[Linus]

No, Sammy.

[Dan]

I thought you bought it for the expansions.

[Linus]

Yeah, that was not the.

[Dan]

That was not what I thought. It was actually just more sad.

[Linus]

Maybe you just didn't self educate on what Sammy said.

[Dan]

That's true. I didn't finish reading it before I reacted.

[Linus]

Classic influencer. That's why everybody hates them.

[Dan]

It's worse, though. What he said is, like, just actually worse.

[Linus]

I think I know. I don't know what to do with him.

[Dan]

How do you spend more money on a company?

[Linus]

On the one hand, he does a great job. On the other hand, he's definitely going to come to softball night this year. And I hate that dude. He's infuriating.

[Dan]

Why is that?

[Linus]

He's just. It's like he's trying. It's like he's trying to make me lose. It's softball. I want to win. Softball is very competitive company softball events.

[Dan]

Is this because he goes on your team too much and he's bad, or is it because he's really good and goes on?

[Linus]

He's just. He's a pure agent of chaos. Like, he. He ran over Ariana.

[Dan]

Yeah. I was there for that.

[Linus]

Literally, like, plowed her over right through. Yeah, yeah. Just. You never want to plow the head.

[Dan]

Of a truck in the way. Wasn't in that much of a hurry, really, so. Well, he was, but didn't need to be. I never lost. Is he. Is he flawless? Win rate?

[Linus]

I don't believe him.

[Dan]

Has he only been there once?

[Linus]

I don't believe him. No, no, he's been there more than once. Oh, no. Yeah, you know, he comes pretty regularly. Sammy, I'm looking forward to seeing you there. By the way, Chewy's organizing a batting cage thing. Get in touch so that maybe you'll actually hit something this year. It'll be great. We'll have fun. He said I might not go this year. Lol. What, are you weak?

[Dan]

Oh.

[Linus]

I'll see you. All right. Okay. What else? We got.

[Dan]

Plenty of things.

[Linus]

Oh, we do need a ding emote. We need a bell emote. Yeah. How do we not have a ding emote in the. In the floatplane chat? What? Is your team not, like, doing work or what? Sorry, I'm just feeling kind of aggressive right now.

[Dan]

They are doing work. They're doing work on things we can't talk about.

[Linus]

Oh, like what?

[Dan]

Good stuff?

[Linus]

Yeah. Good.

[Dan]

Yep.

[Linus]

You sure?

[Dan]

Yep.

[Linus]

Dude, this was actually. This week was kind of awesome. I don't know if we've revealed this yet, but whatever, I'm gonna do it. We shot a collab with Kitboga that was so much fun. There's gonna be videos on both of our channels. I'm not gonna give away anything about them, but it's with Kit Boga, so you can imagine that it's gonna involve.

[Dan]

Put one or two things together.

[Linus]

Scammers and computers and fantastic videos. Messing with scammers with computers. You know, something along those lines. Yeah, no, dude, we, we had the entire production team, including ourselves, because fortunately, like, there's no video, right? So we don't even have to keep a straight face. We had the entire, the entire room just like in stitches multiple times to the point where we had to like mute our microphones because it was. So we're just like some of the outlandish stuff that happens. It's going to be great.

[Dan]

Oh, that's good.

[Linus]

And then I've got another collab upcoming where we're going to be working with Badminton Insight. So they're a big badminton channel. Big, big week for collabs. Big week for collabs. It's awesome. What are we supposed to be talking about? What are we supposed to be talking about? Microsoft publicly rolling out recall to consumer copilot plus PCs again along with improved Windows Search and Click to Do. Microsoft is launching Recall. No, really for real this time via a Windows Update to all CoPilot Plus PCs. It is available now via the April 2025 Windows non security Preview update. It's being accompanied by an improved AI powered Windows search interface because that's what the Windows search interface needed, and a new Click to Do feature which is similar to Google's Circle to Search. Recall was originally supposed to launch in June of last year, but was delayed following concerns brought up by security researchers. And there were many. They have spent 10 months overhauling some of the security of Recall, part of which is making it an opt in experience. Okay, that's good. That's actually very good. The database is also now encrypted and attempts to filter sensitive data by default. I thought that was it was supposed to do that. Maybe it's just better at it. None of these improvements help third parties who may be communicating with someone who has Recall enabled, such as via chat, email, etc. However, alongside recall, you can now use Windows Search with natural language queries. So if you're looking for an image of a brown dog but can't remember the file name, you can just ask for brown dog and then it will bring up a web search for brown dog. I suppose. Click to do is also available, letting you highlight text or images and have AI interact with them. The description makes the sound almost like AI powered. Right click right. Oh God. Demo available. Use the laptop. Recall is pinned to the taskbar.

[Luke]

So if we're on the corner there for You.

[Linus]

Oh, no.

[Luke]

That's the other side of your laptop.

[Dan]

Is it this?

[Luke]

Yes.

[Dan]

Ah.

[Linus]

Oh, Lordy. All right, well, hold on a second. Our. Our laptop partner for the show. Dell probably doesn't want me to show you guys what this other laptop is.

[Luke]

You want to get some tape?

[Linus]

No, I'm just gonna. I'm just gonna. Wow.

[Dan]

Whoa. That was smooth.

[Linus]

Okay. There we go.

[Dan]

Dang.

[Linus]

His name's Dan, actually.

[Dan]

What's going on? I can do that.

[Linus]

Trying to get the hdmi. You can do that? Yeah.

[Dan]

Right?

[Linus]

You can't even lift two and a half pounds.

[Dan]

Oh, my.

[Linus]

Sorry. It's a bit of an inside joke.

[Luke]

Have you even ordered them yet?

[Linus]

Yes.

[Dan]

Doesn't seem like it. It's not exactly. They're out of stock out there. My God.

[Linus]

Yeah. Okay. Sign in options, but. Okay.

[Luke]

I don't have it yet.

[Linus]

Okay. You don't have a what?

[Luke]

The laptop.

[Linus]

You don't have the laptop?

[Luke]

Not yet.

[Linus]

What do you mean you don't have it? Of course you don't have it. I have it.

[Luke]

No, the screen part. That goes on my screen.

[Linus]

Wow.

[Dan]

Look, it's in stock. $7.50.

[Luke]

Sounds like a bit much. Can't you just use, like.

[Linus]

Yeah, why can't you just lift a heavier weight?

[Luke]

Put like a rotisserie chicken on each side or something?

[Dan]

I. I can't lift. I gotta. I gotta grab those. I can't lift it. Gotta eat them.

[Linus]

Sorry. Grab them by the rotisserie chicken. Okay. I set it to 1080p. Does that help? No.

[Luke]

Maybe. Plug and unplug.

[Linus]

Plug and unplug. Okay. I will try that when you just.

[Dan]

Buy a pair and bring them. It's so lame.

[Linus]

Yeah. I told you I might have free access to a gym.

[Luke]

Nothing.

[Linus]

And all you have to do is carry. It's not two and a half pounds to the gym with you.

[Dan]

I helped design it. It's £5 because I need to bring two of them. It's a lot of weight.

[Linus]

Sorry. What's that, Dan?

[Luke]

Still nothing.

[Linus]

Still nothing. I don't know what to tell you, sir. This is. This is as God made it. It's definitely doing a thing.

[Dan]

Detecting. Yeah.

[Linus]

When I plug in the thing. So I think this may be an issue on your side, sir.

[Luke]

Okay. Skill issue. One second.

[Linus]

Okay, I'm gonna. I'm gonna say show only on two. Now, theoretically, you are the only one with an output. My screen is black. So that he can be the one who definitely has an output. I'm putting out for him.

[Dan]

Oh.

[Luke]

You'Re sending me 1080 by 1200. I can't deal with that. Or. Let me try doing.

[Linus]

No, is it doing the stupid thing?

[Luke]

Let me try doing a thing.

[Linus]

No, I think it's doing the stupid thing. The active signal versus the. Oh, I hate that. I hate that so much.

[Luke]

Just give me a second.

[Linus]

Can it just never. Okay, Nvidia, amd, Intel, Microsoft, all four, y'all. Get rid of that. Get rid of it completely. The whole active signal, resolution variable or desktop mode, and then being different, if I change the resolution. Just let the panel do the scaling. Nobody else touch anything. Leave it. Oh, I hate that so much.

[Luke]

Unplug and replug.

[Linus]

Yes. Every single time this has ever been a thing, it has been a problem, and I cannot think of any problem that it solves. What problem does that solve? It sends the native resolution to the panel. What does that have to do with the external display? Nothing. Leave it alone. Send whatever resolution that I set. Don't do anything else obnoxious, Jonah.

[Luke]

Force it to 1080.

[Linus]

I'm going to try, but every time I try and do this, it's a gigantic hassle.

[Luke]

It's caused us so many problems in.

[Linus]

The past, and overriding it is like a pain in the butt. No, I can't do anything with the Nvidia app because it uses amd, so there is no Nvidia app. And I can't remember.

[Luke]

It's more display modes. Do you want me to come and fumble with it?

[Linus]

More display modes.

[Luke]

Sorry, where's that? Oh, it's Windows 11. I can't remember.

[Linus]

Brilliant.

[Luke]

It should be under Advanced Display. And then. Wait, I'm using a computer. I could just check here.

[Linus]

Advanced Display, Display settings, Display adapter properties.

[Dan]

Seems like you guys need some tech tips.

[Linus]

List all modes.

[Luke]

Yeah, that's the one.

[Linus]

I. I swear to God I've done this. No, I. I am in 1920 by 1080. 60 hertz.

[Luke]

Yeah, I'm still getting 1200.

[Linus]

I know.

[Luke]

For the black magic.

[Linus]

It's this stupid, obnoxious thing. No, I think. I think there's something in AMD's software where you have to do something.

[Luke]

Can you just set all of it to 1080?

[Linus]

No, I am set to 1080 on.

[Luke]

On both displays.

[Linus]

I mean, they are Both set to 1080, Dan.

[Luke]

Oh, good God.

[Linus]

I swear they're both set to 1080. Oh, I have. I can't change it. I think, like custom. Custom Custom resolution utility or something like. This is, like. This is one of those things that makes me.

[Luke]

Scaling mode. I don't know.

[Linus]

Really Matt. No, scaling won't do it.

[Luke]

Running out of time here.

[Linus]

Yeah, I think we might just have to give up on this. I can give you the laptop. I really don't think it's gonna do anything though.

[Dan]

This has been such a good segment.

[Linus]

Yeah. Great job, everyone.

[Dan]

Maybe I'll just do another topic.

[Linus]

Yeah, maybe just get a Dell next time. Because when I plug into my Dell, it just flipping works.

[Dan]

A pretty good advertisement.

[Linus]

Just an idea.

[Luke]

Money, please.

[Linus]

What is that?

[Dan]

Because we did a. It was technically a call out for someone who's technically a sponsor anyways. Discord CEO Jason Citron steps down to be replaced by former president of King, also known as like the guys who made Candy Crush ahead of potential IPO. On April 23rd, Discord CEO and co founder, the person I just mentioned uploaded to a platform a post to Discord's blog entitled Passing the Torch. Citrin goes on to share that they have hired a new CEO, Human Sacchini. That's a pretty sick first name.

[Linus]

Definitely not an AI with a name like that.

[Dan]

Yeah. And that Citron will be stepping down to a board and advisory position within Discord. Sacchini's previous roles include Vice chairman at Activision Blizzard as well as King, president of King Digital Entertainment, makers of and it crashed. Discord's other co founder, Stanislav Vishen Vsky, almost is continuing his role as Chief technology officer. This change comes amid media reports that Discord met with investment bankers to discuss a possible initial public offering as soon as this year. A Discord spokesperson told CNBC in a statement that it does, in quotes, not comment on rumors or speculation. And that is.

[Linus]

Discord has commented on a lot of rumors and speculation over the years.

[Dan]

But sure, yeah, that is focused on delivering the best possible experience to our users and building a strong sustainable business. To me, honestly, that is just like, yes, we're doing it, but anyways. Discord currently has 200 million global monthly active users playing a combined 1.5 billion hours of games each month while on the platform.

[Linus]

All right, discussion question. What are we gonna switch to from Discord? It will almost certainly.

[Dan]

I still use Teamspeak every once in a while.

[Linus]

Mumble anyone?

[Dan]

We could go back. The old are largely still there. Which is kind of weird actually.

[Linus]

Like Mumble still exists.

[Dan]

I'm pretty sure Mumble still exists. I think Ventrilo still exists. I know Teamspeak still exists.

[Linus]

Mumble totally still exists. Yeah dude, when did they get. When was the last version stable version? Show me a date. Show me a date on this. Okay. Here we go. Dude. December 8th, 2024. That wasn't even that long ago. Yeah, vent look, 45 commits since this release.

[Dan]

Dude, look, look.

[Linus]

Ventrilo is totally still a thing. That Windows logo though. Good lord, that is incredible.

[Dan]

Team speak still around. Look, they have among us meme. They're still around.

[Linus]

How timely and relevant.

[Dan]

Yeah, Team speaks. Twitter just memes about how like you know, Discord will go down for a second and they'll be like finally users. So they like, they're like making self owned jokes and stuff. But yeah, there's still a thing.

[Linus]

What would, what would what in crap ification would it take for you to stop using Discord?

[Dan]

People would need to leave it. I feel next to no alignment at all with Discord. I would be happy to switch to Teamspeak tomorrow.

[Linus]

Would you consider switching to just Steam? Like Steam has one of the big reasons that everyone got off of Steam because everyone used it. One of the gaming social network. Okay, I haven't tried it because it sucked.

[Dan]

I don't know if it's still there.

[Linus]

Right. So they didn't have it and then it sucked. Would we just go back to Steam? Apparently Steam voice is really good now. And then the next person who replied said it's kind of trash.

[Dan]

So wonder when the last time they used it though if they think that it's trash.

[Linus]

Like Discord is more than just games. Yeah, I mean we use Discord just to like chat about things that are not.

[Dan]

Steam is also more than just games.

[Linus]

Steam's mobile app. Not amazing. Not amazing. That's definitely an invent, an advantage for Discord. Not that I ever get a notification when you message me, but sure, whatever.

[Dan]

I got a notification that you messaged me I think yesterday this morning.

[Linus]

Cool.

[Dan]

I was like, yeah.

[Linus]

I was like, wow, he's ignoring me. I'm unfriended. Turns out Discord unfriended me.

[Dan]

I can't see my podcast moving their communities into Steam. Yeah, sure, I don't know. It's, it's.

[Linus]

But I mean Discord had that other scenes. Yeah, Discord had that same perception. Like if you have a good product, people might. I mean people used Skype for gaming, for crying out loud. Skype did not have a gaming brand back then. I think people will use a good product for whatever it's good for, regardless of the branding.

[Dan]

Modern Teamspeak also has the chat and picture and stuff sharing features that Discord has.

[Linus]

Does it do the streaming thing that Discord does where you can screen stream and stuff?

[Dan]

I don't know on that.

[Linus]

No, we're not using Yahoo Chat. Waffle with syrup.

[Dan]

Yeah, I'm not sure on the screen sharing thing. And Discord's pushing that hard. I don't know why. I haven't really been able to figure that out.

[Linus]

Maybe they are. Maybe. Yeah. What would they be doing with that?

[Dan]

In teamspeak communities you can stream, but you have to pay for them. And server files. Server files aren't public yet. You mean server files to like self host the streaming stuff? Is that what you're saying? I'm not sure what that person means.

[Linus]

Cool.

[Dan]

On my self hosted server, I cannot screen share. Okay. Yeah. So self hosted you can't. But there's. You can. Which.

[Linus]

Okay, kind of makes sense. So yeah, what would it, what would it take basically? Well, what do you think it would take for any of your like gaming buddies to get off of Discord? Like a major privacy incident or like a data collection change in the terms of service or just generally getting a little less reliable? Like what, what is the, what's the insignification that would, that would drive people off of Discord if the. If they go IPO and just kind of suck now? Because like Reddit, it doesn't seem to have mattered. They went ipo, they antagonized their users. Everybody's still on Reddit. People seem to have completely forgotten that they were mad.

[Dan]

People don't switch platforms at Reddit. Like it's a weird thing. I mean we talked about this with. We've talked about this a few times on WAN show how like YouTube, Reddit, all these things, they feel extremely rooted now. Like this is how the Internet has like figured itself out. These are the sites that just will stay for whatever reason. We used to go through social media platforms every couple years and now things just stay.

[Linus]

No matter how bad they are. It seems like they just stick around.

[Dan]

Yeah, people just don't switch because we seem to have like critical mass or something. I'm not sure. So I think a big part of the problem would be switching everyone. And I don't think a privacy incident, almost no matter how big, is going to switch everyone because as much as people scream about it, I think most people unfortunately just don't care.

[Linus]

Okay, well, I think the audio quality.

[Dan]

On Teamspeak is fantastic. I think there's other things about it that are great.

[Linus]

But it like Switch two pre orders have been kind of a nightmare and scalpers are trying to cash in after a delay to assess the changing market conditions. Tariffs. Nintendo opened up the North American pre orders for the Switch 2 on April 24th and it was very hard to secure one. There are a ton of ebay resellers who are selling their secured pre orders like the butt heads that they are. Please report them. In Japan where they're offering a discounted Japanese only version of the console for about US$350, over 2.2 million people entered the lottery for the privilege of giving their money to Nintendo. So if you were questioning whether the Switch 2 will be a success as a gaming platform, I think you can probably put that wonder to rest at this point. Yes, it is more expensive than the Switch one. No, that does not appear to matter.

[Dan]

I'm not surprised at all. Not even a little bit.

[Linus]

That's. That's pretty wild to me. Those are just monstrous numbers.

[Dan]

Like, oh, the numbers are. Yeah, those are crazy. What I mean is I'm not surprised that like scalpers are an issue and everybody's going for it. It that that works for me.

[Linus]

I don't know. I kind of, I kind of believed in Nintendo that they were just gonna like make enough of them. And I guess you just like, you can't, you can't make enough when you have eight years of pent up demand for a Nintendo console that doesn't look like donkey balls on your tv. I mean the, the Switch was an old phone when they launched. Super hairy and big.

[Dan]

He likes bananas.

[Linus]

Bongo tastic. Bongo balls. The European Commission continues to be a beacon of hope. The European Commission fined Apple 500 million euro for blocking app developers from steering users to cheaper payment options outside the App Store. Meta also got hit with a 200 million euro fine for its consent or pay model, which forces users to either give up their data or pay for ad free versions of Facebook and Instagram. Honestly, I was kind of okay with Facebook's approach.

[Dan]

Totally fine with it, to be honest. Just don't use the service.

[Linus]

However, Facebook Marketplace dodged major regulation under the DMA after the EU found that it had fewer than 10,000 business users. So it is no longer designated under the DMA. The note here says Linus isn't convinced by that 10,000 business user number. Expand on that thought for the class. I'd be happy to, simply based on the number of commercial entities that I see selling stuff on Facebook Marketplace here, whether it's cars or services or whatever else across the entire EU. You're going to tell me there's less than 10,000 of them. I do not believe you.

[Dan]

I think that's dramatically underreported On a.

[Linus]

More consumer friendly note, starting June 20, all smartphones and tablets sold in the EU must come with a label showing battery life, energy efficiency and repairability ratings. How cool is that?

[Dan]

Does that mean there's going to be a standard for evaluating these things? Is there a standard for A, B.

[Linus]

C, D, E for repairability class? Yeah, yeah.

[Dan]

That's not what I mean.

[Linus]

A standard. Oh, I don't know. We can look.

[Dan]

How do they rate them?

[Linus]

I don't know.

[Dan]

Who's rating them?

[Linus]

I don't know. Someone is.

[Dan]

How do you rate repairability?

[Linus]

I don't know.

[Dan]

Yeah, but that's one individual company.

[Linus]

Well, I'm just, I'm just saying. EU Repair. I'm sure there's a. I'm sure there's a rubric there. EU Repair.

[Dan]

What's the rubric for? Battery life. What's the test they're doing for repairability index?

[Linus]

Calm down.

[Dan]

I'm not saying it doesn't exist. I want to see. I'm saying I want to see it.

[Linus]

I'll fight you. What are we fighting about? Repairability Scoring system Product Bureau Europa EU Repair. Okay, here we go. Including scoring here. You happy? Okay, cool.

[Dan]

How did they do it though?

[Linus]

Welcome to the website about product repairability. Wow, that is like the most European header that I think I've ever. Okay, project plan, project plan. Oh my God. Documents.

[Dan]

Where's scoring then?

[Linus]

Related links.

[Dan]

Oh boy. I'd be really interested to see how they, how they score across so many different devices. Repairability and battery life.

[Linus]

There's a second draft report. Okay, smart guy.

[Luke]

Oh boy.

[Linus]

Oh boy. How long is this?

[Dan]

We need an AI summary stat.

[Linus]

Hold on, hold on. We got. No, no, we got the thing. We got the thing. We got the index, the table of indexes. Disassembly depth, fastener type tools, spare parts, software updates, repair information, other relevant parameters. Selection of scoring parameters. Okay. Be really interested to see how disassembly depth, page 17.

[Dan]

I really need to see how scaling, how this scale works versus the iFixit scale.

[Linus]

Okay, so disassembly depth. Here we go. Where is it? It said it was on page 17. Disassembly depth. Here we go. A score is designed, is assigned for each priority part based on their disassembly depths. A discrete rating is proposed. Points are assigned at priority part level. So rating class one disassembly depth index, less than or equal to two steps is five points. If you are 15 steps of disassembly depth, that's one point and that's a priority part.

[Dan]

So a priority part I'm assuming would.

[Linus]

Be like a screen or battery.

[Dan]

A drive.

[Linus]

Cool.

[Dan]

I'm assuming.

[Linus]

Okay.

[Dan]

Sweet. I wonder how they do battery. But that is very cool.

[Linus]

I mean, most batteries don't move around much, so I'd imagine they just do the battery. Yo.

[Dan]

Do the battery.

[Linus]

And then you spontaneously combust.

[Dan]

Someone pokes you and you just blow up.

[Luke]

You're a Samsung.

[Linus]

Yeah. Got him. Note seven. Note seven. Zing. Wow, that's timely. What are we supposed to be doing?

[Luke]

You got about five minutes. Until when? After dark.

[Linus]

Oh.

[Dan]

Oh, yeah. You have an out.

[Linus]

Oh, yeah.

[Dan]

I sort of forgot about that.

[Linus]

Yep. The LTT subreddit has corrected Linus's take on American cheese.

[Dan]

He was wrong again. I think I was also wrong, but I'm going to point it at him because it says Linus's take. Not my fault this time. Didn't have my name in the subject.

[Linus]

It is indeed made primarily from real cheese with some added ingredients to change its texture. The two linked threads point towards a video by Nilered on his secondary channel. Niall Blue making American cheese on his own. We're not going to watch that here. You guys should go watch it.

[Dan]

Yeah.

[Linus]

The discussion question is, is it cheese now? It doesn't taste like cheese.

[Luke]

May.

[Linus]

And maybe part of the problem. What are the other ingredients, the particular brands? It's like salt and something or butter and milk powder something.

[Luke]

Normally there's an emulsifier as well, like a xanthan gum or something. Yeah, you can make it yourself. There's great Chef Steps video on making. Yeah. Processed cheese.

[Dan]

Chef Steps is great.

[Linus]

The ones I've eaten are disgusting, so.

[Luke]

I'll say that much because it's mostly not cheese.

[Dan]

Dude, it's alive with Brad is actually amazing.

[Luke]

Oh, my God. Yeah.

[Linus]

What's that?

[Luke]

Oh. Or is it live with Brad? Is that Bon appetit?

[Dan]

Yeah. Wait, I'm talking about the wrong one. But yes, I like both of them. Both of them are great. I got them conflated. But I do like both of them a lot.

[Linus]

So it has cheese in it and that's good. And I like my cheese in a brick.

[Dan]

Chef Steps makes the jewel, right?

[Luke]

No, that's a. They make the anova.

[Dan]

Ah.

[Linus]

Apparently used to be Bon appetit, but he went solo.

[Dan]

Cool. Either way, good stuff.

[Linus]

Game over there says American cheese is good exclusively on sandwiches with really cheap ass lunch meat.

[Luke]

I mean, the menu has a line in it at the end that American cheese is the best cheese for putting on a Burger because it doesn't split when it's heated to a high temperature.

[Linus]

Doesn't split.

[Luke]

That's what the emulsifiers are for by split.

[Linus]

Why would it split?

[Luke]

Well, the oils separate. Have you ever made, like, hollandaise or something like that?

[Linus]

Yeah, it's great when the oils separate.

[Luke]

You like it when it gets grainy and, like, grainy.

[Linus]

What are you even talking. What kind of cheese are you people eating?

[Luke]

This is normal cheese. If you overheat normal cheese.

[Linus]

Well, why would you overheat it? Get good.

[Luke]

Say you're making a cheese sauce or a grilled sauce.

[Linus]

I thought we were talking about a burger.

[Luke]

Yeah, you put it on a hot burger.

[Linus]

Like, put it on a hot burger, and then when it's melted, you eat it. What's wrong with you people? Someone says, linus, you don't cook. No, but I can put. We're not talking about cooking. We're talking about putting cheese on a burger. That's not even. That's not even cooking. Who cares? Linus can't cook. What are you guys talking about? No, honestly, though. Okay, both of you. I have handed both of you, at some point or another, a hamburger with melted cheese on it. Are you telling me that I. That I prepared both of you? Explain this to me.

[Dan]

I don't know if there's any evidence of this happening.

[Linus]

You know for a fact. More than one time. More than one time.

[Dan]

I love. I love how exclusively talking about cheese melting on hamburgers went to Linus can't cook. I. I just.

[Luke]

What is wrong with you people? I'm just talking about emulsifiers in American cheese.

[Dan]

The conversation of which Linus was following.

[Linus]

Yeah, but why do I need them? What's wrong with the. What's wrong with the melted cheese? That's just doesn't have emulsifying agents in it.

[Luke]

Stabilizes it for temperatures.

[Linus]

If you're making a cheese.

[Luke]

Cheese sauce is.

[Linus]

But I'm not making a cheese sauce. I'm putting cheese on a burger.

[Luke]

Whatever the hell you want.

[Linus]

But what. What do the emulsifiers do? Someone said it doesn't do a thing. Cheddar doesn't have the same effect on ham on burgers as American. What do you mean, the same effect? It adds a cheesy flavor. What effect do you want from your cheese?

[Luke]

It makes the burger taste less like plastic.

[Linus]

You want it to tap down?

[Dan]

We're gonna end up on the subreddit.

[Luke]

Again because of you, Linus.

[Dan]

Good.

[Linus]

Oh, man.

[Luke]

Cheese discourse.

[Dan]

What are you guys talking. It's supposed to melt Even, like, pizza.

[Linus]

Unique username goes. You don't know about cheese. Just do the correction. You're gonna be called a narcissist for weeks again.

[Dan]

No, I'm asking a question and no one's answering it.

[Linus]

Nobody is answering the question. What is wrong with just melting regular cheese?

[Dan]

And there is the line. Dan's right at the end of the menu. He talks about how American cheese is best.

[Luke]

What Linus is talking about is completely reasonable.

[Linus]

What. What does it do better?

[Luke]

It just holds. What do you mean?

[Linus]

It doesn't melt.

[Luke]

It just holds itself together better.

[Linus]

What the f. Are people talking about? It works fine. This is user error. I'm sorry, what?

[Dan]

I'm. If. If I'm making an assumption here.

[Luke]

What do you mean burger's not gonna get it up to the level where it's gonna, like, de. Emulsify.

[Linus]

De Emulsify. What? We're talking about burgers.

[Luke]

Yes, but cheese is a suspension, and the milk solids can separate out if you overheat. Like, say, a cheese product in a fondue or, like, in a cheese sauce.

[Linus]

Why would I do that?

[Luke]

Well, you wouldn't on a burger, which is why. I don't know why they're freaking out.

[Linus]

Why would I do that in a cheese sauce either? Just control your temperature.

[Luke]

Yeah, exactly.

[Linus]

Like. Yeah, this is.

[Luke]

Cook it right. This is like saying. That's a great answer.

[Linus]

No, this is like saying you need to use, like, garbage. Garbage chocolate. Because you can't be arsed to use a double boiler. Like, what are we even talking about?

[Luke]

I don't know, like, tempering chocolate, which sucks. You could just do that with an immersion circulator, but, like. Oh, my God, this is dumb. Just use normal cheese. It's fine. Linus, you don't need.

[Linus]

I will.

[Luke]

You don't need to have American.

[Linus]

The oil separating out of the cheese. Okay. Are you talking about how the oil kind of pools on the top of the. On the top of the cheese? Like, it sweats. Is that what we're talking about when you heat it up?

[Luke]

No, that's what people.

[Dan]

I think what they're talking about.

[Linus]

Okay.

[Dan]

When you're using real cheese, it kind of wraps. Wraps itself around the burger a little bit, right?

[Linus]

I mean, yeah, if you leave it in for too long.

[Dan]

A little bit, sure. Okay. Well, I think what they're talking about is when you use the. The slice American cheese thing, it will literally keep its shape and, like, stick out even after being cooked because it.

[Luke]

Becomes less heat sensitive because it's basically.

[Dan]

So it's not Gonna wrap around the burger.

[Luke]

Singular block of goop.

[Dan]

It keeps that like I am a square of cheese thing going on.

[Luke]

You want that behavior. Also the. The pull is way better.

[Dan]

People are now saying, no, it doesn't do that. So I guess I'm wrong. I have no idea.

[Linus]

Cheese stays on the burger. How are you guys knocking all the cheese off your burger?

[Dan]

That's not true. Unless you're talking about processed cheese food. Is that not what we're talking about?

[Linus]

Literally the opposite. It melts more.

[Dan]

It melts better.

[Linus]

Other cheese separates even on a burger, which leads to way more.

[Luke]

I have never had to separate on a burger in my entire life.

[Linus]

The oil is already in the cheese. There isn't more oil.

[Dan]

Okay. So what they're saying is that it melts more and wraps more around the burger.

[Linus]

It wraps more around the burger.

[Luke]

That's just cuz it's very thin.

[Linus]

Yeah. Why would you want that? I like a big old thick. I can afford cheese slice of cheese on my hamburger. I'm not gonna put.

[Dan]

I like this, actually. LMG exclusive Linus barbecues burgers with five different cheeses to test it out. I think that's great. I think that's fantastic. It's great for grilled cheese.

[Linus]

You know what else is great for grilled cheese? Learning to just cut cheese evenly with a knife and then putting cheese on your grilled cheese.

[Luke]

You do get some incredible strings, dude.

[Linus]

There's absolutely no way that I would put, like, American cheese. At least like a Kraft single. Is that what we're talking about? We're talking about craft singles.

[Luke]

That's what I thought we were talking about.

[Linus]

That's my understanding.

[Dan]

That's what I thought too.

[Luke]

Yeah.

[Linus]

I would rather eat plastic than eat Kraft singles on a grilled cheese sandwich. I'm sorry.

[Luke]

I mean, they say so.

[Dan]

Okay, so American cheese, especially when used using a brand with emulsifiers like sodium citrate, melts exceptionally well and creates a smooth, fluid texture. According to Bon Appetit. This contrasts with some other cheeses that might become clumpy or greasy when melted.

[Linus]

Skill issue. Okay, what else we got here to what else we got this week?

[Luke]

I'm gonna freaking lose it. And.

[Linus]

And so craft singles are apparently bad. Whatever they use at Subway is also inedible. That stuff is trash. I wouldn't feed it to my dog. I don't even have a dog.

[Luke]

Okay. If you want the properties of American cheese, just follow the chef's steps video and just get some real cheese and then just put some chemicals in it. And you're done. It's real cheese, but with ch. That's it. You processed it.

[Linus]

Viridian is still mad that I'm saying it doesn't lead to more oil because the texture of the liquid is different. Yeah, but that's not more oil. That's just that the oil is on top of the. I mean, by the time you're taking a bite of a burger, a little bit of liquid oil in this thing. Is that. Is that a concern? I mean, it's got a beef patty on it, right? Like, come on.

[Luke]

I don't know. I don't. I've never seen an oil with like, Camembert or like a real.

[Linus]

You don't. You don't take the burger apart and like, lick the top of the cheese. Do. Why is the oil there a concern?

[Dan]

Personally, I eat my burgers like Oreos, so I don't know what you're talking about.

[Luke]

You dunk him in milk. It's like a hot dog eating competition.

[Linus]

I want to see Linus do the cheese jar challenge. Oh, God, that sounds awful.

[Dan]

What is the cheese jar challenge?

[Linus]

I don't know, but it sounds like it involves, like, cheese whiz. They made me eat cheese whiz at like a. Like a. Like a spin for punishment thing on a live stream a while back, and I just about vomited. It was horrible. Horrible.

[Dan]

This didn't even come up with anything. It came up with, like, the great jar trial from Elden Ring. I have no idea.

[Luke]

30 minutes left. Can we talk about not fake cheese? I mean, real cheese, but it just has emulsifiers in it.

[Linus]

We can talk about the slate truck. The $20,000American made pickup truck with no paint.

[Dan]

What?

[Linus]

No stereo.

[Dan]

What?

[Linus]

And no touchscreen.

[Dan]

Sounds amazing.

[Linus]

Michigan based Slate Auto has developed the Slate truck, meant as a blank slate to be extremely customizable and extremely affordable. It's expected to be sub 20 grand after federal incentives, assuming those stick around, aiming for a production start in 2026. Instead of steel or aluminum, the body panels are unpainted molded plastic, or as Slate calls them, injection molded polypropylene composite material. The unpainted body was designed to take advantage of the trend of vinyl wrapping cars. They offer vinyl wrap kits directly, or you can DIY it. There's a configurator that is live on their site right now. Oh. Personalize your slate. Let's go. Boom. Slate truck environments, color dip.

[Dan]

Okay, click on personalize.

[Linus]

Let's go.

[Dan]

Yo. Nice.

[Linus]

All right, so vinyl, vinyl wraps. Definitely not gonna lie.

[Dan]

This is cool.

[Linus]

Okay.

[Dan]

They even show like, if you don't want to like go through all the work of getting like very legitimate speakers, you can just do this.

[Linus]

Wow. What? It's just a Bluetooth speaker.

[Dan]

You just print a. I'm assuming you just 3D print a Bluetooth speaker.

[Luke]

One hot dog holder.

[Linus]

Yeah, that is hilarious.

[Dan]

I'm just like, yeah, whatever. Just, yeah, you know, you want some sound, you don't want to pay for speakers throughout your truck. Done.

[Linus]

The truck does not come with any infotainment at all. Not even a radio. Slate intends to make information regarding basic repair and maintenance available through a Slate university. And they have a partnership with already established nationwide service centers for work on things like the high voltage system or for customers who just want the work taken care of. They will not be doing sailors through a dealership, but through direct sales online and pickup locations similar to Tesla. So discussion question here is, would you buy a vehicle that is lacking everything but the absolute basics? If you did, would you intend to drive it as is or would you upgrade it, slash, make it your own?

[Dan]

I'd upgrade it and make my own and I would absolutely buy one. Yeah. Sick.

[Linus]

This actually seems super cool. Like it's one of those like. Yeah, for real though. Like, I already have a phone.

[Dan]

Yeah, whatever.

[Linus]

Or a tablet.

[Dan]

But like. And you could set up a screen in there that you connect your phone to that just like makes your phone screen bigger and more easy to interact with. Like that's fine, but you can set that up yourself or you just get one of those and you're totally fine.

[Linus]

Look, actual buttons. I am PC control.

[Dan]

Trillion percent sure someone will come out with some. Maybe Slate will themselves some way to add like proper speakers. Whatever.

[Linus]

This seems legitimately pretty cool.

[Dan]

That's sweet.

[Linus]

I think Bezos backed it though.

[Dan]

That's gross.

[Linus]

Don't. Don't quote me on that. Hold on. Slate truck.

[Dan]

Still cool.

[Linus]

Bezos back.

[Dan]

Yes, still cool.

[Linus]

Yeah, you can, you can still get one. It's still pretty cool. You can make yourself feel better by just watching Bezos face plant by the, by the spaceship. Just watch it on. Just watch it on loop for a little while. Have it like side by side because you're making a major purchase, right? So obviously you're at your computer. So you just put Bezos face planting as your center, sort of subway surfers on the side. And then you configure your Slate truck and it cancels it out.

[Dan]

That's good. The truck is all electric, carrying a 52.7 kilowatt hour battery that powers a single rear motor producing 201 horsepower and 195 foot pounds of torque. Acceleration from stop to 60 miles per hour would take about 8 seconds which if this was 20 years ago would be like amazing. So it's probably fine. You're probably okay. Relax. Driving range is estimated 150 miles. And there's an optional 84.3 kilowatt hour battery which will increase the range to 240 miles.

[Linus]

Oh, that's pretty good.

[Dan]

There's also a dual motor all wheel drive powertrain that is potentially in the works. And it charges with Tesla style ports.

[Linus]

Yeah, I think those are going to win. Now.

[Dan]

Payload tops out at 1433 pounds. Towing at a thousand pounds. This is like more than what almost everyone needs. The whole like zero to 60 time thing. Like what? It's cool. Most people aren't gonna really care. I think we got past a point where it really matters to the vast majority of people. And if you want to have fun with your Porsche, go for it.

[Linus]

I do.

[Dan]

But like most people that want a $20,000 truck, like dude, can it get up to speed within a safe period of time on the highway? Yes. Cool. I'm like, outside of that. Doesn't really matter much.

[Linus]

That's fair enough.

[Dan]

This is sweet.

[Linus]

SoCal tech fair. Apparently we're a sponsor.

[Dan]

Nice.

[Linus]

That's super cool.

[Dan]

Let's go.

[Linus]

Our team's been working on get. Oh. What, what, what, what?

[Dan]

What's he doing there?

[Linus]

Meet and greet. Meet and greet with the one, the one and only Colton Potter fired him.

[Dan]

And now he's working for them.

[Linus]

Imagine that. What a guy. Anyway, hold on. There's a bunch of notes in the doc. So this is J's 2 cent heights SoCal Tech Fair happening in the city of industry, California on May 3rd and 4th. Our team is sponsoring the Tower of Power booth activity where you can take part in a frantic 2v2 motherboard stacking. Face off to see which tech community team gets the highest Height in under 2 minutes. Random hardware provided. Stacking ability skills unfortunately optional. You can win lttstore.com prizes including commuter backpacks, screwdrivers, magnetic cable management, sticker packs and more. And if you come on Sunday, Colton will be there to say hi and you're fired. Good catchphrase. Has anyone ever thought of that before? Some other cool things happening at the event. There's an AMD CPU trade in offer while supplies last. You can trade any AMD CPU in any condition and get a free ultimate Upgrade to the AMD family. An AMD Ryzen 7 9700X and an Asus B650 motherboard combo. That also qualifies toward a free copy of Monster Hunter Wild. Sorry, how does this work? There's got to be. It's got to. Is it like raffle or something? Sorry, What? What? What? What? What? What is this? Hold on. Where's the. Where's the info on this? Okay, SoCal Tech Fair Control F AMD AMD cares trade in program. There's got to be while supplies last.

[Dan]

While supplies last is, I'm assuming, a big part of this.

[Linus]

This trade in is limited per day per individual paid ticket holders. Okay. It's basically a sweepstakes then. Yeah, I think it's a sweepstakes.

[Dan]

I think they mean ticket holders, as in ticket to the event.

[Linus]

Yeah, I know.

[Dan]

How's it a sweepstakes?

[Linus]

Well, because not everyone who buys a ticket to the event is going to win it. Test your luck. Test your luck on the AMD Plinko board to receive tickets to win daily GPU giveaways. Wait, yeah, that's a separate thing because of course it gets even more loaded. Sign up and enter yet another free PC giveaway with two times another separate thing. Okay. Depending on AMD Cares. So fair challenge rating. Challenge rating. What are these coins? Or the. They're bank coins.

[Dan]

What?

[Linus]

They're bank coin. AMD cares. Depending on trade in restrictions. TBD 5 minutes limited trade in while supplies last. I mean, yeah, there's gonna be. There's gonna be some kind of gating. There's absolutely no way that every single person who attends is getting a free CPU and motherboard.

[Dan]

So it's gotta be the while supplies last part.

[Linus]

I. Yeah, I mean, good luck. Good luck with getting that because that seems like a very good deal. Also, IBuyPower is gonna have a GPU garage sale. You can learn more and get tickets by searching SoCal Tech Fair or at the link in the video description. Also, The Boink Pentathlon 2025. The LTT Forum Boink team will be competing in The Boink Pentathlon 2025 running from May 5 to May 19. In this event, we'll go up against other tech communities by contributing computing power through Boink to support scientific research and progress. While only Boink points count toward the pentathlon, we'll also be tracking folding at home stats for anyone signed up. If you want to join the competition and support science, you can find all the details and sign up info on the LTT forum that's LinusTechTips.com. just look for the Boink. Pentathlon 2025 thread. All right, it's time for After Dark. I assume I can find this easily.

[Dan]

Not Boeing. Boink. B, O, I, N, C. Boink.

[Linus]

Where would they have posted that? Probably here, right? Yeah. Here we go. Community. Boop.

[Dan]

Boink. Pentathlon.

[Linus]

It's just pentathlon. There's no second A. Oh, common mistake.

[Dan]

Pentathlon sounds better.

[Luke]

I know some mandala effect here. Bernstein Bears.

[Dan]

Yeah.

[Luke]

Brenstein Brads Mainstain.

[Linus]

Berenstain.

[Dan]

Oh, yeah. After Dark. Let's go.

[Luke]

Are they even bears? All right, I got some March messages here for you.

[Dan]

The one that gets me the most is the Fruit of the Loom cornucopia thing.

[Luke]

Yeah. Messed me up.

[Linus]

Do they not have a cornucopia?

[Dan]

The claim is that they don't, but I specifically remember learning what that was because of asking my mom about the. Yeah, apparently that's not a thing.

[Linus]

What?

[Dan]

Yeah, no, it says fact check. Click into it.

[Luke]

Do not believe that at all.

[Dan]

I don't believe it either, man.

[Linus]

Are you sure?

[Dan]

Yeah. The Fruit of the Loam logo that never contained a.

[Linus]

What now? This I've never seen. But what? Rating false.

[Luke]

So it did basically.

[Dan]

No, no. Scroll.

[Luke]

The claim is that it didn't, and then that's false.

[Linus]

Yeah.

[Dan]

At some point in the past, the Free Luna. No, no.

[Linus]

Yeah, Fact check. It has never contained one.

[Luke]

What?

[Linus]

Rating false.

[Dan]

Yeah. Okay, scroll up slightly.

[Linus]

What is happening there?

[Dan]

Read the claim and then read the rating day.

[Linus]

At some point it contained a cornucopia.

[Dan]

That is false.

[Luke]

Oh.

[Dan]

Meaning they're saying that it did not contain a cornucopia, but I don't believe that.

[Luke]

I also refuse to believe.

[Linus]

What?

[Dan]

There's no way, dude.

[Linus]

It's been disproved. What's been disproved?

[Dan]

That it contained a cornucopia is strongly.

[Linus]

Held an image they're saying that's not real, but that. What?

[Dan]

Which there's, like, no way.

[Linus]

What?

[Dan]

This is a fabrication, not an actual Fruit of the Loon logo. Like, what are you talking about? I. There's no way. The only thing that I thought of was we used to they disprove through the looms claim. Is that true?

[Linus]

Did it never contain a cornucopia? Okay, because this actually looks pretty familiar to me as well. I. This looked very familiar, though.

[Dan]

I swear that one's real.

[Linus]

This.

[Luke]

Maybe their logo has emulsifiers in it, too.

[Linus]

Fruit of the Limb.

[Dan]

I mean, there's Proof they did. It was marketing. But then why does this thing say the claim is false?

[Linus]

Well, this is Yahoo Finance. I don't know. I. This doesn't look right to me, though. Found in thrift stores. More examples sent to Snopes appear to have their origins in a June 20 point, among other things. The other example of some from a TikTok video proposed cover up is one of the greatest marketing ploys in history. The provenance of these photos is unknown, and as a result, their utility as evidence is limited. Okay. I don't know, man. People are saying the site is wrong.

[Dan]

Yeah, I don't know.

[Linus]

I'm very upset right now. I could. I could have sworn it had a thing. Wait, an early version did have it, but it was dropped. What is this? Oh, no. Oh, no. Oh, no. Okay, well. Okay, well, anyway, after dark. Oh, man, I'm so upset. I was also a Shazam. Kazam. Bamboozled earlier. I was bamboozled. I. Whatever the wrong one is. I thought that Sinbad was in a movie called Kazam. But also. But. But it's actually Shaq in a movie called Shazam or whatever. Like, I could have sworn I remembered seeing a VHS of Sinbad as a genie, but apparently that never happened, so.

[Dan]

Yeah.

[Linus]

Yeah. So it's a whole thing Mandela effect, man.

[Dan]

The cornucopia thing. Like, I. I refuse to give up on that because I. I very specifically remember being in the car coming from a thrift store, having bought a Fruit of the Loom thing and asked my mom what that thing was, and her explaining the word cornucopia. That's how I learned the word cornucopia. It was from the Fruit of the Loom logo.

[Luke]

Yeah.

[Dan]

So I don't know.

[Luke]

Do you think maybe knockoffs?

[Dan]

Yeah.

[Luke]

Yeah.

[Dan]

That's the only theory that's made sense to me because back then we got a lot of stuff from. From thrift stores and secondhand and stuff like that.

[Luke]

Same area and.

[Dan]

Maybe, maybe, maybe. But why are you knocking off Fruit of the Loom?

[Luke]

I don't know anymore.

[Dan]

That's the last remaining thing for me is, like, weren't they cheap in the first place?

[Luke]

Maybe that's why this timeline is so messed up. So they changed something.

[Dan]

Who's making a knockoff version of the cheap brand? I understand the Fruity Loom website says. No, I don't care. I don't believe it.

[Linus]

He doesn't care. He doesn't believe it. Okay.

[Luke]

All right. Why has email not changed in the past 20 years? Number one time annoying thing in business is email. Why haven't anyone come up with a more efficient way to process email threads?

[Dan]

That was a dramatic change.

[Linus]

That was a huge change.

[Dan]

Massive.

[Linus]

I mean there's still a lot of issues like formatting and like text formatting and like reply formatting in email chains when people are using different services or clients can still get a little bit messy. But overall email is for me not the number one most annoying thing. It's actually really annoying when people send me anything that needs actual thought put into it via any means other than email. Because as soon as I have read something like on my phone, if it requires more than two seconds of thought, I can't reply to you right now because I'm in the middle of something and I will never think to reply to you again because now it isn't marked on red and it's not sitting in my email where it can be carefully organized and isn't just going to get buried the next time someone messages me something. Because the way that sorting works on messaging apps is not ideal for the way that my add brain works. And there are more efficient ways to process emails. There's like priority view in your Gmail inbox. There's like AI reply help if you're.

[Dan]

Being able to sort by unread. Probably in the last 20 years.

[Linus]

Yeah, huge difference maker. Email has definitely changed.

[Dan]

Email was largely processed on like email clients and I remember it was like an actual job back in like the geek squad era to back up up people's email files so that you could transfer them to their new computer and stuff. Like the email has dramatically changed.

[Linus]

It's way better. Way better. Now the search in Gmail sucks, but other than that it's way better.

[Dan]

It's really wild.

[Linus]

Oh crap.

[Luke]

Don't do that. Linus.

[Linus]

We both cleared and so we cleared two.

[Luke]

Oh, I'll read one while I look for it. Question for Luke. If you could, would you own bigger birds? Like parrot size?

[Linus]

No, because if he could, he probably wouldn't own the size of birds he has now.

[Luke]

Never thought about that.

[Linus]

Fun fact. You can.

[Dan]

We have to do seven medications a day, right?

[Linus]

You wouldn't even have to squeeze that hard.

[Dan]

We have to do seven medications. Blind kid and my God. And we have to give them milk. Milk thistle. Milk thistle. I think that's milk thistle. Medicated water, basically. It's. It's crazy.

[Linus]

Okay, okay. Here out. Charge nuclei. Chickens. I bet you don't. Chickens.

[Luke]

I used to keep chickens. 10 out of 10 birds.

[Dan]

Chickens are probably the only one. And it's because they have utility.

[Linus]

I mean, technically, budgies have the same utility. You're just. You just have a hang up about it.

[Dan]

Eating their eggs.

[Linus]

Well, I mean, not everybody just eats the chicken eggs.

[Dan]

Oh, there's really not a lot of meat.

[Luke]

They got feet too.

[Linus]

I'm not saying it has a ton of you.

[Dan]

It would hardly even constitute a snack.

[Linus]

I'm just saying it has some.

[Dan]

Legitimately.

[Linus]

I'm just saying it has some bagel bite.

[Dan]

No, I don't even like a Triscuit.

[Linus]

Just a little Triscuit with melted cheese. Proper cheese. And then a little bit. You mean.

[Dan]

But then it might not be properly melted. Linus, you clearly don't know how to cook.

[Luke]

Shut up.

[Linus]

Anyway, I just want a no context shirt with a burger patty with melted cheese on the top of it.

[Luke]

I've said so. Nick. So many messages this evening.

[Dan]

What was I gonna say? Yeah, no indoor birds. I don't want a bigger one because the poop is a problem. Budgies, the poop's not really that big of a deal, but I want to be able to allow them to fly. So if you have a larger bird that has big goopy poop, you don't want that flying all over the place. There's pictures people have shown me of like their monitors and the back of their monitor is just like covered in. It's gross.

[Linus]

Okay.

[Dan]

Don't want that.

[Linus]

In response to the next in response to the next merge message. This is not my wife. What? This is not my wife. Oh, our. Our next merge message. This is a Hong Kong based actor. She's 50. She's a little old for me. Pretty impressive filmography, which is nice and good for her, but she is not, in fact my wife. So this next Mercer merch message. Hello, Linus, you've mentioned Yvonne is from Hong Kong. As someone else who married a girl from Hong Kong, I was wondering if you've taught the kids Cantonese and go back to visit from time to time. Time? I have never said my wife is from Hong Kong. She is not from Hong Kong. We do go back to visit the country that she is actually from, which is Malaysia slash Brunei, but I don't know, once every 10 years or so. We actually just went back and Yvonne does not speak Cantonese. She speaks a little bit of Mandarin from when she was a kid, but barely these days. Yeah, Mandela effect again. Here we go. Here we go. No, I did not. Not, not. Scrappy. DP I'm not being mean. She. I'm not saying she's old. I'm just saying she's a little old for me. She's 11 years older than me. What? What?

[Dan]

You know when people get to a certain age.

[Linus]

Yes.

[Dan]

Their age band tends to increase.

[Linus]

Their age band, yeah.

[Dan]

What they're acceptable with And I'm just saying maybe you're up there. There.

[Linus]

Maybe I'm up there.

[Dan]

Yeah.

[Linus]

Really?

[Dan]

How old are you now? 30.

[Linus]

Don't worry about it.

[Dan]

8.

[Linus]

Hold on. Which one is it? Crap. Yes. Barely though.

[Dan]

Yeah. Okay. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So if you went. There are definitely 38 year olds that would date 27 year olds.

[Linus]

And, and I might say, I don't know, they seem a little for you. I.

[Dan]

Young.

[Linus]

Well, okay. The thing is. Young.

[Dan]

Yeah. They're dating down 11 years. I don't think they're a little.

[Linus]

Oh, sorry. No, no. I thought we were going the other way.

[Dan]

Okay.

[Linus]

I would say, I would say that if an 11 year gap works for someone then that's fine.

[Dan]

It's huge. It's huge. I wouldn't do it. You do you in either direction. That's a lot.

[Linus]

You do you.

[Dan]

When there's like a generational gap. I don't know.

[Linus]

Mukan Twish says LOL. Linus thinks 27 is a little old for a 38 year old. I mean it's a very different, it's a very different life stage.

[Dan]

Fine. It's not like, like I'm in the.

[Linus]

Middle of my career and I'm dating someone who is like getting close to the end of theirs potentially, especially if they work in film. And so like we're just going to be at completely different life stages in a very short amount of time. That's a major concern for me. Like I like that Yvonne and I, the other more different Yvonne, the one I actually married, are going to like age together, you know, barring any kind of, you know, knock on wood, horrible, you know, health affliction or anything like that. We're going to mostly fall apart at probably almost around the same time. Ish. You know.

[Dan]

Yeah.

[Linus]

Goes according to plan.

[Dan]

It doesn't gross me out. I wouldn't do it and it's going to be surprising to me. But yeah, I don't know. I just think if you're going to be cool with going X amount of years down, you should also be cool with going X amount of years up.

[Linus]

Yeah, I'm not, I'm not saying, I'm not saying it makes any kind of.

[Dan]

But if you're not cool going X amount of years down, then yeah, fair enough stuff.

[Linus]

I, I I like that Yvonne and I are the same age and I totally recognize that other things work for other people.

[Dan]

Yeah, it's fine.

[Linus]

Totally fine. Yeah, yeah, totally fine. Okay. Mick, 81, dating a 37 year old. Are we talking about Mick Jagger? Hold on. I mean that's not your girlfriend at that point. That's your. That's like your like caretaker Melanie Hamrick and Mick Jagger, 44 year age gap.

[Dan]

So I'm saying is he should be open to. How old is he again?

[Luke]

Too much.

[Dan]

81, was it said?

[Linus]

Yeah, I think so.

[Dan]

I don't think five year old legal.

[Luke]

I don't think you're allowed to do that. Although he could probably afford do what he wants.

[Dan]

Bill Belichick is 70 and his girlfriend is 24.

[Linus]

All right, here we go.

[Dan]

Okay, that's normal.

[Linus]

Fans fear for him after her bizarre social media post. I mean, yeah, that doesn't seem like a mismatch at all, you know?

[Dan]

Is that the bizarre social media post?

[Linus]

Not bizarre.

[Dan]

That's. That's super normal. That looks great.

[Luke]

Adorable.

[Dan]

That's cute. If anything.

[Linus]

Okay, well, anyway, so said surely he.

[Dan]

Wasn'T allowed to eat until she took the picture. Who cares?

[Linus]

What?

[Dan]

That might even be true.

[Linus]

He also is eating. He's like totally like starting on it while she takes a picture of her food. Calm down.

[Dan]

Get off it.

[Linus]

My goodness, calm down.

[Luke]

This is what happens when the cornucopia goes missing.

[Dan]

The world just.

[Luke]

Everything is gone downhill. Zids.

[Dan]

Yeah.

[Luke]

I can't do this anymore.

[Dan]

Yeah, okay.

[Luke]

Hello, fellow humans. With the AMD APUs. With great graphics performance, do you think GPUs will become less popular?

[Linus]

Yes, they already have especially cheap GPUs. They basically don't exist anymore. Boom. It's AMD's fault.

[Dan]

I accept this. This is true.

[Linus]

Nvidia slash S. Oh my God. No, no, no, no, no.

[Dan]

He said it. He said it. He said it. Go after him on Reddit, make a thread.

[Luke]

Just add it to the cheese one. I don't care anymore. Hi, LTD crew. Hey, now that Lin a few products. Is he a fan of quote unquote Design by committee, e.g. microsoft or a singular gut envision, aka Steve Jobs?

[Linus]

Nothing. Neither. They're both stupid.

[Dan]

Wait, what?

[Linus]

The correct answer is having a singular guiding vision and consulting a committee and taking the best ideas from your committee of people that presumably you surrounded yourself with because they're smart, and then combining all of those, reaching a consensus about what the best product is to achieve the vision, which may have changed through discussion with the rest of the team and then creating a product that is better than what any one of those people would have created. But not as directionless as what an entire team would have created. There you go. You're welcome.

[Dan]

Someone disprove this wayback machine. Fruit.com for the loom logo.

[Linus]

What? Fruit.com.

[Dan]

Is their actual website. Just fruit dot.

[Linus]

What is fruit dot com?

[Dan]

Yes, it is. It was archived on April Fools. No. No way. So did the Fruit of the Loom company for April Fools put up a logo with the cornucopia in it?

[Linus]

It caught him.

[Dan]

What a troll. That's actually an amazing troll.

[Linus]

That's pretty good.

[Dan]

That's actually fantastic.

[Linus]

That's pretty good. All right, well, you know what? It's been great hanging out with y'all. I mean, doing a therapy session with y'all.

[Luke]

Yeah.

[Linus]

We will see you again next week. Same bad time, same bad channel.

[Dan]

How long can I. I can pause forever. You could be late for your thing.

[Linus]

I'll just leave. But I've done my part.